GORE VIDAL interview with MONICA ATTARD – SUNDAY PROFILE 20th APRIL 2003

Monica Attard: Hello and welcome to Sunday Profile, I’m Monica Attard. Tonight a special guest for this long weekend, Gore Vidal, America’s last small ‘r’ republican, now 76 and railing against what he calls the Bush-Cheney junta.

America, says Gore Vidal, has made meddling in the affairs of other nations his reason for being. Without a constant perception of threat the world’s last superpower can’t function. It is says Vidal a law of nature that there is no action without reaction.

The United States had September 11 coming, and at the end of the day it might well have been a gift to what he calls the Bush-Cheney junta, a gift which allowed the United States to go after Osama bin Laden and after Saddam Hussein, the two men it perceived as obstacles to the superpower’s imperial ambitions.

So what is Gore Vidal’s America? Believe him and it is truly an unappealing place where the state is constantly waging war not only against foreign nations but against its own citizens, where the police run wild abusing civil rights, where the infamous Bill of Rights is a fading memory of what could have been.

Gore Vidal: But I would say that that is not the United States that I write about, those are certain aspects either politically but I won’t say traditional, but certainly since 1950 when the economy was militarised and we began what I call perpetual war for perpetual peace, which was sometimes called the Cold War, now referred to as World War Three. I think this was a great mistake on the part of our leaders, especially President Truman at that time. And we are getting into worse and worse trouble, but don’t blame it on the Americans, we have nothing to do with it, it’s corporate America which owns the country and which in the year 2000 staged a coup d’etat when the popularly elected president Albert Gore was refused the presidency and the loser Mr Bush, was put in his place by a five to four majority of the Supreme Court, which was acting unconstitutionally. Now I’m a critic of this sort of thing and since I’m in favour of the American republic and I just like the American empire, I thought my position was pretty clear.

Monica Attard: What do you think of George Bush? Much is written about his capacities or lack of them? Is he a capable leader?

Gore Vidal: Well I shouldn’t think so, who knows whether he’s leading? It is assumed in Washington that what ruling is being done, I mean that in the most primitive way, is done by the Vice President Mr Cheney. Bush is just somebody that they put in the presidential chair.

Monica Attard: Thus the Bush-Cheney junta as you call it?

Gore Vidal: Yes the junta, the junta is oil and gas, money, ? America, they also own the media, which is why voices of dissent have been pretty much stifled, in every area of media. We are suddenly without any recourse, we the people. The Congress has abdicated, it has two great powers, one to declare war, the other is the power of the purse, these are written in the constitution. Each power has been abandoned, we haven’t declared war since 1941, and yet we’ve fought well over 200 wars since then, hot, cold, tepid. And the power of the purse is now entirely operated by the Executive for the benefit of the military. Now the larger the military you have the more you’re going to use it. Our founders were very intelligent and in the federalist papers great figures like James Maddison, one of the early presidents warned against even having a standing army except maybe to keep a little order here and there, that it would lead to empire and empire would lead to despotism. And that’s where we are now.

Monica Attard: Presumably though this manipulation of the administration by corporate interests is not something that has suddenly arrived on America’s doorstep. Presumably it’s something that’s been in the making for a very, very long time?

Gore Vidal: Of course it has.

Monica Attard: What marks the Bush administration out then as any worse than those which have come before it?

Gore Vidal: Good heavens, we have never had an administration that’s set out deliberately to rid us of the Bill of Rights, with USA Patriot Act number one, which passed 45 days after 9/11 and now there’s a current sequel to it, which has not yet been given to Congress but has been leaked, you can be arrested without a charge, put before a military tribunal without recourse to due process of law, to a lawyer, you can be deprived of your citizenship and you can be deported, this is a born American. It’s got some lovely language in it, you can be deported to a region or a country that has no government, which I must say at the moment sounds rather good to me.

Monica Attard: Of course there’s the men still in captivity in Guantanamo Bay that have yet to have their status dealt with?

Gore Vidal: Oh I don’t think they’ll ever be let go, they have nothing against them but they enjoy the power of holding them.

Monica Attard: But surely they can’t be kept forever?

Gore Vidal: I don’t see why not, I mean it is a dictatorship, it’s a dictatorship with a lot of ventilation, we still have many of the signs of the old republic are still there. That was the genius of Julius Caesar when he set going, he had Augustus, the Roman Empire, they strictly maintain all of the republican machinery having two consuls, having a senate, having this, having that, while they concentrated all power in the principate(?). So in theory the Emperor was just sometimes an acting consul and sometimes he was just somebody living in the country, but all power was to him and then of course they couldn’t work out the succession, so due to a series of wars of succession they fell apart. But that’s what we have done now, we keep the forms of the republic and we have an imperial system and something of a police state.

