09/26/13 – John Glaser – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is the show.
Our next guest is John Glazer.
When I invited him on the show last week, we were supposed to talk about Syria, but then we talked about Iran the whole time.
So now I want to talk to him about Syria, but also Iran too, and also other things.
Palestine.
Welcome back to the show, John, how are you doing?
I'm doing well, thanks for having me back.
Very good to have you here.
You write for Antiwar.com, especially slash blog, but also news.antiwar.com, and the Huffington Post, and the Washington Times, and aljazeera.net, or is that america.aljazeera.com?
And am I leaving out anything else?
You got it fine there, that's enough.
Okay, good.
Well, and it's a good thing you do too, because people need to read what you're writing, that's my opinion.
Lots of things to discuss here.
I guess first of all, I wanted to bring up, did you see where, over at the Mondoweiss blog, they've got a little thing about it, about all these Republicans palling around with the mujahideen eat caulk yesterday?
Including Michael Steele and Rudy Giuliani, Mr. 9-11.
Oh, and also Patrick Kennedy was there too.
I did not see the piece at Mondoweiss, but it's been known for a long time.
But it's a bipartisan issue, unfortunately.
Many former and current members of Congress of both parties have teamed up with MEK.
They've given speeches with huge speaking fees that they've been paid.
And they're otherwise financially associated with MEK, which is an Iranian dissident group who used to be on the United States list of officially designated terrorist organizations, and seeks the overthrow of the Iranian government.
It's not uncommon for the United States to team up with opposition groups in countries that we want to overthrow, in countries that we view as adversaries.
We've been doing that for a very, very long time.
Unfortunately, this is another example of that.
I thought it was ironic, it says here that Rudy Giuliani says he's accusing Rouhani, the new president of Iran, of being linked to the 1994 bombing of the Jewish Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Which is a little bit hilarious, because Gareth Porter, of course, just a few weeks ago, uncovered the fact that it was actually the Mujahedin-e-Khalq that made up the so-called fact that Hezbollah and Iran were responsible for that attack in the first place, which Gareth has long shown was much more likely to have been carried out by white right-wingers, anti-Semite types in the security services there, than any agents of Hezbollah or Iran.
Yeah, leave it to Gareth, the meticulous debunker.
He's great.
Yeah, indeed.
And leave it to Rudy Giuliani to pal around with a communist terrorist cult, to pal around with anybody called the Mujahedin-al-anything.
What in the hell?
I know, it's certainly ironic.
It's crazy, dude.
All right, well, yeah, of course, opposition to Iran comes first.
Uberalus, right?
No matter what.
All right, so now, speaking of which, Phil Giraldi was just on the show, and he was saying that he thinks that Israeli interests are going to come between America and Iran on this deal.
And I was wondering, with the developments of the last few days, what you think about that?
Do you think there's a possibility that Obama really have carried, really worked something out?
Because Rouhani and the Iranians seem to really be pushing hard to say, no, we really want to make a deal with you, which is kind of, it'll be at least a little bit embarrassing if the Americans don't at least seem to really try, right?
Yeah, so I see a couple things possibly happening.
I mean, I think, if history is any judge, the bulk of Obama's political career shows that Obama does things not because he's courageous and he wants to break new ground, but because it's going to be politically palatable for him and his constituents and his party.
So any possible deal with Iran is thought about in the context of the White House, in the context of the next election.
So either getting somebody, someone Democratic into the White House in 2016 or in 2014, you know, getting a majority of Democrats in the House or something like that.
And so he has to keep that palatable.
And, you know, I don't have much confidence in Obama to, you know, make the case for peace, the public case for peace, anyways.
I don't think that he wants to, you know, go to war with Iran or bomb Iran or whatever.
And I think that he probably does view Rouhani's overtures as serious because, you know, he's been exchanging letters and so on and so forth.
So, you know, these are good signs.
But, you know, I, for one, am very pessimistic.
And, you know, we'll sort of have to see.
One of the things that is true about this is that however legitimate and serious these diplomatic overtures between the U.S. and Iran are, there's a very short time span for them to actually be effective.
You know, these things go bad like a pear.
They're just overnight and they're no longer ripe.
And so that's because hardliners in both countries sort of get on their haunches and say, oh, this is how it's not working.
You know, the other side's not making enough concessions and so on and so forth.
So it gets very bad very quick.
And so if anything is going to happen that's positive and substantive, it's going to have to happen really, really soon.
