>> visit book tv doherty to watch any of the programs use the online. type the author or bouck title when the search bar and the upper left side of the page and click search. you can also share any thing you see on book tv board easily by collecting a share on the upper side of the page and selecting the format. book tv streams life on line for 48 hours every weekend with top nonfiction books and authors. booktv.org. for the next three hours activist and author phyllis bennis the institute for policy studies following and former united nations journalist discusses u.s. influence in the international body and the status of the war in iraq and afghanistan her work on u.s. foreign policy since 9/11 include before and after challenging in high gear and ending the iraq war. in your

>> host: phyllis bennis coming in your first book from 1990u stones to state what you'vew right being partisan does not allow one to feel and honesty, to fail to tell the truth but it does mean choosing the story that one will tell >> host: what's your objective in your writings? >> guest: you know, ever since i began doing writing which i first started writing for radio, i was writing radio commentaries first, i felt like it was part of political organizing. i never felt like i was writing a book for history, or i was writing an essay for the poet in us all. i appreciate the writing for history, i appreciate poetry, but for me it was always very practical. it was because it was a story that needed to be told. it was an analysis that i thought would help mobilize people to change the world, usually to end a war somewhere. and in the case of that particular book, "from stones to

statehood," part of what we were trying to do was to give a voice to palestinians who were living under occupation. this was in the time of what was called the first uprising that started in 1987-88, and i was work aing for a photographer, and we were there for a newspaper. and suddenly decides, you know what? this is really a bigger story than a newspaper story, we should do a book. and it became a photo book with my text, much of which is not mine at all, it's the voices of palestinians we met with, all kinds of people from all over the occupied territories, and neil's photographs. and can it was to give voice, in that case, to someone else, really, much more than to me. >> host: where did you gain your perspective? >> guest: ooh, that's a hard one. you know, i grew up jewish in california which was defined much more in the context of being pro-israel than it was about religion. so god really didn't figure into

it, but israel figured really big. and i grew up very active in the zionist movement, zionist yiewpt groups, all that stuff. that's how i learned my first organizing skills, i think. so that, in a sense, taught me a certain way of looking at the world politically. but, of course, it was a very different set of politics than what i came to -- later i went away to college, went to university and sort of spent all my time organizing against those last years of the war in vietnam. and i wasn't thinking about the middle east at all. and then when something happened that i don't really remember, something put the issue of the middle east in front of me, and i remember thinking, i think i was wrong about that israel stuff. and i went to my father's library and read the founder of modern zionism, and i thought, what was i thinking? this guy was a lunatic. and so that was that. but it was really vietnam that taught me a whole new way of looking at the world.

>> host: why? >> guest: partly, i think, i was learning because i had the extraordinary good fortune of being an age where i was with at university in the big years of anti-war organizing. i started at university at 17 in this 968. i was there from '68-'72. mobilization was the top of our agenda. i sometimes say i majored in protest at university because i certainly spent much more time doing that than i did actually studying. and i have no regrets for that, but i think that it taught me, it taught me things like how to look at the world from the perspective of somebody else. so i started thinking about what it would be like to be in vietnam, to be a vietnamese facing these bombings and this occupation that was going on. and then trying to think what it would be like for u.s. soldiers. i never got that far with trying to put myself into that position, but i tried.

but it was that sense of trying to look at other places in the world that i had never been and thinking about how what my government was doing, evening the things -- especially the things i didn't like, how it was likely to be affecting them more than how it was going to affect me. >> host: well, let's get this question out of the way. does israel have a right to exist? >> guest: you know, it's a funny question. i don't think countries have rights like that. i don't think france has a right to exist. france exists. israel exists. israelis have rights. people have rights. israelis have rights, palestinians have rights, i don't think countries have rights. you know, if we look at our country, our country was founded on the basis of slavery and genocide and stealing other people's lands, most of whom we then wiped out. now, does that mean we have a right to exist? i don't see history that way. i think that we stole the rights and be the lives of a whole lot of other people, and we have

obligations to make good on those rights. how we do that can change, but i think that the notion of rights is really something that belongs to people more than to countries. >> host: when you travel to the middle east, do you have trouble getting into israel now because of your writing? >> guest: i haven't so far. many of my friends do. i think that if i look at someone like one of my great mentors and friends, richard falk, a noted professor of international law who is currently with the united nations, the last time he tried to enter to carry out his u.n. mandate, he was arrested at the tel aviv airport, thrown in an immigration jail cell and held overnight and put on a plane and sent out the next morning, was never allowed to enter israel, was not allowed to do his job.

