08/23/13 – Andrew Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our next guest is Andrew Coburn.
He's got a new piece in Harper's called a very perfect instrument.
That sounds like a Brit talking.
The ferocity and failure of America's sanctions apparatus, and as I'm sure you're all very aware, he's the author of the book, Rumsfeld, His Rise, Fall and Catastrophic Legacy, which is great and which you ought to read cover to cover.
I think you will be amazed at some of the stuff in there.
Welcome back to the show, Andrew.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
Always good to be with you.
Good deal.
Very happy to have you here.
And a very well done essay here in Harper's magazine about the history of sanctions, not just, you know, up to date with what America's doing to Iran and a lot of other countries in the world, but going back to World War One.
And I really like your choice of this quote of John Maynard Keynes about how the sanctions regime against Germany, or the blockade against Germany built up during World War One became its own job holding government program that refused to die even after the war.
And could you explain a little bit about how that worked?
Right.
I mean, they built this, they created this, you know, system for blockading Germany, which worked really well.
By the end of the war, you know, half the Germans were starving and then the war ended.
So really, you know, in a sensible world, the blockade would be lifted and the Germans thought too.
But the people who were running the blockade, they thought they'd made it so perfect.
In fact, they just brought in some refinements that made it really perfect.
And they thought, well, just because the war's over, no need to stop starving the Germans and they kept it up.
So we don't know exactly, but something like a quarter of a million Germans starved to death after the end of the war in the five months between November and March when they did start to lift it because they were scared that the Germans would go communist, you know, were killed for no reason.
Just because, you know, the sanctions bureaucracy, as you say, refused to die.
And that's, you know, I think that's the way things have continued that way.
Yeah.
Love for its own sake is what Keynes called it.
Incredible.
And, you know, this is the kind of thing that even though this is my job, I still am amazed, shocked, and just I can't figure it out when I learn about nuclear weapons lobbyists and how, hey, we got to keep making these H-bombs, right, and congressmen and where, wow, there's really no morality or larger spirit of public interest even available to these people to think of.
It's simply just make that money.
That's your job is getting hydrogen bombs sold.
And that's just, I don't know, the incentives to continue on in spite of what's obviously good and right and so simply, you know, good and right.
It's just it's incredible.
I see examples like this, too, or just like the sanctions regime against Iraq in the 1990s.
It was originally created to get him out of Kuwait.
And then they never lifted it until what, 2005 or something.
Well, actually, I think they're only just lifting them now.
But they, you know, there are people in jail for sending food to Iraq, which they did, you know, for doing that before, you know, when Saddam was still there.
And the thing is, as you're saying, I mean, these people know, you say nuclear weapons, the people know there's a sort of a downside to that, you know, kind of scary, can vaporize millions of people.
But sanctions are meant to be nice, you know.
Hey, let's not go to war.
Let's have sanctions.
You know, let's leave that sanctions, give time for sanctions to work.
So they've sold us the idea of this nice, benign kind of soft thing that I don't know, maybe cut off people's TV or force them to go to bed early or something.
In fact, you know, they are dangerous.
They destroy.
I mean, one of the people, Bob McBrien, who was in charge of global enforcement for sanctions.
I mean, he told me he said, you know, sanctions destroy people.
They hurt.
That's the idea.
So, you know, one of the things I didn't meant to explain when writing this article was this is a very cruel instrument.
I mean, you know, the very perfect instrument was what the British called it.
We do the blockade, but it's a very cruel thing.
I mean, it really destroys societies and in a very insidious way.
And now in the 1990s, you and your brother Patrick co-authored a book about Iraqi life under sanctions, right?
Yep.
Yep.
And I'm sorry, what was the name of that one?
It was called Out of the Ashes.
I mean, at that time, when we first published it and then it was republished as Saddam, an American obsession.
It's basically, you know, the whole story of how we before the end, we published it in the 90s about what we were doing to Iraq at the time, including starving hundreds of thousands of babies.
I think we talked about the great review that you wrote for the London Review of Books of Joy Gordon's book, Invisible War.
So if people just Google Andrew Coburn and Invisible War, there's the short version of that specific story for you.
But it really is.
And it really bears repeating, too.