Monica Attard: Now Mr Vidal this dictatorship as you call it, did it have September 11 coming?

Gore Vidal: Well yes, it activated a lot of things that had been in the works. Example, after the bombing in Oklahoma City the country was duly shocked by what McVeigh and the group of what they call, call themselves ‘patriots’, may or may not have done, we still don’t know much about it, nothing was ever really investigated. But suddenly Oklahoma City they blow up a public building, immediately Clinton signs a terrorist act bill, which really it goes after many of the rights of due process of law and so on, habeas corpus, which we expect under our system. They were not annulled; they were nudged toward obedience on the part of the citizens. Then comes 9/11 and a few weeks afterwards there’s a 342-page USA Patriot Act, which is enormous detail but it certainly wasn’t thought up in 30 days since 9/11 as a response to a terrorist attack. It had been prepared and it was sent to Congress, Congress was then so overwhelmed by the media and the horror that had befallen us by wicked Arabs or whoever it was who did it, they passed it without reading it. Now we’re stuck with the damn thing, Congress at last is sitting down and realising what they wrought, and they’re reviewing some of the aspects of it, which are violently anti-democratic if one can use that phrase.

Monica Attard: Mr Vidal do you think that the United States brought the devastation of September 11 upon itself though, do you think it was a simple as a payback?

Gore Vidal: Well nothing is of that nature is ever terribly simple, no nation ever begins anything in a state of innocence, nations have pasts, they’ve done good things and bad things and have enemies and allies, indifference. There are many things we could have done, should have done, did not do, and there are many things that we did in other parts of the world, which caused resentment. The President is a born again Christian, it means he’s a protestant from the south and believes and rapture and wants to be a sunbeam for Jesus, well he’s going to let in so Washington says, I can’t believe it he’ll do it, but he will let in, in theory anyway Christian evangelicals into the Muslim world. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen an American Christian evangelical but run, no matter what you yourself may be in the way of religion, I mean these are very, very primitive people, and they’re absolutist and they know that God has chosen them to convert everyone else. To have a bunch of them loose in the Middle East I said is asking for even more trouble than what we’ve got.

Monica Attard: But given the United States reaction to September 11, the attack on Afghanistan and Iraq, the rolling back of American civil liberties, who in your view represents the more dangerous evil? Is it Osama bin Laden or George W. Bush?

Gore Vidal: Well it’s Bush we have to deal with, bin Laden is a gangster, that should have been treated not like a war with a country. Osama bin Laden is not a country, he is something like the mafia, he’s head of a bunch of religious zealots, he’s a thug, he’s a terrorist indeed. Now how do you handle that normally in a normal country? What you do is you call out the police, you get to Interpol if he’s international, you turn to other countries to help you find him and his allies. And you might even go to the United Nations if you were not eager to supersede it yourself, that’s what should have been done. Instead Bush pretends there’s a war, but you can’t have a war without a country. Terrorism, you can’t have a war against terrorism, it’s an abstract noun, you can’t fight an abstract noun.

Monica Attard: But you’d have to argue wouldn’t you Mr Vidal that attempts had been made to flush him out, particularly under the Clinton administration. And yet all of those attempts have failed, he’s a very elusive character?

Gore Vidal: Well he’s literally elusive, they can’t find him, but then again we don’t know if they’re looking for him. When our generals first arrived in Afghanistan, a country which had nothing to do with 9/11, the Taliban as such had nothing much to do with it, they were a bunch of chaotic people that we had put in charge of the country at the time of the wars with the Soviets, and they were becoming crazier and crazier. But in the interests of establishing a pipeline to get oil from the Caspian Sea down to Karachi in Pakistan, we decided to go in there and replace the Taliban and using Osama bin Laden, who had been in and out of Afghanistan, as an excuse. As soon as our general on the spot got there he gave an interview, I’m sure he got into a lot of trouble, somebody said well when do you think you’re going to get Osama bin Laden? He said, we’re not looking for him that’s not what this is about, and then he had to come back with a statement that said well, we’re against Al Qaeda, and then he had to explain what that was. But what it was really about was UNICAL, Union Oil of California which had a contract to put a pipeline from Turkmenistan down through Afghanistan down through Pakistan to the port of Karachi, where the oil would then be sold to China, we had already made a deal.

Monica Attard: So is it possible then that September 11 was potentially a preemptive strike in response to what the Arab world might have interpreted, correctly or otherwise to have been a possible US threat to Afghani strategic interests, oil interests?