i have other friends who have been turned away at the airport. so it happens a lot. somehow being jewish doesn't provide the protection for that, let's say. leaving the airport i've had my share of being searched, etc., and being treated very roughly. that's kind of of a given. but i haven't had any trouble getting in this yet. >> host: in the last couple of years you've been working on a primer series, ending the iraq war, understanding the u.s./iran crisis and ending the u.s. war in afghanistan. where did this series come from? >> guest: you know, the first of those was the israel/palestine one which we deliberately chose reversing it. it's usually called israel/palestine, we chose to name the book understanding the palestinian-israeli conflict. that came out of a project that had actually started several years earlier with colleagues of mine who had asked me if i would put together what they called a

primer as a pamphlet. and we weren't sure exactly what form it should take. we wanted something that would be easy and accessible for people who are interested in the issue but didn't necessarily know anything about it. and maybe because they're educated people would be a little bit embarrassed to admit they really don't know some of the basic questions. who are the palestinians? why are they there? are jews is and israelis the same thing? so i did this pamphlet. and then in discussing it with a very close friend and colleague of mine, my publisher who's palestinian, he said, you know, we should do this as a book. why don't you expand it and to it as a book. and it turned out that the hardest part of doing that book -- much harder than writing the answers -- was figuring out the questions. we decided to do it as frequently-asked questions. all of them are like web sites disguised as books. you don't have to sit and read the whole book.

you can look at the list of questions and say, that's what i wanted to know. just go and read two or three pages to answer that question. so it's really aimed at providing very basic understanding. what is zionism? why did it emerge when it did? those kinds of very basic questions. and, of course, it's my own opinions. those books don't have a lot of footnotes. some of them have more than others. but they're mainly a way -- i sort of imagine it as if i were speaking somewhere, and after you give a speech somebody says, i have a question. and they ask their question, and this is my answer to their question. so i write the way i talk. the goal being to make it, again, as accessible as possible. so it's not seen as being the definitive work on x, y or z, but it's a way of of helping people figure stuff out. in some of the later ones, particularly the ones on iraq and on afghanistan, the newest one which i did with a colleague of mine who spends quite a bit of time in afghanistan, we were

really aimed very specifically at providing a tool for people who are opposed to those wars which now i just read a new poll last night, in fact, a new cnn poll indicates that only 32% of people in this country support the war in afghanistan. that's a huge drop in levels of support, and it seems that everybody else doesn't pay attention to that in this town, in washington where the decisions get made. nobody's really recognizing the significance of that. and so we wrote that book as a tool for those people who give them answers. when somebody says to you, well, that's fine, you want to be against the war, but what would happen to the women in afghanistan? well, there's an answer that we've learned from women in afghanistan who said the war is not helping us. the war is not making our lives better. the vast majority, peter, of women who die too young in afghanistan -- and there's a huge number of women who die too young -- they don't die because

they're killed by the taliban, they, in fact, don't even die because they're killed by u.s. bomb bombs. they're killed because they tie in childbirth -- die in childbirth because there's no health care available. and according to the united nations afghanistan, now, is the second worst country in the world for women to survive childbirth. it's the worst country in the world for children. unicef figures are that afghanistan is the worst place in the world for a child to be born and expect to live to her or his first birthday or, then, the fifth birthday. and that's after nine years of u.s. occupation. so can we really say that we're doing any good for the women of afghanistan? i don't think so. >> host: should the u.s. have gone into afghanistan in the first place after 9/11? >> guest: not militarily. not the way we did. the crimes of 9/11 were horrific crimes. they were crimes against humanity. but i don't think you solve a crime with by war.

and i think that was as true for a massive crime as for a small crime. if we look at those people who have actually been caught, the leadership people of al-qaeda that have ended up in u.s. custody, that sort of thing, we're not seeing that they are caught in bombing raids. we're seeing that it's good intelligence that finds them. it means that we need international cooperation. we need the international criminal court. you know, one of the things i did, it was actually one of the fun things in writing these books, i wrote one book right after 9/11 that was, again, designed to help sort of sort out -- >> host: which one was that? >> guest: that was "before and after: u.s. foreign policy on the september 11 crisis." and the goal there was to kind of look at why did the u.s. do what it did, why did it see war as an immediate response to that terrible crime? and was that really so different than earlier decisions that had been made in foreign policy, or was this something very new and

different? and the book really tries to look at that. but one of the things i got to do in that book was write the speech that george bush should have written and should have given that night, when he should have ordered the plane to land after he finished reading my pet goat to the children in the school room. he should have given a speech to the american people, and he would have said -- i forget exactly how i wrote it, but some version of we have been the victims of a terrible, terrible crime, and we will do nothing to prevent us from finding and bringing to justice the people responsible for this crime. but we are going to make a commitment here tonight that too many people have already died, and we are going to do nothing that leads to the death of more innocents in the name of fighting against this terrible crime to which we have been subjected. and that's why we're now realizing why we need the united nations, why we need the international criminal court, why we need to understand our role in the world this a whole

different -- in a whole different way than we ever did. and, unfortunately, he didn't give that speech. he gave a very different speech. >> host: welcome to booktv's in depth. this is our monthly program, first sunday of every month, where we feature one author and his or her body of work. this month it's phyllis bennis of the institute for policy studies and the author of eight books plus two edited books. here's a list of phyllis bennis' work. she began in 1990 with "from stones to statehood." then in 2000 she published "calling the shots." "before and after" was published in 2003. "challenging empire" in 2006, and then her primer series began last year. "understanding the palestinian-israeli conflict '09," "ending the iraq war," 2009 and then her most recent,

