How do the neocons continue to be considered experts when they are wrong all the time? Robbie Martin, director of the three-part documentary “A Very Heavy Agenda,” will join today’s Liberty Report to discuss how no matter who is in power, the neocons remain on top.
Daniel McAdams: Hello everyone, and thanks for tuning in to The Liberty Report. I am Daniel McAdams, and I’ll be hosting the show today, because Dr. Paul is out of town. If you follow the show, and especially if you follow the Ron Paul Institute, which I’m the director of, you know that one of our favorite things to talk about is the neo-cons and the neo-con’s stranglehold on foreign policy and Washington, and how they’ve been able to frame the issue that everyone who doesn’t agree with them, is extreme and they are the mainstream, whereas in fact, they are probably the most extreme people on earth.
We’re very fortunate today to be joined by a filmmaker, who I just became aware of that has a three part documentary series called “A Very Heavy Agenda”. He sent me a link to the first two installments a couple of weeks ago, and I sat down and was blown away for 2 or 3 hours. They’re long films, but they’re fascinating films. Robby Martin: is the director, producer and filmmaker of these films. Robby, thank you so much for joining us.
Robby Martin:: Thank you so much for having me, Daniel.
Daniel McAdams: Thanks for making these films. One of the things I think is most important about the two episodes I’ve seen so far – and the third installment is coming up this month and we’ll talk about that later. But what’s important in my opinion is that it focuses on continuity of the neo-cons in Washington. No matter who is sitting at the throne of the presidency, the neo-cons are there to give advice and whisper in the ear. Yours was a non-ideological film, you didn’t want to just attack Bush or just attack Obama or the Democrats or Republicans, and I think it made for a very powerful film. But I’m going to ask you, if you don’t mind, if you can recap the first two films, just sort of the main idea of what the plot is and what the films are about so the readers can get a little bit of a flavor.
Robby Martin:: Sure, going off of what you just said in a sort of an intro there about how a lot of the times when people make movies like this, they are maybe more partisan tinged or they’re about Bush. Even the film, The Power of Nightmares, that’s mostly about the neo-conservative influence, is mostly about the Bush Administration and the people that were in his inner-circle. So its a very heavy agenda in a very basis sense, all three parts of the film are specifically focusing in on who I consider some of the most influential neo-conservatives in Washington DC. Names like Richard Perle and Mike Ledeen would probably come to mind for most people when you talk about the most influential people. But I think what they didn’t succeed with, people like William Kristol and Robert Kagan did succeed with, which is actually rebranding neo-conservatism to be something that has some sort of bi-partisan appeal, that it can actually influence both sides of the political spectrum.
A Very Heavy Agenda – Part I kind of recaps what the project of the new American century actually was, or what they wrote. Who was part of it, not just who signed their letters, because people like Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld did sign the PNAC Letters, but they weren’t the people who were actually writing a lot of this policy. It wasn’t them, it was people like Robert Kegan, people like Donald Kegan, and even Robert Kegan’s brother, Fred Kegan. In Part 1, it kind of shows how, after the Bush Administration ended, these neo-cons in DC realized that they needed to sort of reach out to the other side of the aisle to the Democrats, and to take a less partisan approach than they had before. I tried to show that a little bit in Part 1, but mostly Part 1 is showing how they didn’t go away, that when the Project for a New American Century closed, it didn’t simply disappear, it actually reopened under the name The Foreign Policy Initiative, and that was sort of the purpose of Part 1.
In Part 2, I start right back off at the point where the Foreign Policy Initiative is now the new neo-con think thank that they’ve created. And the Obama Administration is now in office, and I can only speculate based on the decisions Obama has made, but it is a combination of naivety or maybe not understanding the way the whole game is played. Obama hired Victoria Nuland, Robart Kagan’s wife, to be in charge of an extremely important policy making position in the State Department. These are all the things I cover in Part 2. In terms of who are the main characters of these films, I would say, in Part 1 it is mostly Robert Kagan and Bill Cristol, and I Part 2 it mostly focuses in on Victoria Nuland.
Instead of just showing some of the behind-the-scenes inside baseball neo-cons talking amongst themselves, Part 2 shows how their rhetoric gets filtered down into the mainstream media landscape, and actually creates immense damage in terms of how they can control the narrative just by inserting little talking points here and there. So yes, that’s Part 1 and 2 pretty much.
Daniel McAdams: I started watching Part 1,and Part 1 is interesting because it has no narration, you are essentially letting these people speak for themselves, which I think is a very clever thing. But what I was thinking when I was watching it, is that you’ve succeeded in rescuing all of these little quotations and all these interviews from the memory hole. Because the thing about the neo-cons is that everybody is a brand new day for them, they don’t want you to know what they said yesterday, because what they said yesterday was wrong: Iraq wasn’t a cakewalk, all these things didn’t go smoothly, and so they never want you to go back and see these things. And that’s what you captured in Part 1, which was great.
