01/10/14 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright y'all, sorry for all the incoherent rambling on the show today.
Probably doesn't sound much different to most of y'all, but...
For anybody who doesn't like it, I'm blaming the Benadryl.
It's weird, this Benadryl.
It's got me high in a way where I don't feel high, but then I think back on the things I was just saying, and I realize that there's something wrong with me.
Very strange, this Benadryl.
Maybe you're not supposed to take it first thing in the morning with coffee.
Maybe that's the problem.
I don't know.
Anyway, so it's my show, the Scott Horton Show, and in the next segment I'm going to do my best to be quiet and let Sheldon Richman say great stuff.
Hey Sheldon, how are you doing?
Welcome back to the show.
I am doing fine, and always great to be with you.
Thanks for asking me.
Good times.
Very happy to have you here.
Sheldon Richman, everybody, you know him.
He's the vice president of the Future of Freedom Foundation at FFF.org.
And your latest piece here is, U.S. foreign policy is a shambles.
And sorry for wasting your time, but let's start with a shambles.
Isn't that a singular and a plural all mixed together and confusing my brain?
Well, that wasn't a question I was prepared for.
Is that the proper grammar there?
A shambles?
Yeah, I don't agree.
Isn't it in shambles?
I think you can say in shambles, too, but I don't think you can say is a shamble.
I'm not sure there's such a thing as a shamble, but I'll have to defer to linguists on this one.
Yeah.
I need to get the great book of etymology, eh?
I'm sure it's out there somewhere, eh?
I'm sure there are more than one.
Yeah, there you go.
Make sure to go to the Scott Horton link to Amazon.com first, everybody, before you send me your gift.
All right.
So U.S. foreign policy is in shambles.
It's a shambles.
I like a shambles.
It's a shambles.
That makes sense.
As after it goes to shambles, then it's in shambles.
It's a shambles in shambles.
So yeah, you bring you bring up the point, the all important point that John McCain and Lindsey Graham are lamenting that the Americans are not in the middle of the fight going on in Fallujah right now.
Yeah, they are.
They're very upset that there's been this resurgence of al-Qaeda and Sunni activity and violence in Anbar province, which is the Sunni part of Iraq.
And well, you know, I heard after I wrote this, after it was published, I did see McCain on TV saying, well, I'm not saying we should send in troops, because the American people wouldn't stand for that.
That seems to be his only reason.
I think he'd like to send in troops, because he saw a troop left.
And he doesn't even buy the point that Obama tried hard to have the troops remain there.
It's just that Maliki wouldn't give them immunity from Iraqi law.
Which led to the, you know, the final withdrawal of the troops.
But McCain doesn't buy that, he wants to be able to blame Obama and say Obama didn't try hard enough to keep troops there.
But you know, like I say in the piece, he and Graham have never seen an opportunity for U.S. intervention that they didn't like.
Well, you got that right.
By the way, Nick sends the grammar errors, and it turns out that you're right and that it's supposed to be a shambles, and I'm wrong that it could ever be in shambles.
That is an incorrect way to use that term entirely, it says here.
I thought you could say that, but I guess I got it right.
It's only your way, never the other, according to this website I've never seen before.
But they have a picture of a jackass next to in shambles, and a wise owl next to a shambles.
So, I think the question is settled.
So I guessed right.
Yeah.
Okay.
Again, sorry for wasting your time.
Yeah, so yeah, well, McCain, at least he's not the president, huh?
Yeah, we can be thankful for that.
I mean, whenever you want to really rail against Obama, just remember, it could have been McCain or it could have been Romney.
Now let me ask you, do you think that the guys in charge of the American Empire, is it that the Democrats just have a much different, kind of opposite sort of policy than the Republicans?
Or is it more or less consistently the same policy makers, but they're just complete idiots and have no idea what they're doing?
Or is it a grand conspiracy to simply smash every society in the region and try to get them all to kill each other?
Yeah, what is going on over there?
Because it does seem to make, it sure looks like a shambles to me.
You have to look at it, I think, person by person, because I think there are differences within the Republicans and within the Democrats.
But I think the Democrats may be a little more sensitive to the idea that the Americans are sort of sick of sending troops off to foreign lands.
Of course, that means they can use drones instead, or special ops, or something more subtle that's not so much in the headlines.
So, you know, we don't want to make them look too good by comparison to the Republicans.
But I think they have this, at least compared to some, like McCain and Graham and Lieberman, who we might as well throw to the Republican Party.
Versus them, the Democrats, I think, are a little more sensitive to the idea that Americans have gotten sick of troops being bogged down for years and years and years in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.
And, you know, we saw what happened when Obama wanted to launch a pact, not even send troops, but launch a pact against Syria.
The people stood up and said, no way.
So that was a good sign.
Yeah.
Although, you know, I wonder about, and you know, it was quite contrary to the media narrative.