"ending the u.s. war in afghanistan." phyllis bennis, what was your work on "altered states"? >> guest: that was a fun one to do. that was an anthology that i did with my colleague, also my publisher, that was looking at the end of the cold war and what was it going to mean for countries other than the u.s.? so we have authors in that book from an amazing array of countries, from haiti, from eastern europe, from, from france, from several different african countries, from are all the countries in the middle east, from latin america, and we were trying -- what we found was writers who were involved in social movements in the their own countries who were involved at the time in trying to recalibrate what their own governments were doing, what their own peoples were doing to respond to this whole new situation in the world where suddenly there was only one superpower. and we called it "altered states: a reader in the new world order," because that was the term that george bush i had

coined for that period when suddenly there's this whole different way of thinking about where the u.s. position in the world, but at the same time p there was no attention being paid to all the other people around the world 40 did not -- who did not live in the soviet union or russia in that transition but were engaged in a huge transition of their own. we tried to find people who knew about these countries that we knew very little about. i didn't think anything about concern i didn't know anything about haiti, and we got a fascinating piece. so i think the e effect of the cold war particularly on countries of the global south, the countries of africa, latin america, the middle east, asia, the countries that are not the most developed, wealthiest countries of the world. in that very specific period of about 1990-1992, '93 when the transition was still very lively and active, that's what we tried

to look at on this book. >> host: if you'd like to participate in our live program, 202 is the area code. 737-0001 if you live in the east and central time zones. 737-0002 for those of you in the mountain and pacific time zones. you can also send us an e-mail. booktv@cspan.org or send us a tweet, twitter.com/c-span/-- i'm sorry, twitter.com/booktv. it's at booktv is our twitter address. in your primer, "understanding the u.s.-iran crisis," you write: despite claims by the bush administration and others, there is also no evidence iran has a military program to build nuclear weapons. >> guest: yeah. that's -- >> host: do you stand by that? >> guest: i stand by that. there is simply no evidence. what the u.n. watchdog, the nuclear watchdog, the iaea, the international atomic energy

agency has said is that there are unanswered questions. and iran certainly is in violation of its agreements with the iaea to answer those questions and provide the information. it has not done so, and it should do so. but there isn't evidence that actually exists that people can point to and say that proves that there is, indeed, a military, a military program here aimed at creating a nuclear well. now, iran's nuclear program -- because it's true of any nuclear program -- it's the same technology, unfortunately, which is why i think it's such a problem that countries all around the world including our own are doing so much nuclear technology overall. iran is no different. if you do the nuclear technology to build nuclear power plants, it is the same technology to build a bomb. it doesn't mean you can because you may not have enough, it may not be as good enough as it needs to be, but it's basically the same technology. you take unremember itched --

unenriched uranium, and you enrich it to 5% or so for power plants, about 20% for medical uses and up to about 90% for a weapon. now, there's no ed that iran have gone beyond 20% in one reactor for medical isotopes. are they being provocative with some of their nuclear stuff? of course they are. and it may be that the iranian leadership which has said over and over again not only that they are not doing it which, like any government you have to take that very carefully, but they've also said it's the religious requirement which, to me, doesn't mean much. but i think to rain -yard lines it -- rain -yard lines it means a lot. if that government were to change that position, they would have a very high bar to reach at home to justify that to their own people, why suddenly it's religiously okay to do what the ayatollah khomeini right from

the beginning of the islamic revolution said is not okay. so i think it's certainly possible, for example, that what saddam hussein did in iraq might be what's underway in iran which was to act as if there were massive weapons of mass destruction. because that was what made him appear powerful to his enemies both domestic and in the region. there were none as we know. but there was a claim, there were hints, he made it sound like he was trying to do so, and many people -- myself included -- many people for years said, this is nonsense. this is all just posturing. he's trying to show that he has power in order to gain respect in a region. that is thought to respect power more than anything else. it turned out to not be true. now, one can argue that parts of what the iranian regime is doing may be the same thing.

they're deliberately hiding things, deliberately making things a bit more ambiguous rather than saying, here, we're an open book. come and look at everything we've got. instead of doing that, they're leaving open possibilities. but there is no evidence. that's what's key here. the u.s. is threatening at various points. israel is threatening consistently to use military force when there is no evidence as if there were to be a military weapon that somehow a military strike would be an answer to that. it would be even more disastrous. >> host: so iran, no threat threat to the u.s. or to its neighbors? >> guest: you know, i think that iran is not a threat. i think that the middle east region, like our own country, is overarmed. i think too much money is spent if you look at the little gulf states some of whom in the wikileaks, for instance, we're hearing how gulf country leaders are telling the u.s. secretly, boy, you really should do