I think her her main thesis where she she draws the distinction between what America is doing to Cuba still after all this time and what happened to Iraq.
Because, you know, during the Cold War, you could still if America put an embargo on you, you could still go with the other side.
But after the end of the Cold War and with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, there was no other side.
It was a unanimous U.N. Security Council thing with Russia and China in on it.
And they would have had to pass a whole new resolution in order to lift them.
There was no sunset on it of any kind.
And America ruled the Security Council with, you know, 800 ton guerrilla kind of situation in the U.N.
And Iraq had no one else to trade with.
I mean, they were really blockaded from the whole world.
And so this was basically like what Britain did to Germany.
This was not fooling around at all.
They killed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people.
Well, that's what we're trying to do to Iran.
I mean, things are a little better for Iran now because they can still trade.
To a limited degree with the Chinese and the, you know, sell oil to the Chinese and the Indians and some to Japan.
But what we're doing, we've discovered this new refinement in the last 10 years, really, which is to use U.S. control of the global financial market.
So basically what they do is they say, unless you follow our sanctions rules, we will cut off your bank's access to the New York financial markets.
And you won't be able to trade in dollars, which any bank in the world, you know, that is terrified of that.
So that's how it's a new refinement of what the Treasury's under Treasury, Treasury under Secretary David Cohen called said to me was some new and innovative strategies to, you know, to target, to use control of the banks to do this.
Well, now, you know, whenever people there are.
It's amazing, actually, how much access we have to news stories about people suffering in Iran because of these sanctions due to a lack of medicine and that kind of thing.
It really is a different world than when we were just stuck with Jennings Brokaw and rather kind of one way information.
So these stories do get through if only because of access to British media, really.
But people still don't understand because, come on, it's not true that America puts sanctions on medicine.
So, you know, I don't know if some Iranian kid is dying, no medicine.
That's got to be his own government's fault for one reason or the other, because I know you're not trying to tell me that America would do that.
But that's where we get to all these innovations and targeting the banks and and the chilling effect that it has on all business with Iran carried out throughout the world.
That's right, because, yeah, because the if you say, you know, you're you're you're sanctioning, you know, medical supplies to Iran.
They'll say, no, we're not.
We aren't those exemptions for that, which is true.
But the thing is, any bank you run, you know, you know, bank will handle that transaction because they're terrified that the US will come along and say, aha, you're dealing with a targeted Iranian entity.
You know, that's really a front for the Revolutionary Guard or something.
And we're sanctioning you and bang, you're facing a billion dollar fine.
Right.
And then if they do that to you, then that means that any business who messes around with you is now playing with the same fire.
Exactly.
Exactly.
It's a you know, it's a it's very insidious, very clever, actually.
But it works.
It works well.
You know it now.
But didn't America have to just make gigantic exceptions for Japan and Korea and and India, too, that now you guys can still buy Iranian oil?
What are you going to do?
Well, they get waivers.
But there's a wrinkle to it.
You can get a waiver so long as you are reducing the amount of oil, you know, that you buy less this year than last year.
So the idea is to progressively reduce Iranian oil exports.
I mean, there's a bill coming up in the Congress, probably sometime this fall in the Senate.
It's already passed the House that will that'll cut that, you know, abolish that waiver.
But at the moment, it's it's the idea is you gently or gradually squeeze Iranian oil exports so they don't tell me at all.
Well, then how bad is it?
Because I guess Iran never had that great of an economy in the first place, did they?
Iran?
Well, Iran was, you know, it's better in a way.
It's more developed, more developed than Iraq.
You know, they have a lot of lot more industry.
They can grow a lot more of their own food.
You know, they it's bad.
I mean, times are hard in Iran now.
I mean, the inflation is galloping on.
Maybe it's like over 100 percent, particularly for the price of food.
I mean, poor people are being very hard hit.
The rich, of course, are not being hard hit.
In fact, the rich, as always happens, are making money out of sanctions.
You know, because you can do, you know, trade becomes you can do it becomes a lot more profitable.
So, you know, you've got, you know, like Maserati sales.
You know, Ferraris are selling well in Iran.
It's just, you know, the poor folks, as usual, are getting hit.