But taking off on what you said earlier, here’s something from the film, and you have Robert Kagan, and I think he was on C-SPAN. The one thing about the Kagans and Cristol even, is that these are not bomb-throwing types, they’re actually very civilized, almost friendly types, and they have a way of bringing you on almost with a sort of charm. But here’s what Kagan said, and this is from your film: “What people call neo-conservatives, I actually call a mainstream bipartisan view”. But the thing is, he’s right in a way, but that’s only part of the story. He’s right because the only view that is able to come through is the neo-con view. When Foxislooking for an expert, even when MSNBC, CNN is looking for an expert, they’ll have someone like John McCain or Bill Cristol, these are the foreign policy experts. So they’ve been able to make something very extreme look very mainstream.
Robby Martin:: Yes, and I guess what I found disturbing while making this film was that the neo-conservatives not only have succeeded in making some of these ideas mainstream, I feel like the culture in Washington DC in general has shifted more towards essentially the normalization of what is considered being a neo-conservative. The word is almost considered anachronistic now, people don’t use it anymore, but I think they’re more influential right now than even possibly when they were in the Bush Administration. Because always in the Bush Administration, it was very clear that people, I’m assuming like you and Ron Paul, to see that and to know that these are neo-cons. We know who these people are and we know what they’re trying to do. Now it’s a little bit more confusing and things are more merged together where there are a lot of people who seem centrist.
One of the parts in Part 2 that I focus on is these new neo-cons, sort of the new generation of journalist and people out there who are going around helping sort of the old-school neo-cons, like people like Eli Lake who write for Bloomberg. That’s a whole new thing that’s happening now, is a lot of these journalist have a lot of credibility among younger people and younger intellectuals than someone like Bill Cristol or Robert Kagan.
Daniel McAdams: That’s why I knew that I wanted to talk to you and have you on the show, because you brought out this point about the younger generation of neo-cons. You’re right, they’re very savvy looking, someone like Michael Wise or Eli Lake like you point out. They’re very Savvy, the daily beast has a huge readership among young people, and they’re also very impressive. The older neo-cons, even the Kagans, (forget about the previous generation) still have somewhat of an erudition about them. The new generation strikes me as more of attack dogs, and I notice with some glee as this escaped me while I was watching that you did focus a little on Jamie Kirchick, who I think encapsulates the idea of an attack dog neo-con. He is with the Foreign Policy Initiative, which you focus on a lot in the second film. He is the sort of well paid attack dog who does nothing but sit around looking for things to attack.
I remember when we opened the Ron Paul institute back in 2013, it was either on the day we opened or a day or two later, there he was firing out 1,500 words about how we’re a bunch of cooks conspiracy theorists, he said, “They’re awful, don’t listen to them, try to ignore them, stay away from them”. That was a very interesting and very important part of the film. It almost needs to be flashed out more I think.
Robby Martin:: Yes, that’s a good point you make. Part of the reason I didn’t flash it out more is because I didn’t want to feed his ego, because he does seem to almost thrive on that kind of negative attention. I almost seem him like a James O’Keefe style agitator for a neo-cons, he has similar techniques, except the things that James Kirchick is doing are meant to appeal to liberals often times. So when he did the protest on gay law on RT, he was doing that under the guise of “I’m a Liberal activist”, while in reality he was one of the most hardcore neo-conservative think tanks on the planet.
Daniel McAdams: And the agenda is to bash Russia no matter what.
Robby Martin:: Of course, and that’s what’s interesting to me. And then you’ll see other sort of triangulation efforts between him and his buddies in Washington DC. For example, after him and Ray McGovern went at it in an interview together, he was kind of embarrassed afterwards because Ray McGovern made him look like a fool because of the things Jimmy Kirchick was trying to smear him with. A few weeks later, Rosie Gray on BuzzFeed writes this hit piece on Ray McGovern essentially calling him a racist and a conspiracy theorist, and I was thinking, “Isn’t that convenient that one of Jimmy Kirchick’s friends writes this hit piece about Ray McGovern after Ray McGovern made Jimmy look like a fool on live television.