Although we also had, it seemed like Dempsey and the military really didn't want to do it.
So I wonder if they had been for it, whether they would have gone ahead on or not.
Yeah, we won't know.
We have to be thankful for what we can get.
And that was a shining moment when the people basically rose up.
The way I like to put it, and I think we've talked about this on the show before, that it was the people that stopped that attack, the beginnings of that war, U.S. participation in that war.
Not the Constitution and nothing else.
Because, you know, Obama still thinks he's got the constitutional power to do it if he wants.
And that he doesn't even need congressional approval.
But the people said, we don't care what you think of the Constitution.
We don't want to attack Syria.
And so far, it's stopped that, stopped the attack.
Yep.
And, you know what, even if that is oversimplifying it a little bit, it's still a powerful precedent.
And it's still mostly true, even if, you know, Obama was hesitant a bit himself.
And even if the Joint Chiefs happened to agree with us, it is, you know, there's no doubt that, you know, the establishment consensus was, whoa, well, a red line.
Oh, we've got to do it.
On, you know, all the liberal hawks and right-wing hawks agreed and all that.
And then what came through, which they just could not deny, was the poll numbers.
And the American people were saying absolutely not by huge margins.
And I remember, I guess better than anything from that time, I remember the frustration of the cable news anchors like Jake Tapper going, well, you know, when we come back, we're going to have an in-depth look at what can the president say to the American people to get them on board for this thing?
That was just the only way that they could look at it.
It was so frustrating to them.
Well, that's right.
The Republicans tried to, you know, macho Obama into it by continually raising the red line issue.
Obama then backed away.
Remember Obama backed away and said, well, I didn't set a red line.
The world set a red line.
So he distanced himself from it, giving him some, yeah, some room to then go with the Russian plan to destroy the chemical weapons in Syria, which, of course, and that's happening, I guess, to the distress of the Republicans.
They would love to be able to catch Assad in a violation of that and then say, see, we were right all along with the attack.
So far that's not happening.
So that's another good thing.
Yeah.
And, you know, as...
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
I was going to say, we keep pointing out all these good things.
Why am I saying that foreign policy is a shambles?
Well, it could be worse.
It could be President McCain and, you know, so we can always imagine how much worse it could be.
But, yeah, no, I mean, it's true that if Obama had really been determined to start a war in Syria, he sure could have and he didn't.
And the American people's opposition certainly did have a large role to play in that.
And that is an important thing to note.
But that doesn't mean that they're not over there, you know, causing all kinds of problems all day long and selling weapons to all sides and all kinds of madness, which, you know, sticking with Syria for a minute here, you know, I kind of wondered whether Obama was afraid that ultimately, I mean, come on, he's not as dumb as McCain.
They're both as criminal as each other, I think.
But McCain has just got air between his ears where Obama had to have been thinking ahead that, man, he would really be going down in history as a guy who fought a war for al-Qaeda in Syria and that that could really be bad.
You know, I don't know, that maybe it would be too bad to ignore, you know, when the suicide bombers come to power in Damascus because and thanking him for it on TV and as they blow themselves up or whatever.
So, you know, I don't know.
I think maybe that was part of it, was that, you know, that he's been going along with the arm in the opposition all this time.
I don't mean to acquit him for it, but I think he's been really afraid to help them win, you know?
Yeah, I think that's right.
I mean, you had a good interview, a couple of good interviews lately, both with Gareth Porter and Patrick O'Byrne, where a lot of that was brought out, right, that it's not clear who Obama wants to win or whether he just wants things to remain in the stalemate in Syria.
Because they do seem to grasp the problem if the al-Qaeda types prevail in Syria and we see some really bad things happening there.
On the other hand, you know, Assad's not a nice guy either.
So, I don't know, maybe he's taking the position that maybe the Israelis have taken, let things just remain sort of, you know, in turmoil without it being tilted one way or the other.
And maybe they've calculated that that's the best thing.
But we're still concerned about what's happening in Iraq, because, you know, after the U.S. investment there, it looks like, oh my gosh, it was for nothing.
Of course, we always knew it wasn't for any good cause.
It certainly didn't do the Americans any good or the dead Iraqis any good.
But now, you know, you hear people say, oh, well, you know, we've shed so much blood or we lost so much blood, you know, personnel and treasure in Fallujah, only to have it now come into the hands of al-Qaeda.
So, you know, how can we just stand by and let that happen?
In other words, let's pour more blood and treasure, you know, after what we've already lost.
In effect, that's when I'll bring back what was lost.
And that's the way people seem to be looking at it.
That's the way people seem to be looking at the events in Iraq.
But, you know, like you and I have discussed before, and you've discussed it many times with other guests, the Iraqi policy has always been incoherent.
Because on the one hand, we have Iran being our bête noire, you know, our mortal enemy, Iran.