Well, yeah, and, you know, it sounds like the kind of thing of just, you know, some crank's complaint, but it's a true thing that back in October of 2009, when there was the best chance that we've had so far for them to come to this nuke swap deal, something or other, the Israelis had the Jandala al-Qaeda-ish terrorists in Baluchistan commit attacks, terrorist attacks, inside Iran, which made the domestic political atmosphere in their country, you know, shift hard against making a deal.
And they're willing to go to those lengths, go back and look that up.
In fact, I don't know how I had missed that.
I had been so caught up in the fake outing of the secret Fordo facility at the time.
I had somehow missed the correlation, or at least I didn't remember it well in my own little narrative there.
But it was Ray McGovern, the former CIA analyst, that reminded me, go back and Google it, 2009, October 2009, right when Obama's trying to make a deal, well, so-called trying anyway, Jandala, working for Israel, starts blowing stuff up in Iran.
Yeah, I mean, if you look at broader interests, even the most unseasoned political observer can look at the headlines in the past few weeks and see that Netanyahu doesn't want any sort of negotiations with Iran.
You know, with Israel-Palestine, he at least says, okay, let's have negotiations as a cover for, you know, Israeli expansionism into the West Bank and essentially annexation.
But with Iran, he just wants nothing, no negotiations.
And the reason is he's not party to those negotiations.
Because if he were, he'd be disrupting them and undermining them.
But with two parties, the U.S. and Iran, which could conceivably want to actually do something substantive, he has no ability to undermine them.
And so he doesn't want them to happen.
And this has been the case.
I mean, go back to 2001.
After 9-11, Iran, you know, issued condolences, and then they helped us overthrow the Taliban and install the Karzai government in Afghanistan.
And then they, you know, there was a possible detente.
The Iranians wanted Washington's strategic help and vice versa.
And then right after that, President Bush said, oh, Iran's on the axis of evil.
Two years later, the same team of Iranian officials offered the Bush administration what they called a grand bargain.
They made numerous concessions.
They said, we'll open up our nuclear program for even more transparency.
We'll collaborate with the United States in Iraq.
We will restrain Hamas.
We'll even consider stop aiding and giving weapons to Hezbollah.
I mean, this is all like a wet dream to Washington and Israel.
And yet the Bush administration rejected the offer out of hand.
So, look, Iranians have made diplomatic overtures for peace in the past, and they've been dismissed out of hand by the United States.
And we talked the last time about how, if you're a cold, calculating, realpolitik realist sitting in Washington, there are a number of reasons that a detente with Iran makes a lot of sense.
It's better for our interests.
But time and again, the United States pushes its interests out of the way in favor of Israeli interests, and that seems like what's going to happen now unless a real big change happens that I can't predict.
Yeah.
Well, and then that brings us to Syria and American and Israeli support for the Mujahideen in a contest between, to oversimplify it, in a contest between al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, America has sided with al-Qaeda against Hezbollah because Hezbollah is Israel's enemy.
And Michael Oren made that clear, that, hey, look, this is the choice we've made, and he didn't have to say, and therefore have made for you, too.
Since the very beginning of the conflict in Syria, you and me and every other sensible person have said, look, these rebels are mostly extremists, and even the ones that aren't extremists don't have our interests at heart, and they're committing crimes, and it's just a horrible idea for us to go ahead and support these guys.
From the very beginning, and even way back in the beginning, most people in the mainstream dismissed this, oh, the United States is supporting al-Qaeda because it's just too much of an oversimplification and it's sort of too broad and too sort of, duh, right?
Smack you over the head with a 4x4.
But it's becoming more and more literally the case that the United States is in the process of supporting al-Qaeda in Syria.
Yesterday, McClatchy News reported that more than a dozen of Syria's most effective rebel forces, including factions of the rebels that are aligned with the Free Syrian Army and backed by the United States, have formed a new alliance with al-Qaeda affiliates, including Jabhat al-Nusra, which, of course, the Obama administration has put on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations.
Okay, so we are literally giving aid and comfort and money and weapons to rebel factions in Syria that are aligned with al-Qaeda.
And these are groups that we're directly giving money to as opposed to this nonsense about, which is obviously true, that even if you put weapons into Syria and try to get them to so-called moderate rebels, they will eventually get into the hands of extremists.
No, no, no.
We're directly giving them to extremists.
These guys said that they want to set up an Islamic state in Syria that is based on Sharia law.
They specifically rejected in their announcement of this alliance the Syrian Opposition Coalition, which is the civilian group that's headquartered in Turkey that Obama promoted as an officially accepted by the United States alternative to the Assad regime.
Okay?
This is just too blatant.