Well, in fact, yeah, I was talking with Mohammed Sahimi and he was saying about how the Revolutionary Guard Corps, they control the oil black market.
So as much sanctions as there are on oil and driving up the price of oil, the ones that the American, the individuals and the organization that the Americans hate more than any of the rest of them, they're the ones who benefit the most out of everyone and the space of everyone else.
And this is exactly the same case with Iraq.
You know, I can remember being in Baghdad in 1991, 1992 and actually meeting with, you know, Uday, the sons of Saddam and their coterie.
And there you're all.
Uday was saying how much money he was making out of trade.
There were new trade opportunities thanks to the US.
So it's the same thing.
It's terrible.
Well, and then, of course, also, as you say, the attack of inflation on what ought to be right.
If we had a sane foreign policy at all, the moderate middle class that we would like to see, you know, the green revolutionary movement that everyone, all the neocons and neoliberals and neo everybody's loved two years ago, three years ago, four years ago.
Right.
They're the ones suffering the most from this.
They've got whatever they've been able to save has now ceased to exist because of that's right.
And that again, that's what always happens.
I mean, you know, it's again what we did with Iraq.
We wipe out the middle class, which shows really that, you know, it shows what just sort of reflective, mindless strategy sanctions are.
And this is what they do.
This is what they always do.
I mean, you could absolutely predict the result.
You predict what's going to happen.
And yet they impose them.
Even so, I think it's just to crush the society as a whole.
You know, Iraq was Iraq was in many ways a thriving, you know, was a thriving Middle East, you know, had a horrible dictatorship, but, you know, it was a real country with a very thriving culture.
And, you know, was it which didn't didn't follow orders.
So we crushed it.
And I think the same we have the same policy to Iran.
Yeah.
Hey, speaking of that, what was it that that led the Bush, the Reagan Bush Republicans to betray Saddam Hussein the way they did?
Did he betray them first?
I remember there was a thing where he was complaining or George Shultz was complaining that he wanted a deal.
He wanted Bechtel to get a deal with Saddam and Saddam blew him off.
This would have been before the invasion of Kuwait.
And of course, there's the Glass Bead memo and that whole scandal about her seeming to give kind of that Willy Wonka warning.
No, don't come back.
Please don't invade Kuwait kind of a thing.
You know, given him a green light to do it.
Can you fill us in on which?
Well, I think, I mean, you know, there's a lot I don't know when we'll ever know if they'll ever release the documents.
I think the plan was.
You know, they got Saddam to, you know, in 1980, the primary was the Iranian revolution.
So they you know, they gave they sent Saddam off or certainly encouraged him to go attack Iran, which he did.
And he fought the Iranians to a standstill.
So by the end of the 1980s, you know, he'd taken care of that.
I think the idea was then they felt they thought that Saddam could be like the new Sadat, you know, a tame Arab dictator who'd do what he was told, you know, not cause any trouble for Israel and, you know, put his money in American banks and, you know, just be one of those people.
And for whatever reason, he didn't do that.
He was, you know, he was kicking over the traces about Israel.
He was kicking over the trace about the price of oil, which he wanted to put up.
And then eventually he, you know, he invaded.
He went into Kuwait further than I think he told them that he was going to.
He did.
He broke the rules.
Whatever agreement there was, he broke.
And I think they decided this this guy's gone off the reservation.
We have to smack him down.
I think that's what happened.
Yeah, I guess that's what they say, right?
He was supposed to take the northern oil fields.
Greg Palace said his kneecapping.
He's supposed to go over there and break their knees.
He wasn't supposed to go over there and move into their house.
That's right.
That's right.
You know, and turned out he was a real.
Suddenly there was this guy.
He had a big military.
I mean, he didn't last long against the Americans, but it was certainly permissible in local terms.
And, you know, who knew what he might do then?
You know, I mean, if he'd gone, kept going, he could have taken Saudi Arabia right there and then.
But, you know, he was stupid and he didn't.
So I think they just thought, well, this is, as I said, this guy's off the reservation.
We can't control him.
So we have to whack him.
You know, years ago, I mean, a long time ago in the late 1960s.
Lyndon Johnson told the Greek ambassador, he said, OK, we're going to solve the Cyprus problem.
