i think that is one well. whenever the governor says the earth keep you safe get ready because in the air freedom. you know some leasure see a story and it seems so for like sleep you think you understand it and then a glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything is ok if you don't i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.

for. fun. welcome back to the big picture i'm in for tom foreman coming up later in this half hour allied lines may soon be erased in libya if u.s. nato airstrikes continue to accidentally close rebels where we now stand in the ravaged war zone and speaking of war a new study shows that an old policy could

actually help keep america from of rushing into new conflicts that's right folks the debate over the draft is back plus it appears that the proposed promise of bringing home the troops from iraq at the end of the year may be broken an in-depth look at america's war addiction in tonight's dealy take. the alliance between libyan rebels and nato is growing more and more uncertain as casualties continue to mount rebels claims that a nato airstrike today mistakenly killed took on their own positions killing two people and wounding at least a dozen others now remember this is the second accidental attack on rebel forces by nato in less than a week now in the aftermath of this accidents there are reports of chance of down

down with nato from the rebel camps and all of this comes on top of complaints by opposition commanders that nato strikes were coming true slowly to give the rebels a clear edge now the ongoing stalemate and that is what it is in libya underscores the lacombe clear strategy for the allies prompting us to ask whether we're sliding into yet another endless war and here to offer his take on this issue is steven junior's he's the professor of politics and chair of middle eastern studies at the university of san francisco professor thank you so much for being. it's great to have you back. now something that's been obvious i think for libya watchers for quite some time now is finally being officially acknowledged by officials which is that libya is at a stalemate there is a grim assessment by the chief of u.s. military command today and it looks like it's really likely to remain that way for quite some time but the bigger question on my mind is why does this always come as a surprise for us you know airstrikes do a lot of great things and

a lot of terrible things but one thing they certainly don't do is build democracies so was our approach to this whole mess wrong from the start. afraid it was i mean this is striking the libyan oppositions create a stain through during its first week when it was overwhelmingly nonviolent that's when they liberated more than half the country where you had these massive defections among top people in the dark these regimes were also investors around the world and we saw that we've seen not just since news and egypt from chile into serbia to poland to to the philippines the power nonviolent action bringing down even the most brutal dictators but by taking up arms or putting it out there attacking gadhafi the strongest point bringing in foreign forces just kind of feeds his you know phobia nationalism which actually strengthens the regime. and so we indeed have found ourselves in a stalemate in what could be an indefinite civil war but it really seems to me like the policy here when it comes to libya's sort of one of hoping that either the

rebels will somehow win by themselves militarily or that gadhafi will one day wake up and decide to voluntarily step down but i mean since when did hoping to get lucky become the basis for u.s. foreign policy and i'm afraid you're right and this really has not been. thought through and the strategic matter in bringing in air support and even arming the rebels doesn't meet them a cohesive fighting force and the other two hundred courses who's who's in charge here i mean initially the pro-democracy movement was genuine. and broad basis the pro-democracy movements we've been seeing elsewhere in the middle east but as it's evolved into a civil war that's a pretty sketchy characters to start to rise to the top of the opposition so basic question if we do get rid of gadhafi it's going take it's place you know when we i mean i i don't that you're a professor you're not the commander in chief necessarily but considering the fact that we are in the situation we did get involved militarily now that you know the steps can't be undone what do you think is the least painful way of either getting

out or sort of carrying forward that you know the effects and i guess if that's the least amount of damage for all the involved parties. i would do or could possibly be done to enact a ceasefire and i mean the rebels are fighting if they know they're going to have your support and gadhafi is actually obviously going to keep fighting if he feels that he's being a to be overthrown or in an armed revolution and try to get a cease fire and for the people in the liberated areas to try to have sons some some of the democratic rule that the western the rest of libya could emulate encourage nonviolent resistance strikes way cards so those medians other kinds of resistance there which i'm dying are to have say trust him but then they were essentially talking about partitioning another country and how do we. only temporarily so that but again escalating the struggle into nonviolent struggle in