something about iran. you know, we won't say it publicly, but we really think -- this isn't new. but those governments are the same governments that are spending billions of dollars, billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of their country's oil rev view at times when -- revenue when there is unemployment rising in those countries to buy massive amounts of the most advanced u.s. weapon systems that the u.s. is willing to sell them. you know, it's u.s. arms exporters that are, quote, making a killing in this business arming the entire middle east. the $3 billion a year that the u.s. gives in military aid to israel is only one part of it. it's one of the worst parts because it puts us as directly complicit in those weapons. the other countries are buying weapons. but it's our military producers that are the ones that are making a killing off of this money, and the money instead could be used for infrastructure, for education,

for things like figuring out what's the middle east going to do when the oil runs out? what's it going to do when the water runs out? these are huge problems that could be solved if more or resources went there, but instead we're seeing the resources used overwhelmingly for military purposes that are not making anybody else safe. >> host: career wise how did you end up at the institute for policy studies? >> guest: it was one of the great moves of my career, as it were. and one that i never expected. i had known of the institute when i was a kid. ips has been around since the early '60s. it was founded by two extraordinary men who were working at the time in the kennedy administration, marcus ratherkin who was in the state department and richard bar net who was in the white house in the national security council. and they quite quickly, they were both very young, and they quite quickly found each other and realized that they were in the wrong place. they didn't like the policies on nuclear weapons, the question of

vietnam was looming at the time, and they both managed to escape the white house, escape the state department, and they created something that had never existed before, an independent institute for the rest of us. and that's what it's been ever since. it's an institute that works with social movements. our slogan is we turn ideas into action. it isn't just about producing ideas into the abstract, it's to make possible changing the world. and i had known about this for a long time, things like the vietnam reader when i was a kid. i read it at 17, 18, whatever i was. and i remember that was the first book i read about vietnam. and i didn't exactly know what this institute was, a think tank. what's that, exactly? it sounded like something weird, a bunch of people sitting around thinking great thoughts somewhere. i didn't really think about it that much. it was just sort of in the back of my mind. and years later when i was in new york, i was working,

actually, on "altered states," and we wanted an article on nuclear weapons and how the standoff between the u.s. and the soviet union was going to change. and i saw an article written by marcus. so we contacted mark, and he was delighted and wrote a terrific piece in "altered states." and later he brought a new book to interlink which i ended up doing some of the editing on, his book "visions and revisions." and then a little while later he knew i was working on a book on u.s. domination of the united nations. and he called me and said, you know, why don't outcome down to ips and do a seminar, that would be great. and i thought, well, that's a good idea. and then he told me he actually wanted me to apply for a job. and i thought, jeez, i don't want to move to washington. i hate washington. i go to washington for protests. i'd never really been here except for a protest. and i decided to do it anyway. i was going through some changes just what i was doing in new york, seemed to make sense to at

least check it out. i came, i did a seminar, i loved it, and i was hired at ips, and i've been there ever since, and it's been the perfect place to do the kind kind of work i do. i couldn't ask for a more supportive environment. >> host: what were you doing in new york? >> guest: i was freelancing as a writer and radio journalist. i had been working as a journalist at the united nations writing, first, for a small biweekly newspaper in california, a national paper but based in california. and we had decided to send somebody to new york to work at the u.n. not because of the u.n. itself. it was funny was i didn't know much about the u.n. as an institution. but it was -- informs the mid '80s -- this was the place where you could meet representatives of liberation struggles, meet the pal stint p yangs, meet representatives of socialist countries, the vietnamese who you couldn't eat anywhere else in the country.

they weren't allowed to travel. in this many cases all these socialist governments and liberation movements, the anc from south africa, nelson mandela's organization all had offices at the u.n. and it was the only place that you could meet them. so i had this incredible opportunity to spend years at the u.n. writing about developments in the east rib ration movements, india's struggles, contradictions of u.s. policy, what the u.s. was doing wrong in those areas. but i was doing it at the u.n. and it was during that time that i started looking a little bit for the first time at the united nations. and it was at the time of the iraqi invasion of kuwait in 1990, in that summer which was at the same time as the end of the cold war. the soviet union was collapsing. the u.s. made a decision, in my view, based on a cold war analysis. not based on the fact that kuwait had been invaded and that iraq had violated international

law. and when i watched that happen, one of the things i was looking at was how the united states was using the u.n. itself as an instrument, as a tool in its own foreign policy. and i started writing about that. i wrote one of the pieces in "beyond the storm," the anthology that we did about the gulf war. and that was, i think, my first major piece on the role of the united nations. and then as i started to investigate further i thought, you know, this is kind of important stuff. i never knew it, and i think most other people that i work with don't know it either. so i decided to write a book about it, and that's what led to "calling the shots: how washington dominates today's u.n. " and i did several different updated versions of that. the first one came out in '95 or '96, and then there was another one in 2000 and another in 2004 that was a british edition. that's one that's been translated into, i don't know, five or six different languages, published in different countries pause i think all around the --

because i think all around the world there is a sense of unease and anger both at the public level and sometimes even at the governmental level at what the u.s. has done to the u.s -- to the u.n. you know? and how it's prevented the u.n. from doing what its charter says it's supposed to do, stop the scourge of war. and so often the u.s. has used the u.n. as a fig leaf to cover up its own interventions. another of my great mentors, the great pakistani scholar once said that what the u.s. did with the u.n. in desert storm was using a multilateral instrument to hide a unilateral war. which i always thought was exactly the right way to see how the u.s. used the uniat that time. >> host: who were or are your parents? >> guest: my parents have both passed. my parents were extraordinary. my parents were, we grew up in suburban los angeles. my father spent his life working