There was a Cyprus problem those days.
And we're going to you know, Greece can just take the Greek bit of Cyprus and Turkey will take the Turkish bit.
And the Greek ambassador said, oh, well, the Greek, you know, the parliament, you know, that would be against the constitution.
The parliament would never agree.
And I can't reproduce Johnson's language exactly, but he said, F word, your parliament, F word, your constitution.
You better understand that Greece is a flea.
Cyprus is a flea.
America is an elephant.
And if the fleas itch the elephant, he might just whack them with his trunk and whack them good.
And that's, you know, that's you know, that's that's what happened.
You know, if the fleas itch the elephant and, you know, Saddam was a kind of big flea, but he was still a flea.
They gave him a good whacking.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the whole thing is it's the Americans.
It's not so much an elephant is like maybe the big dumb guy from beyond Thunderdome or whatever, just punching himself in the face, going after that flea and knock himself right out is really the thing.
I mean, when you look at the the declaration of war against the Americans occupying the land of the two holy places that Osama bin Laden put out back in 1996 and then again in 98.
It says, yeah, it's because you have air bases on the Arabian Peninsula that you use in order to enforce this blockade against the women and children of Iraq.
And so that's it.
We're going to war against you.
And you're either going to, you know, take the hint and leave now the easy way or we're going to bankrupt you until your empire falls apart and force you out completely then.
And we decided to go with the second route.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly right.
Might as well be Lyndon Johnson running this thing for as well as it's going.
Yeah.
Although at least Lyndon Johnson, he was a more I mean, you know, our present regime comes to the same thing.
It's just, you know, it's all sort of masked with, you know.
I find it very unpleasant, the whole sort of pretense that our prime concern is humanitarianism and all that when it's clearly not.
Well, now, so what exactly is the policy with Iran?
Because the Pentagon doesn't want to have a war against them.
And maybe the Israelis want one, but I don't think they can really have one if the Pentagon doesn't want one.
Right.
So they can't have their regime change, but they won't follow a policy that makes any sense if their policy is to support, you know, green type reformers who might one day be nice.
I mean, here the so-called reformer, the moderate that everybody's supposed to be able to get along with just won the election.
And everybody in America is just mad that now there's somebody that they might have to deal with instead of being able to easily demonize like Ahmadinejad.
Yeah, it's more tricky, you know, now that, you know, Mr. Rouhani is there, it's going to be trickier.
But, I mean, I think the last, you know, sanctions resolution passed the House 400 to 20 a month, you know, a few weeks back.
So, you know, I think the way they'll deal with Mr. Rouhani is to ignore him.
I mean, you've got to remember that I think there's various things going on here.
One is, well, first of all, you know, the Ayatollah, Mr. Khamenei, he absolutely believes that, you know, the nuclear thing is a side issue, that the whole point is to get rid of him and get rid of, you know, get rid of the Islamic revolution.
So he's not going to, you know, he's calling their bluff.
He's saying, OK, you say it's about the nuclear issue, fine.
You know, Mr. Rouhani, let him be elected.
And he's, you know, he's coming to New York to make a deal.
Do you want to make a deal?
He believes that they don't.
And he's probably right.
I think they just want to go on punishing, you know, as I quote a congressman in my article, you know, we squeeze and squeeze and then squeeze some more.
I think they just want to sort of choke the economic life out of Iran.
And they think that'll, you know, I mean, Obama, the other thing is Obama, you know, he doesn't have the political courage or political ammunition, but certainly courage to do a deal, which he easily could do on the nuclear thing.
So he's just going to, you know, if you just keep sanctions on and have a few more, you know, let the Iranians get progressively more emaciated, that's OK.
No political cost.
It's just, you know, that I mean, that's that's the that's why sanctions are so pernicious, because they're so easy.
You know, hey, just like we shut the door on this, you know, squeeze them.
OK, so they can't get medicine.
You can't get dialysis machines.
You can't get fertilizer.
You know, never mind.
It's not it's not an issue over here.
We'll just let it the whole place, you know, run down.
Yeah.
Well, and it's the most powerless, of course, who are the ones who suffer the most.
So nobody really hears their cries even inside Iran.
Right.
Right.