the western part of the country which will hopefully you know loosen his losing his grip there because soldiers are much more likely to stay loyal to the regime of someone shooting at them then if they are nonviolent protesters people using using their bare hands and that's a way to get defections from the military that's a way to really know who we can and from from within so i basically says go back to not a violent struggle there's been a lot more successful in the early days when they were engaged in that it certainly as we've seen internees in egypt and literally dozens of other countries around the world that's the most effective way to bring down dictators and you think this intellectual shift in the in the obama administration a sort of responsibility to protect the liberal folks who want to go into certain countries to prevent bloodshed which is very nice and noble but as we have seen and libya we don't think through the endgame the consequences that could be a potentially disastrous movie think that these forces and the administration will continue and potentially move on to other countries where we can protect them but given how things are going in libya i think they'll be more questioning and i think

there's a there is legitimacy in theory around the responsibility we take no national boundaries national sovereignty he should not take a dictator license commit genocide and and in serious crimes like the. well he was looking not at that point but against a change of plea this is we've already had mission creep going beyond simply protecting civilians essentially taking sides in a civil war i don't see this happening in other countries even places like syria where we like to see the government overthrown simply because if it is recognition that the regime has more of a social base. it's not in armed conflicts coming in with planes as is isn't going to really help help things one way or the other and certainly the opposition has not been calling for that i think also you know a lot of arab countries have issues with assad he's not the corrado that gadhafi was so you wouldn't get the kind of approval by the arab league you know and certainly not the u.n. security council so i asked hillary clinton said that her

a lot of our lawmakers think he's a great reformer and i know i know a wonderful gentleman partly we're out of time to professors and i thank you so much for your time. all right so if a government shutdown can and are of course and a massive debt crisis can send our wars and outrage population cans and our wars what can now a new study out of the university of pennsylvania could provide some answers researchers there were trying to figure out what exactly happens to support for wars if the nation implements a draft and here's what they discovered it found that we find that mass support for a war falls by seventy percent when there is a draft relative to when there is an all volunteer force further this shift is driven by self interest support falls most sharply on those who would most directly shoulder the burden of a draft the young who are themselves to be drafted and parents who would see their children drafted so if the united states did have a draft is it reasonable to assume that perhaps we would not be engaged in all of

these military misadventures across the globe but here to offer their takes are seen mostly presidents of less government and ryan clayton a progressive strategist here in washington d.c. gentleman welcome but you have a military way so i want to begin with you. can't you safely say that there is a little bit of a disconnect between our wars abroad and the burden that falls upon the military folks and the people who make the policy decisions in washington can't you say that perhaps if there were a draft we would all feel the pain more and needy think twice before i would agree it's a slightly with your first person or your assertion not to go with your second but you'll recall that the military personnel with whom the. military leaders consult are also volunteer so that it's not like they have to be the military personnel with whom they consult are the folks at the top who are battling on the front lines there and i did so they understand and appreciate it we didn't we weren't born generals they got there through going through the ranks and they understand the

cost and the and the the oil or the is entailed awarded in the horrible bloodshed but so they will they will counsel the leaders to. do this or not is based upon personal experience and understanding what's going on in their volunteer the military is volunteer i want to say very quickly that these people have to rely on the people to the left and the right in a foxhole and they're much more confident and nobody's there voluntarily we have the best military in the world and it's voluntary so i don't think we need a draft you're saying so if by that logic we had a draft in world war two we had in fact in one of our one we had a draft in the vietnam war so when those guys are not looking out for their counterparts they're soldiers because they where they have saw a lot of that when john kerry came back here it was obviously apparent he wasn't looking out for as well as soldiers he was looking out for himself and himself only and there's a bunch of examples the whole winter soldier movement is a quintessential example of that ok well ryan do you agree this assertion that the generals know what and what the toll of war costs and so they're going to counsel