I was reminded when I heard the news of when John Kerry went in front of the Congress earlier in September.
This was in the midst of the propaganda crusade to bomb Syria.
And he said that the opposition in Syria has, quote, increasingly become more defined by its moderation, its adherence to democratic process, and a broad-based and secular future.
A day or two later, Reuters reported that Kerry's statements were, quote, at odds with estimates by the U.S. and European intelligence sources.
In other words, he lied.
It's been...
The debate over, you know, whether and how to support Syria's quote-unquote moderate opposition should have been over long ago, but it...
And I'm afraid even with this obvious news that makes it all too blatantly true that we're aiding al-Qaeda, I'm afraid that it still won't end the debate.
Yeah.
Well, and of course it was...
Kerry was going back and forth with McCain about how much they agreed with each other that we don't have to worry about Islamic extremism on the part of the rebels here, because after all, Syria is a secular...something, something, kind of the verbal dot, dot, dot.
And what they meant to say was, right now it has a secular coalition minority government, and once it's overthrown, it'll no longer be secular.
Nothing.
You know, they couldn't finish their sentence because the rest of their sentence was gonna be true.
Oops.
Yeah, McCain's on a completely different planet on this.
I mean, he's...
He's out in the forefront of saying boldly that the Syrian opposition deserves our help and there aren't extremists and da-da-da-da-da.
I've met with them, he cries, and John Kerry was trying to placate that sort of sentiment in order to convince Congress that it was necessary to bomb Syria.
And he even felt shy about it sometimes.
You're right, his body language is all reluctant, but he slipped this one time and he said, dude, the opposition is increasingly moderate and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and it was an absolute outright lie.
And McCain will believe anything that satisfies his own preconceived notions of U.S. intervention.
So he's just on a different world, he can believe whatever he wants to, but, you know, this is not going to get any better.
The rebel opposition is not increasingly moderate, it's increasingly extremist, and U.S. intervention will only make things worse.
And, you know, I can't...
On the point about McCain there real quick, I can't figure out why this doesn't get more traction, at least in alternative-type media.
It's like it's such an easy 2 plus 2 equals 4 kind of a thing where McCain, the leader of the we-can-vet-the-rebels-and-pick- the-good-guys-to-back movement, as you're describing there, he went at...
The whole thing was arranged by the imposter, the fake Obagi, and her, you know, probably CIA front group, whatever she's working for there, and arranged this meet with McCain where he wanted, according to the Daily Caller anyway, according to Obagi, he wanted to spend the night with these guys, and they were the Northern Storm Brigade, and even if it wasn't the men in the picture who were the kidnappers, it was still the Northern Storm Brigade who were the kidnappers of the Shiite pilgrims from Lebanon, and if you just Google Northern Storm Brigade, the first freaking thing that comes up is a Time magazine interview with them all where at least one of them is saying, yeah, I'm a veteran of the Iraq War where I fought against the Americans as part of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and this is the guys, the Northern Storm Brigade, McCain, Iraq War veteran, together, why am I the only one who keeps stuttering over this freaking thing, man?
This is the biggest thing of them all, and it directly contradicts his point.
He's the leader of this thing, and it's just, I don't know, man, anyway.
I mean, one of the things that is so frustrating about McCain and the way that the media covers him is that he is a true crazy.
Like, he's actually sincere in his beliefs.
A lot of these other schmucks in politics say things, they use buzzwords, they use the, you know, officially approved phrases that will get us to a certain point, but they don't believe it.
And so, like, for example, when Kerry said in Congress, and I just told you, and then Reuters reported, the next day, oh, that is actually not true, and it's contrary to the intelligence that Kerry has been receiving.
You can't do that with McCain, because McCain is a true believer.
He's like a religious zealot for U.S. interventionism, and you can't penetrate his extreme faith, you know?
So it's harder to sort of pin him on it, and the media is kind of afraid of him, I feel like.
And by the way, I wanted to mention real quick that you referred to in McClatchy, U.S.-Syria plans face setback as key rebels break from coalition.
One of the reporters on this is Jonathan Landay, the guy who got more than, what, three dozen or something stories right, more than that, four or five dozen stories right about the intelligence before the Iraq war, and has done excellent national security reporting ever since then.
So the fact that his brand name is on this story makes it that much more citable to me.
I like pointing that out whenever it's his work.
Absolutely.
He deserves it.
All right, and then also, I'm sorry, we're pretty short on time.
We got, what, I don't know, seven, eight minutes.
Please tell us all about the ethnic cleansing of the Bedouins.