at my mother's father's store. my maternal grandfather. and his brothers had opened a store called levine brothers in los angeles that sold tailoring supplies, ool woolens and thread and pins and needles. every year i remember as a kid all the grandchildren would be brought down to the store, just one day a year, for inventory day. and we would be assigned to counting cards of buttons. it was, it was always very exciting. we loved the store. it was great places for hide and seek. it had one of those old-fashioned elevators with the wooden pull door that you could see through as it went up and a chain, you know, a manual elevator. and then my grandfather would take us all out for dinner after that. it was always a great treat. and my father was someone who always wanted to be a writer. he, at times, tried to write poetry and, unfortunately, he really wasn't a very good poet. but it turned out that he was actually a fabulous writer when

he wasn't rying to write poetry -- trying to write poetry. his letters to my mother from the war which i came across only after he died was a huge treasure-trove for me. i'm still trying to figure out what to do with them. unfortunately, there aren't too many of my mother's left, of her responses to him. but you see in those letters how he was both trying to abide by the censorship -- he couldn't say very much -- but it was all about the small group of friends he had in the military or, this his unit, and what they were doing, what they talked about, their own lives. and then he also talked about my mother's family. he would talk about the people in the neighborhood who he knew she was living with. she had gone back to live with her parents while he was overseas during the war, and it was just this wonderful set of letters about his caring about her and what that relationship had been all about. so it was an amazing thing.

my mother was an incredibly strong woman who never knew how strong she was. i think she always thought that my father was the strong one in their relationship when, in fact, it was quite the opposite. she was tough as could be. but incredibly gentle. and she had, she was ill for a long time before she died. she had a very rare form of cancer and was ill for about 14 years before she died and went through a number of experimental treatments, and it was a very rough, a very rough time for a very long time. but she never gave up. she fought and fought, and her family was her framework. she wasn't somebody who was that interested in the events of the world. my father was. my mother, not so much. but her family was so important to her. and the two of them together, i was very glad that my mother's death was just after my first book was published, so she was able to know it. and, of course, my father was so thrilled that his daughter had

written a book with. he didn't really agree with it, but that was okayment he was so proud of me that it really didn't matter what the book was about. my daughter wrote a book. you know, it was that sense of -- because i think he had always wanted to write a book. and his younger brother, he was a twin, he was an identical twin, and both the twins when they came home from the war, they went to work. they had families quite soon after. their younger brother who was eight years younger was the only one who was able to take advantage of the g.i. bill and went to university and became a noted academic and writer. my dear uncle who i adore and is still with us teaching awz an emeritus at usc has his new autobiography just came out -- >> host: what is it? >> guest: it's called "still surprised." i thought it's a great title. >> host: what does he think of your perspective on world issues? >> guest: well, it's very interesting because now he agrees a great deal. i think he didn't always, but he

was always a liberal. he was someone -- he was president of cincinnati university, he was vice president of sunni buffalo at the time that i was a student activist. and there was a great collaboration between our fds chapter at santa barbara and sds at buffalo where there were similar protests going on, a great deal of activity, some riots, faculty being arrested, the whole, you know, all of the excitement. and they called one day, i remember to this day. i happened to be in the sds office and got a phone call as we were getting, you know, from campuses all over the country. everybody was collaborating with each other. and i remember someone calling and saying, i'm calling from sunni buffalo. what's your name? i said, i'm phyllis bennis. bennis, oh, my god? are you related to warren bennis? yeah, he's my uncle. we call him warren the snake because we don't trust him. it was very funny, and it became a big issue at the time. but i think now he agrees a great deal with my perspective on -- maybe not in every detail,

but the idea of changing the world, i think, is very important to him. >> host: this is booktv's in depth. our guest is phyllis bicep in addition. -- bennis. 202-737-0001 for eastern and central time zones. teresa from middletown, connecticut, you are first up. please, go ahead. >> caller: yes, and thank you. regarding afghanistan, i've always had a problem with our invasion of afghanistan. it seemed wrong to punish the people in afghanistan for osama bin laden being there. our military leaders insist we must stay and fight in afghanistan because that's where al-qaeda laid the plans for 9/11, but i also found it very hard to believe that a bunch of al-qaeda militants doing boot camp maneuvers in a remote region of afghanistan were responsible for 9/11. but isn't it true that the plans

to attack the u.s. on 9/11 were formed in germany? >> guest: yeah, you reached some important points. the notion of going to war in afghanistan, they lived, as you say, in hamburg. they didn't train in afghanistan, they trained in the florida. and they didn't go to flight school in afghanistan, they went to flight school in minnesota. and now, of course, this notion that we are still having 100,000 u.s. troops and another 40,000 nato troops occupying afghanistan we nor mouse military -- with with enormous consequences. when the cia itself commits there are -- nests there are less than 50-100 al-qaeda