And yet we went into Iraq and did Iran's bidding by getting rid of their mortal enemies, Saddam Hussein, and turning it over to the Shiite.
So, it was always incoherent.
Well, it was really stupid what they did there, right?
I mean, or I don't know, do you think that they deliberately thought to like, yeah, we'll make a majority Shiite Arab country in the center of the Sunni Arab world, and that'll cause them to all hate each other, man?
That'll set up some dominoes and some excuses.
Or they just really thought it would be easy, or what?
You know, I wish I knew.
I really can't get myself inside their heads.
I mean, maybe that's a compliment to me, but I can't think the way you think.
Yeah, exactly.
Come on, Sal, your inner madman has got to explain this.
I try to pretend I'm Richard Perle, but it just doesn't work.
Or Rumsfeld.
You know, the only thing that would make sense is if they had, you know, a regime change in Iran next on the agenda.
But, you know, that doesn't strike me as quite likely, because that's a huge job, obviously, and I just don't think they were figuring that, you know, we then move on to Iran and overthrow them, or even that we somehow...
They couldn't possibly believe that sanctions were going to cause the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow the regime.
Surely they didn't believe that, because who could possibly believe that?
So I don't know what they were thinking.
I think it was played by Iran, and I think Eric said this the other day, I was just listening to it yesterday, but it was within the last week, that they improvised.
They improvised, right?
It's all ad hoc.
They make it up as they go along, right, and it's somewhat determined by what they did last, but the last move was just an improvisation based on what they did previously.
So I think we're wrong to look for some grand strategy.
I don't think they think like that, and I think Obama has carried that on.
In a sense, he was stuck with it, and even though he wanted to keep troops there for whatever reason, I don't know.
Of course, you know, I don't believe he was ever really against the Iraq war, anyway.
Gates might give us some reason to suspect that in his new book.
But also, you know, you'll recall that during the election, the primaries against Hillary, he was asked, when he voted against the authorization for the use of force against Iraq under Bush, and he said, if I was in the Senate, if I'd been in the Senate, I don't know how I would have voted.
He didn't pay a whole lot of attention to Bill Clinton.
That was part of a fairytale that Bill Clinton complained about when his wife was getting beaten up.
But that was a very telling remark.
He's not a pretty principled anti-war person.
You know, it sounds funny to even say that these days.
But there he is, confessing that, you know, for all the bluster he made about being one of the only ones who opposed that resolution on force, he said he doesn't know how he would have voted.
Back in the Senate in those days.
So, you know, I don't know what the heck's going through their minds.
I think he wants to get through his term and have things kind of look good so that his legacy is secure, and then otherwise leave it to his successor.
Right.
Yeah, that's what Bush said, too, and they asked him about, you know, well, what do you think the end of the Iraq war will look like?
And he said, you'll have to ask some other president, because it ain't gonna end on my watch, man.
I'm just staying until time runs out for me, and it'll be somebody else's problem.
Like Lyndon Johnson, too.
I will not seek, I will not accept another four years, because then this war might have to end in total failure while I'm here.
I don't want that.
I'll be in Texas, let Nixon take the heat for it.
So I guess, you know, if we want to be really charitable, we can give them both credit for realizing that the U.S. can't dictate events there.
I mean, the U.S. can kill a lot of people, and get a lot of people killed, including Americans, and create a lot of destruction and havoc.
But they don't seem to suffer, really.
Maybe some of his advisors did, Bush's advisors.
But the two of them don't seem to have suffered under the delusion that they could actually micromanage events there.
So that actually is something to say in their favor.
Now, they didn't pull out and totally, you know, get out of there, and Obama didn't until he really had to.
But at least they seemed to understand that they just needed to sort of manage it until they got out of office, because there was no way they could fix things in any sense.
Well, I wonder if I had my own think tank up there or whatever, maybe they'd have to consider me a genius.
Because I would argue that, hey guys, what if we made a real peace with Iran, and then that way, that could completely neutralize all the different messes that we're in.
It won't matter that we accidentally fought a war for them in Iraq.
This is the second place alternative to regime change in Tehran.
How about that?
Just make friends out of these guys, and it won't matter that you help them out in Iraq.
It won't matter that their allies are in power in Damascus or in southern Lebanon either.
Because they're friends of ours anyway, so who cares?
It'll be just like the old days, only without having a complete and total sock puppet dictatorship.
We'll just have a friendly and mostly compliant government over there.
They would go along with an offer like that, if the Americans were sincere about it.
And then we can lure that over the Saudis all day.
We can do whatever we want.
We won't be so dependent on them anymore, because we'll have our friends the Iranians back and all of that, right?
I could be as evil as a sociopath as I can try to be, like I wrote for Foreign Affairs or something like that, what we should do over there.
Brilliant!
We'll befriend our enemies.
Right?
Why not?