the politicians with the best advice possible because they know just how bad it's look we have a great volunteer military in america great men and women that serve their country with discipline and honor and you know blessed are the peacemakers you know those those people who go out there and ensure that there is peace and safety throughout our country and throughout our world what i would say is that we have a great country with rights but we also need to exercise responsibility with that and we should really have a national service act that requires that everybody that does benefit from those rights shares in the responsibilities of keeping our country together keeping it safe and having a military option for that service because at the end of the day when you have that option and when you make sure you do not criticize the military forces people are going to think twice and think more about putting our military men and women in harm's way you know it's going to be a lot higher bar to set before we send people into combat and i think that that's going to be something that impacts the political decisions we make that are right now they're just too cheap and easy to send to another class of citizens halfway across the world to do something that other people aren't sharing the burden of

with their own friends in their own family but everybody everybody knows that your own children or your neighbor's kids can get shipped half way around the world we think twice and we think maybe even three times before we take that decision seen and we think cindy sheehan's son for his nice little diatribe there. there there are many many members of congress who have children. brothers sisters in the military and they voted to go to war this is not a classless thing i mean it's not the right that's keeping their o.t.c. off of the harvard campus it's the left if you want talk about breaking down the class structure why isn't harvard and yale and columbia and the ivy league allowed on the road to see to come and recruit well most of the best and brightest of the country if you want to talk about classless i would talk about how you mentioned cindy sheehan's son who actually died serving his country yes and would and has her as cindy sheehan's ex-husband said she would have beat we disagree with everything she did in his name and i thought this was about cindy sheehan and it's about the

bigger issue of whether we're disconnected from war and you know at a time when i disconnected from what we know this time from war i i when you see a remote controlled essentially war that's covered by you know m s n b c gung ho and this n.b.c. and we don't really understand the cost are we don't see the toll the physical toll of the emotional toll on our troops don't you think that we're a little bit we're safer rushed into the marine corps and one of the things the pictures they sent me online with a picture that said you know written on a locker and said you know america's not at war the marine corps is what it says they're calling out to us and saying look we need your support we need you at our back to be able to do what we're doing but we also need you to be sharing that sacrifice and be here with us or bring us home and what because they've been out there and what it's lame and what side of the illogical spectrum has been with the troops for the last eight years was it harry reid who said the war is lost was it was a or was that the american right there conservatives who constantly do fundraisers for the troops concert is it is the left like john kerry and harry reid and dick

durbin and dick durbin who compared the troops the cold and the tongue in guantanamo bay and you don't have to prove your patriotism to me no i don't approve of you're not reading citizen and i think we all believe in a healthy and secure america god no that's not true but not every american doesn't one thing you don't i'm saying that every american does but. it's been the american left it's harry reid harry the war is lost reed it's the left which is what is going on about afghanistan afghanistan where our objective as the north koreans are and as you were talking about being after al qaeda for having a safe haven is now i see that resurgence of al qaeda i mean the words are no i mean we now have a president who's helping al qaeda in libya oh well out from iraq is leading the charge against moammar gadhafi has limited office and you his press releases that's literally cutlets about most of that say well it's also a fact wooders is a first person it was a first place reporting not moammar gadhafi waiters and i would i would say reuters is not working for gadhafi you may want to say that i'm not well but the point the fact of the matter is we didn't have an exit strategy in afghanistan or iraq we

didn't have an entrance strategy in libya you were talking somebody who's abusing the troops and has no idea what he's doing with regard to putting men and women in arms the way it's this president right now with iraq bronco bombing libya i'll give you the last word do you think that that we would have been more likely to have an exit strategy how they're going to track and how we all felt the consequences of rushing into a military conflict i think it is undoubtable that we're going to make wiser strategic decisions with our military resources including the men and women in uniform and everybody has to participate that and anybody can be sent off to war because right now what it is is there's a class of citizens that are bearing the entire burden and some people just aren't sharing in that sacrifice and they don't have to worry about it every day when they wake up but if everybody had to think twice about that then we make a much better national security and foreign policy there's an hour fortunately i have time but i do want to end the fact that you know what we're all very lucky we get to sit here in our nice washington studio we're certainly not making the sacrifices we have the luxury of debating about it and unfortunately that's that and that's that thank you so much for taking. this right well more