members in afghanistan. so we're sending 140,000 troops to go after something like 350 people? it's crazy. the idea that shaw we have to go after the taliban because if they took power al-qaeda would come back, they would be able to train there, it ignores what kind of a threat it isn't. it is a threat, and many people around the world have suffered from terrorism much more than we have. buff i think that what gets ignored -- but i think that what gets ignored is the understanding that, number one, you can't use conventional warfare to stop terrorism. we don't need to occupy afghanistan to prevent the taliban from coming back as a way of stopping al-qaeda. al-qaeda doesn't need territory to train, they need a couple of garage-sized laboratories and an internet café with fast connection. that's really all they need. they're not training up a big army that needs territory and

space to train. it's just, it's wrong, and i think the ran that we -- reason that we went to war was not to stop the future, it was to avenge the past and to lay the groundwork for the war in iraq. unfortunately, i think the reason we're staying, i don't think it's only because of the potential for pipelines and that sort of thing which is certainly there in the background, but the real reason, i think, that we're staying in afghanistan and what makes it so horrific when you think of the civilian casualties and the military casualties from the u.s. and nato troops, is that we're staying there because neither president obama nor anyone else in congress is prepared to say, we were wrong, we have to get out. they're not prepared to say something that looks like we're losing. >> host: well, libero tweets in, how should the u.s. and nato forces get out of afghanistan most effectively? >> guest: that's a very important question. i'm not a military strategist, and i can't say exactly which

companies should leave first. i'll leave that to the military. but they got us in, they can get out. declare a unilateral cease fire, declare that we are no longer engaged in this war against anyone in afghanistan, that our troops are putting down their arms, and they are getting out. that means donkeys, trains, trucks, buses and planes, the same way they got in. i think the key is to say our focus now should be on the safety of the people of afghanistan and the safety of our troops. not on making more military gains which everyone agrees, it's on the front pages of our newspapers. it's not something you only read online or in the progressive press or you see on some secret show. it's in the mainstream media that the u.s. policy is failing. that, yes, if you send in enough

troops, they can clear an require of whoever they want. if it's al-qaeda, if it's taliban, if it's one of the other numerous organizations opposed to the u.s. envision of afghanistan. but -- invasion of afghanistan. because why? they are afghans. this is their country. i don't know if you remember it, peter, some months ago there was an extraordinary moment when in a hearing in congress add mil mullen, the chairman of the vice chiefs, was being asked by someone who was trying to challenge him, and you saw him rolling his eyes and thinking, oh, god, do i really have to do this? the question was, can you tell me, admiral, how many tanks does the taliban have? they don't have any tanks, senator. and how many planes? is they don't have any planes either. so can you tell me why they're winning? and he sat there for a moment and said something, something,

it's their country. i thought, wow, he gets it. so if he gets it, why is he leading this war? he knows we can't win like this because whether it's next week as i advocate or if it's in 2014 as president obama, unfortunately, is threatening now to stay until at least 2014, at some point we're going to leave. the people of afghanistan are going to have to stay there. it's their country. they're going to have to rewild it. -- rebuild it. are they going to rebuild it in this a way that we feel looks like us? probably not. they have a very different kind of country. the fact that we're trying to impose this government, a strong national government that looks like a democracy, has nothing to do with afghan history, with afghan culture. if you look at the history of afghanistan, there's never been a strong government there. the writ of what happens in kabul is limited to kabul. and 80% of the people of afghanistan don't live in the cities. forget about kabul, they don't live in any cities.

they live in tiny ham lets scattered over this vast mountainous country. and in that context loyalties are not to a strong national government in kabul. loyalty is to family, to tribe, to clan, to village. maybe to region, maybe sometimes. but mostly not. mostly it's very, very local. and that makes it very, very hard to imagine ever having success at trying to impose on afghanistan the kind of government -- forget about the corruption, forget about the incompetent that we're seeing with this government. the people of afghanistan have never had and never indicated any desire for a strong central government. that's not true, for example, in the iraq. these are very different countries. iraq does have a history of strong central governments. afghanistan doesn't. and the fact that we try this one-size-fits-all approach, we're going to go in, we're going to wring in a government

in a before bring in a government in a box. they even called it that, so demeaning. doesn't work. what are you going too far, a jumping jack box that the government pops out and says, here we are, we're the government now. surprise, that doesn't work. they don't have the loyalty of the population, they don't know what they're doing. these afghans who were brought in to be the local government in marjah, for example, the place that was supposed to be the practice for going after kandahar for u.s. troops, we're going to go after marjah, and we're going to clear it of the taliban, and then we're going to bring in the government in a box. well, the guy they brought in to be mayor had spent the years of war not living through the years of war or the years of taliban repression, he had spent those years in this germany. so what a surprise, he was the same tribal links as the people in marjah, spoke the language, but they didn't see him as one that of their own because he wasn't. he had gone to a university in munich, i'm not sure.