And the other point is that they say, supposing that, you know, say, for the sake of argument, supposing Iran is building a bomb or, you know, whatever is giving itself the capacity to make the materials.
And supposing that happens, you know, we can't.
But, you know, they go ahead and they get there.
I mean, it makes it clear to anyone else trying that.
But, boy, you may decide, you know, it's a good idea to go have a nuclear program, build a bomb.
But we will really, really punish you forever if you do that.
So it's you know, it's a good signal to other people, too.
I think it's part of the calculation that goes on.
Yeah.
Given them the Bradley Manning treatment, make an example out of.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There we go.
Well, and the thing is, I mean, in the background of this, which I'm not sure how familiar, you know, people are, I think they're somewhat familiar with the idea that there's an obvious deal on the nuclear issue right there waiting for everyone.
Please keep your enrichment levels down to 3.6 percent U-235 and any higher than that, up to 20 percent for your medical isotope reactor.
You'll go ahead and have that enriched out of state somewhere and import it.
And we will then lift some sanctions and promise not to invade you.
Come on.
Shake hands.
Big deal.
Well, you know, what's so hard about that?
And I never even went to diplomacy school.
And everybody knows that they could do that right now, but they won't.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the Iranians have accepted the offer a couple of times, but then Obama has refused to accept their offer of his, their acceptance of his offer.
Well, that's right.
But the Iranians have told, you know, I quote in my article, they told Jeffrey Feltman, who is the, who is undersecretary general of the U.N., but he, you know, he's an American, was a former, was a senior State Department guy.
They said in a meeting last year, the Hamaneh said, look, I know this nuclear business is all BS.
You know, the policy is regime change.
You know, don't think we don't understand that.
So they should know that the Iranians are wise to them.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, you end your article talking about young men interviewed in Germany about why they supported Hitler.
And one of the major responses that they got in the survey was that they remember growing up hungry under the blockade.
And this guy was promising revenge for them.
Exactly.
Exactly.
You know, everyone, and it's worth remembering, there's a price for this.
I mean, as I was saying earlier, the sanctions that seem cheap and easy, but they're not really because people remember, you know, you know, we destroyed, we changed Iraqi society and then wondered why we got suicide bombers.
Patrick, your brother, Patrick, has talked about that on the show in the past about how, and it's in his book, Mortada, too, I think, about how in Sadr City in the 1990s, they were so deprived of basic anythings that all they had left was religion in the most fundamentalist form.
Yeah.
And they just completely and it didn't have to be that way at all.
That wasn't the course they were on.
As you were saying, back before they were destroyed and cut off from the world oil market and bombed to smithereens and all of that, it was a pretty advanced society with, you know, a lot of educated people and a pretty thriving economy and a lot of, you know, people living off of oil wealth and importing food, for example, to eat.
The biggest pediatric problem in Iraq before sanctions, before 1990, was obesity.
You know, they were worried their kids were getting too fat.
Well, we certainly dealt with that.
So, you know, that's what kind of society it was.
Right.
Yeah.
You know, Lew Rockwell likes to remind us about what a scandal it was when Michael Moore dared show pictures of Iraqis in Baghdad from the street level.
Look, these are human beings.
This is a playground where they're playing on, and this is the moms taking their kids to it and that kind of thing.
And that was such a scandal that he dared to humanize the Iraqis on the eve of our mass slaughter of them.
And that was where we were then.
And I guess, as you're saying now, they wage the same kind of devastating war, but just in a way where hardly anyone takes notice.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You die all the time.
Yeah.
Well, and they're saying, from what I've been reading elsewhere, too, that you're talking about chemotherapy, cancer drugs and malaria drugs and hemophilia drugs and these kinds of things that the Iranians, their industry does not produce.
Well, that's right.
I mean, it's – and they're being forced – they're importing sort of generic substitutes, some of which aren't up to standard.
So there's a lot of people being affected that way.
No, it's a disaster all around.
It really is.
All right.
Hey, thank you very much for coming on the show, Andrew.
I appreciate it.
All right, Scott.
Always a pleasure.
Take care.
Everybody, that is Andrew Coburn.
The article, it's a great one.
It's at Harper's.
A very perfect instrument.
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