Daniel McAdams: That is actually very Soviet, isn’t it. The other thing that’s interesting, and you don’t necessarily get into this, although it’s hinted at … and maybe you get into it in Part 3, but I think it’s so critical … and that’s the issue of funding. Funding is how they dominate the agenda. The organizations are enormously well funded, I think you had several clips from the Institute of Study of War, and they portray themselves as a group of intellectuals, and they do have very good maps on Syria, I have to say. But, it takes about three minutes to clip through and find their supporters, and their supporters are Race On, or probably a Lockheed. But if you go down the whole list, they’re all the military-industrial complex. So the neo-cons and the think tanks that they populate sort of represent a merger of corporate military-industrial complex and government money that’s invested to create policy that then goes back and creates more money for them for new wars. So this is really a stranglehold on public opinion, and it strikes me as almost un-American.
Robby Martin:: It’s absolutely ridiculous that these think tanks, especially something like the Institute for the Study of War is a 1005 funded by defense contractors. They signal boost constantly anything that can potentially involve the United States getting into a new war. But the Institute Study of War specifically is probably one of the most academic non-partisan seeming think tanks in Washington DC that’s all about war, but it’s run by Kimberly and Fred Kagan. Kimperly Kagan is, of course, the sister-in-law of Robert Kagan. In my movie I show her being asked if she’s a neo-con, and she ahs that weird stock response that they all do, where she says, “I don’t even know what that means anymore”, she was completely playing dumb. You mentioned their maps, their maps are pretty much the map you see when it comes to what the ongoing situation is in Iraq and Syria right now. The New York Times and pretty much every mainstream media outlet runs their maps.
But the other side of it that I find interesting is that the defense contractors, unlike a lot of other corporations, this form of lobbying that they do in the form of these neo-conservative think tanks is a whole different animal than the type of lobbying that we normally see where they actually have a whole intellectual class of people in Washington DC who are not just helping them advertise, but writing rationalizations and an ideology to get behind the weapons they’re trying to sell, essentially.
Daniel McAdams: It’s just blatant. I remember when I was on the Hill with Dr. Paul, he would always have Fred Kagan coming in and sitting down as the great expert. The Foreign Affairs Committee was supposed to be the place where you debate these issues and come up with some sort of a policy. It was only always one side, it was always Fred Kagan, he was always telling us how wonderful the surge was going to be in Iraq, and then when it happened, how wonderful the surge was in Iraq. And then afterwards, how wonderful the surge is going to save things, he’s not saying very much about that now. Unfortunately, we’re going to have to close in a bit, but I do want you, if you don’t mind, to talk a little bit about Part 3, which is coming out later this month. Give us a little bit of a preview, and let people know where they can watch these films.
Robby Martin:: Well, you can watch all of them at www.averyheavyagenda.com, it takes you to link to Vimeo On Demand. Right now, we’re actually running a special freebie for Part 1, you can watch it on the website www.filmsforaction.org for free starting yesterday and running the whole week. So definitely check that out, I’ll be releasing a commentary track for Part 1 fairly soon, if you want to get some of the back story and more details about the story in that one. I’m glad you brought up Fred Kagan again, because Part 3 closely follows the rest of the Kagan family and what those people are doing, and also the fathers of some of these neo-cons. So I go into the back story of Erwin Kristof, I cover Donald Kagan, and I also discovered a clip that, as far as I know, hasn’t been posted anywhere else online. It was online to begin with, but it was part of a long radio broadcast.
On 09/12/2001, Don and Fred Kagan actually went on a radio show and said that they want U.S. troops to invade Palestinian territories as a response to 9/11. Don Kagan also said on the same show that on the same show that he believes people are going to become complacent since they think 9/11 is a one-off, and what if the terrorists had anthrax on that plane? Keep in mind this is on 9/12, one day after 9/11, before anybody knew that the anthrax attack was happening, the letters in the mail didn’t actually get sent out until 9/18. So there are some very interesting things in this conversation, and he also makes some blatantly racist statements, in this conversation he talks about how Arabs only understand force, and he repeats this meme several times, which is something the neo-cons tried to hide and brush under the rug that they actually are very racist in terms of the way that they view the Middle East. So those are all things I will be covering in Part 3.
Daniel McAdams: That sounds great, and I really would urge people to go look at it, even if you have to rent it, it’s very reasonable and it is definitely worth doing. I want to thank you, Robby, for joining us, and thanks for sharing this. Maybe when Part 3 is out, we will get together and talk about it again sometimes, but thanks very much for joining us.
Robby Martin:: I’d love to, thank you so much.
Daniel McAdams: I want to thank all of you for tuning in to The Liberty Report, please be sure to follow The Liberty Report on www.YouTube.com/RonPaulLibertyReport. Subscribe to the show, and you’ll get to see all of the things that we’ve done, we’re going on 240 or so episodes, and we do this every day. So please take the time to subscribe, and thank you again for joining us.