Boy, talk about an unreported story here.
I know, it's a completely...
It's just nonexistent in the U.S. media.
You won't hear about it, because it's too embarrassing for Israel.
The military has been demolishing homes in the Bedouin communities in Israel and Palestine, and they're displacing the population with intent.
It's intended to displace the residents.
And that's illegal, and in fact, it's a war crime, and Human Rights Watch pointed that out today or yesterday.
And, you know, this should be understood in the context of the supposed campaign by the Obama administration to get the Israelis and the Palestinians to talk and have some sort of political settlement that's based on a two-state solution, which is an impossibility because of what Israel is doing every single day, bulldozing new homes, building new construction settlements.
It just can't happen when you have an expansionist, annexationist state that is undermining the very basis of negotiations with this, which is two states for two people.
One thing that I just want to point out is what...
What is his name?
Youssef Muneir.
I can't...
I butchered his last name.
But he wrote in The New Yorker recently about a national intelligence estimate by the U.S. national...
U.S. intelligence community back in 1968, so one year after the 1967 war, and it said if Israel continues to settle in the West Bank, it'll be impossible to relinquish control and they'll never turn back.
The Arabs will just be either an apartheid regime or they'll be ousted the way they were in Anakba.
They said this in 68 that it was going to be impossible to reverse this trend towards settlement.
And now we're at the point where we have now about 650,000, maybe 700,000 Jewish settlers on Palestinian land.
And back in 1968, they were talking about this being irreversible.
It's surely irreversible now.
And so the whole basis of the negotiations merely works as a cover for Israel to continue to...annex the rest of Palestinian land.
They're just confiscating it.
It's absolutely illegal.
And we shouldn't be surprised if no movement on the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations takes place at all.
This just makes me wonder why in the world they're wasting time on it.
Why is John Kerry going back and forth thinking he can bring these two sides together when one of the sides, Israel, is undermining the very basis of his attempts to negotiate?
When they get the last of the Jewish settlers out of Gaza, they're sort of human shields there.
They kind of limit how bad Israel can crack down on the Palestinians in Gaza.
And once they're gone, it'll be just the prison by the sea, which is exactly what happened.
So, you know, if they got all the settlers somehow out of the West Bank, not that they ever mean to, even according to the plan, or with whatever land swaps were, they would never let that state be what we would call a state anyway.
It would have no foreign policy of its own, no taxation authority of its own, no authority of its own.
Yeah.
Whenever they talk about the possibility of a future Palestinian state, they say it has to be demilitarized so you can't defend yourselves.
We're going to have a lot of the natural resources, including the water resources in the West Bank, because certain settlements will stay there and they're under control of those.
So it'll be a completely neutered state, and it won't...
Of course, it's completely unacceptable to any decent Palestinian.
But, you know, it's important to note that Gaza, you know, they left Gaza and sort of played it up as some sort of concession, but Gaza is less religiously important to Zionist Jews than the West Bank is.
You know, it's very important to them in their religious canon and their beliefs, what they call the Judea and Samaria.
So, you know, I don't think that we can expect settlements to be reduced or leave.
No Jewish settlers are going back to Israel from the West Bank.
They're meant to stay there because Israel wants the West Bank for itself.
They don't want to share.
They don't want to share the Jordan River as an Israeli Jewish state.
And basically, Palestinians are going to suffer under apartheid until they get what they want.
And then what's worse is that this could all be solved in a second if the United States would just stop its irrational support for Israel.
Everything Israel does in the West Bank and in Gaza is able to be done because of U.S. weapons, because of U.S. diplomatic support.
That is the reason it occurs.
Otherwise, the whole support system under Israel would just evaporate.
They wouldn't be able to get away with this stuff.
So the U.S. is extremely culpable for the ongoing suffering of the Palestinians, the ongoing confiscation of their land, and their dashed hopes for any sort of state.
Well, so what about the one-state thing?
Is there a possibility of that?
It's conceivable, but Israel can't be a quote-unquote Jewish state if that's the case, because they're going to have a massive Arab-Palestinian population that believes in Islam.
And unless they respect their rights, they can't be the democratic Jewish state that they want.
They're just going to have to be a Jewish theocratic state that continues to mistreat the Arab population.
At this point, they're going to ship them by train all to Gaza.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
We're all out of time.
Good luck, Palestinians.
Thanks, John.
Appreciate it.
That's John Glazer, everybody, from Antiwar.com, The Huffington Post, The Washington Times, Al Jazeera, and we'll see y'all tomorrow.
Thanks for watching.
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