a tonight on our nation's approach to war in just a few minutes don't go away. coming up i know it's going to wrap in vietnam and it will be coming up our involvement in foreign conflicts may just be a force of habit it's nice daily take thomas floors white avoiding a war is such a challenge for america.

the official. line called touch from the choose our. life on the. keys mine. says feeds now in the palm of your. home. today violence is once again flared up. these are the images the world seeing from the streets of canada. for asians are.

just. like the segment would go a lot better with the cowboy hat but anyway it's time for tonight's the good the bad and the very very worldly experience she ate only ugly first up the good the arkansas supreme court now yesterday the courts struck down that state's ban on adoptions by same sex couples and unanimous opinion the court said that the ban violated people's rights to privacy officially bringing arkansas out of the dark ages and into the modern world slowly but surely gays in america are gaining access to equal rights and matter how hard the republicans try to stand right now the bad the donald monkey here donald trump has sent a team of investigators on a witch hunt in hawaii tassels with finding out the truth about president obama's birthplace take a look at what trump had to say about his quest this morning on the today show. you

are not allowed to be a president you're not one of this country he may not have been born in this country and i'll tell you what three weeks through i thought he was one of his books and right now i have some real joke i have people that actually have been studying it and they cannot believe what they're for and you have people now they have a little searching i mean in hawaii absolutely they cannot believe what they're finding . people and that's donald now believe it or not what i can't believe is that a recent poll that came out shows that this guy is in a dead heat for first place among republican presidential hopefuls about a dream come true for president obama and i guess journalist and the very very ugly republican congressman mike pence now the feeling of the republicans may be just playing politics with this whole government shutdown thing but mike pence aside if you could affirm those suspicions with this curious freudian slip last night on fox news take a look you're trying to score a victory for the republican faithful for the american public if you're going to score a victory for the american people not for the republican party. that victory is

going to going to come in stages here i think first what's there you have it republicans only care about scoring a victory for other republicans and not the rest of the country and that's very very ugly. right the secretary of defense robert gates was in baghdad today we spoke to american troops telling them that if the iraqi government asks hey i have to remain in that country past the december thirty first withdrawal deadline take a look at folks here are going to want us to have a presence. we're going to need to get on with it pretty quickly in terms of our planning. and our ability to figure out where we get the forces and what kind of forces we need here and what specifically the mission they want us to do is. i

think there is interest in having a continuing presence but. the politics are such we'll just have to wait and see because the initiative ultimately has to come from the iraqis and that's right the politics are such so much for the whole winding down the iraq war at the end of the year and just like of ghana stan and libya we're going to forcefully move more rock into the column of indefinite wars though i sort of think that it's probably been safely there for a few years now now if you weeks ago tom analyze just why it was that every single president since jimmy carter has send american troops abroad with orders to kill and tom reveals a sad reality about our nation and our economy it's addicted to war take a look. we're hooked on the military industrial complex there's no question he's wars in afghanistan and iraq. but if obama were to do that and the war is tomorrow and suddenly bring up all the private contractors and troops in middle the. at

least that's what would happen our common he would tank unemployment was shoot up to depression era levels and it's not just because of the newly unemployed troops and contractors this extends to huge parts of our industrial infrastructure that was shut down because all they do is make weapons of war material if we were to realize the insanity of a global military reach and start closing military bases and interest around the world the unemployment rate would further skyrocket definitely plummeting our country into another great depression this is the consequence of not listening to president dwight eisenhower a republican fifty years ago when he warned us of the dangers of the military industrial complex we didn't pay attention to him then and now we have an economy based on war we primarily build tanks and planes and bombs in the united states and if one day the wars ended and there was no longer a need for these weapons then our economy would be manufacturing virtually nothing just look around your living room right now it's more than likely that the