Gore Vidal: Oh I think that it is now fact, one doesn’t know in a world of so much rumour and this and that, but Osama bin Laden got word that in October Clinton had a plan to hit his camps up in the hills in the eastern part of Afghanistan and to attack Afghanistan, maybe with a full invasion. This was Clinton, who was our kindly liberal president. Osama bin Laden gets wind of that and the next thing that we know we’ve got 9/11, which is a preemptive strike against us. That I think is current wisdom around Washington, not in certain circles obviously where he must be forever a mad demon and I’m sure he is a mad demon. But if he knew an attack was coming in October and he hit in September one sort of sees the logic of that.

Monica Attard: Now you also talk of the United States’ need to always manufacture an enemy. If it’s not terrorists it’s its own people, pedophiles, drug lords etc. Do you believe that it was necessary for the United States to have one individual to focus anger upon after September 11? That is Osama bin Laden?

Gore Vidal: We’ve always done it, we personalise everything because that is the style of the country, that’s the style of the media. You immediately focus on an individual of great good and beauty or a great evil and ugliness, and you just go on and on about them and you never go on about what the battle’s really about, because we want to talk about good and evil, which gets back to President Bush’s deep religiosity. He keeps talking in theological terms about good and evil, politicians ought not to do that, particularly politicians with the United States, a country in which we built what I thought was a big solid wall between the church and the state, between religion and politics. And he’s been breaking that well down too; I mean there’s a good deal to object to.

Monica Attard: Do you think that the United States, Britain and Australia had any justification for what they’ve done in Iraq?

Gore Vidal: Not really no, I think it could have been done quite differently. First of all Saddam Hussein was of no danger to the United States or England or Australia. He might be of danger to a next-door neighbour, but he didn’t even show much sign of that. The last war we had with him was 1991, well he doesn’t anything between ’91 and now.

Monica Attard: But do you accept that the people of Iraq would never have risen up themselves, that they weren’t capable of such an uprising?

Gore Vidal: Don’t you think that’s their problem? That’s not your problem and that’s not my problem. There are many bad regimes on earth, we can list several hundred, at the moment I would put Bush regime as one of them, but I don’t want anybody to attack the United States. Just send Bush back to Texas.

Monica Attard: Can you not conceive of any good planned or coincidental to come from this military campaign?

Gore Vidal: Well the first law of physics is there’s no action without reaction, so for all I know they will discover a cure for cancer because of what they did in the desert. That we can say is a good result. What we have done is we have torn up the old blueprint that came into being around 1950 in which we were in command of Germany and Japan and we were restoring them to their former glory really, and we had established NATO to help Europe, we had the United Nations to arbitrate, we had Bretton Woods, which was going to take care of the world finances in our favour but it was favourable for just about everybody. That world has been totally destroyed in the last two years, there’s nothing left to them. We have not honoured any of our arrangements, whether it’s the Hiro(?) Accords or the environment. We’ve tried to kill the United Nations several times by not paying our dues, by ignoring its orders, we have changed the world’s balance and I am amazed that you people, you people is a generic word for everybody else on earth, haven’t done anything about it and haven’t brought it ?/ attention, this is radical, this is the most radical regime since the 30s.
Monica Attard: You mentioned that the United States has essentially usurped the United Nations, or is attempting to. Another casualty of the war is the relationship between Europe and the United States, always tense but now it appears to be irretrievably damaged. Is that how you see it, you’ve lived in Europe, you still live in Europe for part of the time, what do you make of that relationship?

Gore Vidal: I don’t think it’s irretrievable; this administration will vanish without a trace one day. I just don’t want it to vanish in a nuclear cloud of some suicide bomber, because I see that they’re making all kinds of trouble for themselves that they don’t understand the extent of it. I don’t want war and I don’t want anything violent to happen.

Monica Attard: But what do you make of the descriptions?

Gore Vidal: Europe has moved on to another sphere and there are those I know rather good economists who maintain that with the creation of the Euro that removes the power of the dollar, and it’s only the power of the dollar that we’ve been able to build up this vast military, because we could print as many as we want and it’s a sovereign currency, and it’s considered safe. So any time there’s a war being threatened they buy American securities, American treasury bonds, so that’s how we finance our nuclear weapons and so on. Well Saddam Hussein threatened, it was his first threat that I think got to us, that he was going to shift over to the Euro and not the dollar, which meant that people with Euros could buy Iraqi oil, which they can’t do much of now or then, but they will one day. And that would destroy the power of the dollar to determine world values; particularly the value of oil, and this was enough to give our people a great headache.