but he had lived in the germany for many years, and he suddenly reappears on the back of a u.s. tank and says, hi, i'm here to be your governor in a box. it doesn't work that way. so what we have to do is get out of the way and allow real diplomacy to go on. there needs to be diplomacy. does it have to involve the taliban? of course it does because they're one of many forces in the country. this is one of the great lessons, ironically, of former senator mitchell who has been president obama's special envoy in the middle east. unfortunately, he didn't operate off of it. but he knew from his own experience in ireland that the first lesson of diplomacy if you're serious is everybody has to be at the table. why? not because you agree with everybody, but if you exclude some, if you say, well, you can't come because we think you're terrorists, you can't come because you won't put down your arms, you won't come because of whatever, if you do that, the diplomacy's not going to work because all those people

who support that one or that one or that one that you took out, they're going to say, you know, we didn't even get a seat at the table. we don't have any stake in this. we're not going to abide by it. if you're serious about diplomacy instead of war, then everybody has to be at the table. what the u.s. is doing is preventing real diplomacy, not insuring it. >> host: judith, you're on booktv with phyllis bennis. new york city, hi. >> caller: hi. ms. bennis wrote the speech she thought that president bush should give after the september 11th atrocity really. but i would like to hear now what ms. bennis thinks that president obama should say in his state of the union address this month. >> guest: oh, dear. judith raises a good challenge. i think that president obama's state of the union speech should reflect a decision that i hope

that he is in the process of making that is recognizing when it comes to foreign policy, the wars he is waging are wars that not only we cannot win, but we cannot afford. i think president obama knows that the issue of jobs is by far the most important thing facing people in this country. we know that the war in afghanistan, as devastating as it is for afghans, is not the top of anybody's agenda here. when asked, people don't support it. but it's not something that is top of the agenda because people are hurting here. people are losing jobs, they're losing homes at a rate that surpasses our imagination of the last, of recent years. things are disastrous here. and i think it's making those links that i wish the speech would be something like we have realized that the war we are waging in afghanistan and the

war we are still waging in iraq because we should not forget that 50,000 u.s. troops occupying iraq does not mean an end, it just means a smaller size of an occupation. that's still a war that's being waged. the casualties these days are more iraqi than american, but we are still paying a huge amount and risking the lives of 50,000 troops there -- troops there as well as preventing iraqis from running their own country. we have realized that these are wars that we not only cannot win, but that we cannot afford. the escalation, president obama should say, that i announced last year in afghanistan, the escalation of 30,000 new troops has not made the war better, and it has cost us $33 billion. and i think president obama should say in his state of the union address that i'm sorry i made the decision i did, and i want to bring those troops back so that we will have that $33 billion to use because we know with that $33 billion, we could

have 600,000 new green jobs here at home and still have $3 billion left over to start rebuilding our own infrastructure and begin to pay reparations in afghanistan and iraq for the devastation that we've brought. for every soldier that i'm sending to afghanistan today, president obama should say, it's costing our country a million dollars, every soldier. not because the soldiers are getting a lot of money. some of them qualify for food stamps. but because it costs so much to keep a soldier in afghanistan. gasoline, fuel, $400 a gallon because of where it has to travel. so from now on i'm going to say that for every soldier we bring home, a million dollars, that's enough for a good green middle class job. for that soldier and 19 more, for every one of those soldiers, that will keep our country much safer. so i think judith's challenge to

me but also the challenge to president obama is to say, we can't afford this war any long every. longer. the economic challenge for us at home is to say that we're not going to be able to have health care, we're not going to be able to rebuild our education system, we're not going to be able to create the new job requests as long -- jobs as long as we're spending these billions of dollars. if you look, peter, at the military budget this year and add the cost of the two wars, you know, when they do the military budget, they don't include the actual wars we're fighting. so if you add the military budget and the wars in iraq and afghanistan, it's over a trillion dollars. if we're wasting that, how do we ever imagine we're going to get out of this economic crisis that we're in right now? so that's what i think president obama should talk about. >> host: red forest tweets in, would you say that life in iraq is better or worse post-saddam? please explain. >> guest: i think that the years

of war have been far worse for people in iraq. saddam hussein's regime was terribly repressive. but for ordinary iraqis day-to-day life went on. there were, there were hundreds of thousands of people who were imprisoned at various points, political prisoners, repression. but for most iraqis life went on. iraq had the most advanced health care system anywhere in the region. it's where wealthy saudis would go when they needed heart surgery or brain surgery. iraqis had the best education system, free right up through university and postgraduate work. in fact, iraqis traveled all over the world and then went home. they weren't all trying to escape their country. so life was hard in terms of political repression, but the social and economic rights of iraqis at that time were much better than during the war when we've seen over a million people

killed as a result of this war. the years of sanctions killed hundreds of thousands. we know, we remember the famous statement from madeleine albright back in 1996 when she was asked on "60 minutes" what about the 500,000 children who have died as a result of u.s.-imposed sanctions, and without missing a beat she said, we think the price is worth it. at that moment i think the potential for the clinton administration to win public support in the arab world was gone. when madeleine albright said those words, we think the price is worth it, that 500,000 children's lives was worth overturning saddam hussein's regime, i think -- which at that time hadn't even happened militarily but what was being tried through the use of sanctions -- i think that was when the possibility of winning over support for the u.s. was lost.