I think it is a brilliant stroke, and I wish they would do that.
He seems ambivalent.
At times there are signs he wants to do that, and other times, because he's getting pressure from the other side, from AIPAC and from the hawker settlements of the Democratic Party, not to mention the Republicans.
So I think that's why the message is so mixed up.
But I think that is a very good idea.
You can have one saying, we ought to outright ally with Iran the same way we allied with Stalin against Hitler.
Go ahead and ally with Iran against Al-Qaeda.
That'll help wipe them out.
And the Iranians, they know the region.
We'll arm up Hezbollah against them, I guess, now.
They're switching sides back and forth.
My only fear is they'll go too far the other way and actually get actively involved in that instead of just staying out.
But I agree, they should sign some papers with Iran so that there's now this declaration of friendship and open trade and tourism.
That would be wonderful.
Of course, Netanyahu and the rest of the Israeli government will be upset because then they can't use Iran as an existential threat, which is very useful that way.
But how are they going to claim Iran as an existential threat if it's friendly with the United States?
So that's one reason why he can't fully embrace that, even if he does glimpse the wisdom of it.
Right.
Yeah, wait, why are we sending F-16s to Israel again when they don't have any enemies that aren't friends of ours and we don't have the influence to protect them?
Oops.
Well, that's right.
And the Israeli military, as we know, is not enthusiastic at all about a conflict with Israel and with Iran.
They don't seem to see Iran as an existential threat.
I saw Steve Clemons on TV, I think earlier this week, tell Indra Mitchell or somebody that the Israeli intelligence are telling Netanyahu that there's been a sea change in Iran, that Iran is not this threat, if it ever was.
It's not a threat now.
Netanyahu doesn't want to believe it or he can't say that because it's too useful.
I don't know if they really want regime change in Iran to bring back a type of Shah type that was friendly with Israel because then you've lost Iran as an existential threat, which is very useful because they try to use it to take people's minds off the Palestinians and what they're doing to the Palestinians and these bogus talks which, of course, the Obama administration is just playing right along with.
So, in a sense, they need Iran.
And that's why I think they won't like anything which says to the world, hey, Iran, it can be a normal country.
It doesn't mean it's a libertarian country.
It doesn't mean the government, the kind of government any of us want to live under.
Even a limited government, a libertarian, isn't going to want to live under the Supreme Leader.
But that doesn't mean there needs to be a Cold War or a covert war or a proxy war where we aid and prompt terrorist groups to go into Iran and do bad things, blow things up or encourage Israel to kill scientists or any of that stuff.
We can be friendly and still not like the regime, not think the regime is a good regime because I don't think the Obama, I don't think the American regime is a good regime, whether it's a Democrat or a Republican.
But that doesn't mean there should be war.
And now, in the last couple of minutes here, talk to us about Egypt.
What's the future of America's relationship with the government there, do you think?
Well, yeah, I don't know what the future is.
I mean, that's something I talked a little about in the piece.
I think that does expose the American policy for how bad it is.
I mean, what possible reasons, well, I can name the possible reasons.
I shouldn't put it that way.
You know, you might wonder why is the United States siding with this basically military dictatorship that overthrew an elected government?
It's now, you know, once it's gone to the trial, planning to try Morsi, the president that they knocked off, is making the Muslim Brotherhood, you know, declaring it illegal and a terrorist group and then cracking down on people's civil liberties if they have sympathy for Morsi.
You know, why is the Muslim Brotherhood, why is the U.S. taking this stance when it claims to be for democracy and won't even call it a coup because legally a coup, if it was a coup, it would require the U.S. to cut off the $1.5 billion of military aid that Egypt gets every year.
Well, there are a couple of reasons.
I mean, the U.S. has never liked independent, non-aligned countries in the Middle East or anywhere else, right?
They want those countries to depend on the U.S. and not doing anything that U.S. leaders believe is contrary to what they call American interest, but we know what that means, the interest of a ruling elite in the military-industrial complex.
So they must see, as they long have seen, the Egyptian military is the safest way to keep Egypt in the U.S. camp.
And related to that, of course, is that Egypt has this peace treaty with Israel, which was engineered by Jimmy Carter in 1978, and so Egypt has done Israel's bidding in not doing too much to support the Palestinians, particularly Gaza.
And so the U.S., under pressure from Israel, doesn't want to do anything to alienate Egypt.
I guess one reason they were worried about Morsi was that it's possible that he wasn't going to carry out the terms of the peace agreement anymore.
Right.
I'm sorry we ran out of time on that.
That's a big subject to bring up right at the end of the show there, but we're out of time.
We'll talk again soon.
Thanks very much, Sheldon.
Appreciate it.
Have a good weekend, Scott.
Bye-bye.
That's the great Sheldon Richman from the Future Freedom Foundation.
We'll see you Sunday morning on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., scotthorne.org.
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