television or computer you're watching the show on the clothing you're wearing and the furniture you're sitting on were all made entirely or largely in large part somewhere outside the united states as an economic backup i suppose we have our service economy an economy built on speculative bubbles by millionaires and billionaires who have too much money on their hands thanks to the reagan tax cuts an economy built on complex financial instruments built on predatory lending built on debt and overpriced real estate but those things have no real value now things are actually made and economies built on bubbles are always teetering on the edge and we know what happens when those bubbles burst after the root after the republican tax cuts of the one nine hundred twenty s. led to the disaster of nine hundred twenty nine after the reagan tax cuts led to the bubble and crash of nine hundred eighty seven after the bush tax cuts led to the bubble and crash in two thousand and eight when i scratch. it wasn't always like this i remember when wal-mart opened a store near where we lived in atlanta in the early one nine hundred eighty s.

when sam walton was still alive running a business had this huge better across the doors saying made in america which by the way was the title of his autobiography good luck finding one item in the wal-mart still made in america today now that we've looked at the chamber of commerce by congress and passed legislation to give tax breaks to c.e.o.'s who ship american jobs overseas and close down factories that operated for generations in the united states are non-war manufacturing base is largely gone and this is the first time our country has tried to climb in our history the way back to george washington has tried to climb out of a depression or near depression we've had a number of them without having a non-defense manufacturing to throw back our. so that's the situation we're in today is the real backdrop behind the new unemployment numbers that came out today it's the dark secret that nobody in america wants to discuss a military that overshadows our entire economy with endless wars and occupations

around the world a federal budget with an exploding deficit thanks to these very same military misadventures and a lack of taxes to pay for them and no and this is perhaps the most important part no real domestic manufacturing base to turn to other than defense because nearly our entire economy is completely dependent on this perpetual war machine and we've followed the insanity of so-called free trade like a heroin addict slowly deteriorating it too scared to stop using because the pain comes from withdrawal from the drug and our dealers the chamber of commerce wall street defense contractors are really pushing we need an intervention to stop funding the military industrial complex and restore our consumer products manufacturing base if we want to see actual improvements in our unemployment numbers in the future employment improvements that don't also depend on thousands

of u.s. soldiers dying halfway around the world and millions of civilians being killed in displaced to the war and we need to check our country into a methadone clinic immediately wean us off these free trade economic policies to give c.e.o.'s their quick fixes but deteriorate the substrate of our economy we have by getting out of the w t o and nafta and promote uniquely american industry like we used to do before reagan sold us out maybe then we can bring home our war contractors and put into real productive work building the infrastructure of this country and the goods of the future for our country in our country. this is our only choice now we've been hooked on the military industrial complex for way too long it's urgent that we seriously consider kicking that habit because it is destroying our country our addiction to to go to war our addiction to this giant military machine and the fact that we as i said from the founding of our country

today we have nothing to fall back on or very very little because we don't make things here anymore. we stopped that manufacturing process or began to slow it down starting with reagan it went on steroids we now fear gat would be a cio during the clinton ministration and now there's virtually nothing left that we make you anymore this is this is a true disaster that needs to be fixed by breaking our addiction to the military and bringing home our jobs but changing our trade policies. and that's the big picture for more information on the stories we covered please visit our web site at thom hartmann dot com and also our team at the dot com and if you're driving and i want to listen to tom this entire show is actually available as a free podcast on i tunes and also check out our youtube page at youtube dot com slash the big picture our team that's tom always says democracy begins with you get out there get active and tag you're it.

wealthy british style it's time to. go. to. market why not. why don't what's really happening to the global economy with mike stronger on over.