Monica Attard: So do you think then if that scenario is correct that France and Germany would have had just as much incentive to indulge in decision making for the wrong reasons as Washington?

Gore Vidal: Well it would, they did, they embraced the Euro. They don’t love the United States, I think that should be quite clear, nor is there any reason why one country should love another anyway. President Washington who was a great statesman has said that nations should not have special friends or special enemies, nations should only have interests, and that to me is good statesmanship.

Monica Attard: But that’s precisely what Washington’s doing isn’t it, acting on its interests?

Gore Vidal: It isn’t, it’s invented interests that it doesn’t have, it pretends that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11 and he was going to do it again if we didn’t go in and smash him. He had no plans and we went in and smashed him anyway. Why? Because he has the second largest oil reserves on earth.

Monica Attard: Mr Vidal if we look at the so-called coalition forces, you’ve got George Bush, you’ve got John Howard of Australia, they appear at least to have behaved as expected. That is to say we’re not really surprised by their action. When you look at Tony Blair, a British Labour leader, steadfastly supporting George Bush on this issue of Iraq what do you make of that? Why do you think he did it?

Gore Vidal: I think there’s something very creepy going on, now I’m giving you an opinion. Bush was an alcoholic and he became AA and part of AA is you find Jesus or God of something, and that helps you have the strength to cease to be an alcoholic which he said, he found God, a very primitive sort of fundamental Protestantism, believes in Armageddon, believes in the end of the world, believes that this world is nothing and only the next matters. Tony Blair is equally religious, obviously in a more sophisticated way, but he’s in a funny position, he’s Prime Minister of England, he is responsible in a sense for the Church of England, he appoints bishops for the sovereign to install. Well it is said that he’s become a Roman Catholic, now the two boys can see themselves as crusaders fighting for Jesus against the Infidel, against the heathen, against all Muslims. This to me is perfectly looney, it is nothing that I would do or you would do or most people would do since this kind of religious zeal went out of the western world quite some time ago. It did not go out of the Middle Eastern world, but we could live with that, it isn’t going to hurt us, particularly unless we make them very angry. So I think they see themselves as two Christian crusaders.

Monica Attard: Do you think that Tony Blair’s zeal will eventually see him falling in behind Washington if Washington makes a decision to extend this war and go after Syria? He says he won’t but do you think that’s possible?

Gore Vidal: Well I’m sure he says that but what he will do is a different thing. I think he’s got himself in pretty deep and I don’t think he’s worked out enough of an exit to get out of it because they are going to go into Syria.

Monica Attard: You believe that?

Gore Vidal: I know that and also Iran has been marked too. I hope it isn’t going to happen, I hope that the American people will wake up and stop the junta.

Monica Attard: How do you know that they’re going to go into Syria or Iran? Why do you say you know that?

Gore Vidal: I have connections in Washington and I know that this is a decision that has been made. Things do go wrong and things don’t happen.

Monica Attard: But you don’t think that Washington is just saber rattling, isn’t it possible that having now demonstrated its capacity and willingness to act in terms of Iraq that the Bush administration can actually achieve its aims through fear and threat?

Gore Vidal: It has no aims other than more oil and gas because Cheney had a study done about a year ago that by the year 2020 the entire world would be practically out of fossil fuels, they’re going to grab all of it and the biggest supply is in the Caspian area and all those countries whose names end in ‘stan’. That’s what our eye is on.
Monica Attard: You describe the three-stage process that you observe the US government employing against its enemies, abroad and at home. First there’s harassment, then there’s demonisation, then there’s attack. Is Syria now at the harassment stage?

Gore Vidal: You should read the New York times this morning, there were four major stories about the crimes of Syria, how it was really in with, they found the terrorists there and so it means that Iraq had been supporting terrorism and this and that, mostly stories are made up or it’s totally distorted. But the New York Times is a voice of the regime and a voice with a really a sort of desire for war and expansion in that part of the world.

Monica Attard: And so on your account then the terrorist link would just be extended ad infinitum and all of this on the back of one event, September 11, which looks on this account as though it might have been a gift for Bush, a truly massive widely perceived direct external threat needed in order to secure American global and oil interests?

Gore Vidal: That is one way of looking at.

Monica Attard: You believe there’s no plan to deliver democracy via regime change throughout the Middle East?

Gore Vidal: I don’t believe it’s our business to make regime changes in the Middle East, particularly when we’re under no threat from anybody.

Monica Attard: But is there a plan, is the American administration interested at all in delivering democracy to the Middle East?