>> host: don in haiku, hawaii. please, go ahead with your question. >> caller: yes, phyllis, good morning. or good afternoon there, i guess. i had heard you earlier say that iran is in violation of the iaea, and i had recently seen a documentary with scott ritter who said, no, iran is not in violation of agreements, and there's a complete balance of all the nuclear material. for one. for two, i had another, i have more questions regarding this 9/11 that the whole world's revolving around and this newest documents out, www www.missing links.com, explain more what happened on this fateful day, that two airplanes knocked down three buildings. and i'm just wondering what is it going to mean for jewish people in the united states should it be proven that israel

staged a false attack on the united states on 9/11? >> guest: well, you raise a couple of important questions. on the first one, i think what scott ritter was referencing was that there is no iranian violation of the non-proliferation treaty which is the fundamental nuclear treaty that allows, of course, all non-nuclear weapon states, including iran, to build nuclear power plants, nuclear power capacity. and, of course, it also requires in article 6 that the five official recognized nuclear weapon states including the united states are obligated, obligated by law to move towards full and complete nuclear disarmament. and i think it's the u.s.' refusal to take that requirement or seriously that has led to so much of the nuclear proliferation around the world. on your second question, i think that -- i haven't seen evidence that there's a false flag issue. for me the question is not so

much 9/11, but 9/12. i think what happened around the world as a result of the decision of the bush administration on september 12, 2001, is by far of greater import than the details of what happened on 9/11. the u.s. used that event which i consider a huge crime as an excuse to take the world to war, and we are still seeing the consequence of it. and i think it's stopping those wars that are being launched and waged and continued and expanded in the name of the so-called global war on terrorism whether or not the obama administration has decided not to use that term. they are still using that policy. so i think that's really what's the most important part of what we can do, is to stop those wars that are being waged in the name of 9/11. >> host: what should the u.s. do, in your view, phyllis bennis, to protect its national security? >> guest: i think we should start by redefining national security. i think that the united nations,

for instance, has done some great work through the u.n. development program in defining human security and the new basis so that national security is no longer defined as what does the pentagon want, and what do your corporations want? unfortunately, in the u.s. that tends to be how we define national security. is the dow jones the highest-ranking stocks in the world, and is the pentagon the biggest and strongest military by such a huge margin that no other government, no other group of governments could ever imagine even matching our military capacity? i've got to say that doesn't make me feel safe, you know? i think that we need to start by recognizing that we live in an interconnected world. globalization on every level whether it's information technology, whether it's trade and all the inequalities that that has led to, the reality is that our world is far more integrated than ever before, and one of the consequences of that

that i think we miss at our peril is understanding that we need to recognize that we cannot be secure and safe in a world that is not secure and safe. what we're seeing now around the world with the rise of new terrorist attacks, terrorist organizations springing up that never exist bed before -- existed before, it's in response to what is perceived in most cases rightly, sometimes maybe in an exaggerated way, is seen as the u.s. and sometimes its allies, nato, other countries coming in to control other countries around the world. the extraordinary work that's been done, for example, by robert pate, the political psychologist at the university of chicago, on the history of suicide bombings. he's looked at the history which, of course, began first in be india. that was the first accounts -- not the first. i mean, there's many earlier ones, but the modern phenomenon of suicide bombings began in sri

lanka and then moved to the middle east, that the single most reason that an organization or a community or a country devolves into suicided bombing is foreign occupation. by another country. in most cases, by a democracy. so that's what's extraordinary about this. you see it in iraq, you see it in afghanistan. only after foreign occupation goes forward in other countries. it's something that has e emerged out of foreign occupation. not something that emerges out of a culture. this isn't about the 70 virgins or something. this is a political response in the context of a religious framework for political struggle. but it's a political response to a political reality, in this case foreign, foreign military occupation.

so if you're serious about ending that horrific phenomenon, you have to start by ending the conditions that lead to it, in this case foreign military occupation. >> host: in her book, "challenging empire," the forward, by the way, by danny glover, actor, phillies bennis writes: in building internationalism, people's movements, dee find governments and the u.n. all have a role to play: glx next call for phyllis bennis comes from cal in sacramento. hi, cal. >> caller: hello there. yeah. i was curious about the question of rights and countries having rights.

and it was, she's been talking for a while, or you've been talking for a long time about various humanitarian efforts, and i'm just kind of curious what rights do countries have, and are there boundaries to countries? >> guest: it's a very interesting question that cal raises. i think that we do live in a world that's defined by nation-states. is that my preferred way of organizing the world? no. but it is what exists. it is the world we live in. the world's organized by nation-states. those borders are not sacrosanct. sovereignty is always a shifting reality. we see that in the rise of what i once called in an article micronationallisms in the places like the former yugoslavia where you kind of imagine that the devolution of a country into several -- in that case seven separate countries --