Gore Vidal: Are you crazy? We don’t have it here for God’s sake, why would we export it? We talk a lot about it, our founding fathers, they had two things, one was majority rule or democracy, and the other is tyranny, which they called monarchy in those days. That’s all.

Monica Attard: In relation to this idea that the United States is not the slightest bit interested in delivering democracy to the Middle East, clearly much of the Arab world is deeply sceptical about what the United States is actually up to. But Saudi Arabia seems to stand apart from the rest. Why are they so taken by Washington?

Gore Vidal: Well first of all they are occupied by American troops, which were brought in at the time of Iraq One and then didn’t go home. Secondly deals were made that they are there to protect the Royal Family, which is generally in cahoots with our oil companies, and to protect them from the people if the people should suddenly turn ugly in a country like that. They’re in an awful position, I would not like to be one of them for anything, but we are there.

Monica Attard: Can I turn your mind briefly to North Korea Gore Vidal if I might? What do you think is the real threat to be dealt with there? Is there a real threat to be dealt with, because it’s hard to fathom the energy or financial gain to controlling North Korea for example?

Gore Vidal: Well we had an opportunity under Clinton, one of the few really good things he did in foreign affairs is he opened up fairly normal relations with North Korea. Bush coming in filled with zealotry for our Lord Jesus and knowing these were infidels and evil people, ‘axis of evil’, evil, evil, all of that again and again, these biblical words keep spouting from his mouth. He slammed the door on them, they wanted to have normal relations, they wanted all sorts of things in the way of trade, which Clinton began and he slammed the door, identified them with Iran and Iraq as an ‘axis of evil’, which is absolutely absurd, since the three countries have nothing to do with each other. Iran and Iraq were at war for eight years and North Korea is out of it, it’s on the moon. So the absurdity of even talking about such silly language as President Bush speaks to the people is to me an insult to our intelligence. It is so clear it is meaningless. Yet people say oh he’s the President, he must know something, well he doesn’t know anything or what he does know he’s not telling and he has his own plans.

Monica Attard: So if I could ask you to stare into your crystal ball yet again, what would you think is going to happen in North Korea?

Gore Vidal: I don’t think much of anything is going to happen; they’ll go on starving to death as apparently they are or at least so the media tells us. We only know what we’re told by in our case here by corporate America and they have a worldview, which is greatly filtered, distorted, altered for our benefit. I don’t see them on the march, and I don’t see them putting together an atom bomb and one night saying let’s let the Americans have it! Why? At some point somebody must be intelligent and you must find a reason for something. If you get attacked by somebody you have obviously done something to deserve that attack at least in their eyes. Well so far we haven’t done it, but it looks like Bush might try. We knew Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction, I got so tired of that mantra, because if we had known it we would also know that at the first occasion he would have to use them would be at who invaded him. Now it does not take a Kosovitz to work that one out, that’s obvious. And we can’t find them and I suppose we’ll plant some there eventually, but there aren’t any now.

Monica Attard: Can I ask you one very last question Gore Vidal, what have you made of the coverage of the Iraqi by Fox?

Gore Vidal: Oh it’s disgusting, deeply disgusting, I’ve never heard people like that on television in my life and I’ve been on television for 50 years, since the very beginning of television in the United States. And I have never seen it as low, as false, one lie after the other in these squeaky voices that you get from these fast talking men and women, it was pretty sick.

Monica Attard: Do Americans believe it do you think? Do you think they fell for it?

Gore Vidal: Well the polls would say that they did, but then when you look at the way they ask the questions in the polls you’ll see they get the answers they want. We were badly hit by Osama bin Laden and only brave George Bush is going after him and he’s going to find him and kill him. Are you in favour of this? Yes, says 90 per cent of the people.

Monica Attard: But do you have enough faith in the American people to believe that perhaps they didn’t fall for that?

Gore Vidal: Some didn’t, I can tell you something that didn’t get much play but we had the mid-term elections a year or so ago and many, many Republicans were elected on the strength of George Bush’s war in Afghanistan, but simultaneously a poll got run by mistake I’m sure in the Wall Street Journal and something like 50 per cent, over 50 per cent of those who had voted for Bush in the year 2000 said they would vote for anybody else at that time, this poll was not printed anywhere else, it was only in one edition.

Monica Attard: And that was Gore Vidal, speaking to us from his home in Los Angeles in the United States. And that’s Sunday Profile for this long weekend; I hope you’ve had a peaceful Easter. Thanks to Michaele Perske and Peter Dredge, the producers of the program. I’m Monica Attard.