10/22/13 – Charles Featherstone – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm joined in studio by Charles Featherstone.
Yeah, I almost hit the wrong button there.
Welcome to the show.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
It's good to be here.
I need to turn you up.
You need to talk closer into that thing.
I need to talk closer into this thing?
Yeah, there you go.
Wait, I'm going to turn the gain up a little here.
Okay.
I thought I did a sound check earlier, but I guess I didn't do it well enough.
Let's see.
Say hey there again.
Hey there again.
Yeah, that's just fine.
All right.
Hey, Charles Featherstone.
So you write for LewRockwell.com and you're a minister, right?
Some sort of Protestant minister, I'm not sure.
It's been a while and I am getting there.
So it's been a long journey.
I'm getting ready.
I'm going back to Chicago.
My wife and I are going back to Chicago.
I'm going to be a pastor in Chicago.
Okay, good times.
In my previous life, I was a journalist.
I worked in New York, Washington, D.C., and the Middle East.
And yes, I wrote for LewRockwell.com for a few years.
It's been a while since I've written for LRC, mostly because I've been busy with other things.
Some things take up your life and seminary has taken up the better part of the last six years of mine.
Well, I can see how that would keep you very busy.
All right, well, it's great to finally meet you in person.
It's good to meet you.
You're right.
It's been a little while since we've spoken.
So I'm very happy to have you, especially live in studio like this, something I rarely do.
So yeah, the interview, well, we've got a few things to talk about.
First of all, where all in the Middle East did you live again?
I have lived in Dubai.
I worked for Khalij Times, which is a local English-language newspaper based in Dubai.
I haven't seen them around, but I used to read them from time to time anyway.
Yeah, that was 1995, so it's been a few years.
This was Dubai while Dubai was still learning how to be sort of the glitzy, decadent Disneyland with a flag and an army.
Dubai has fully emerged onto that path now, as I understand it.
Yeah, seems like it.
It was still a little bit more of an interesting place and a little bit less of a flashy place when I was there.
There were still hints of an earlier Dubai of the 60s and the 70s and the early 80s.
And then in 2003, 2004, I was in Jeddah, and I worked as an editorial consultant for a local newspaper there, the Saudi Gazette, which was the English-language publication of Okaz.
And Okaz is the largest English, or was, I suspect it still is, the largest Arabic-language newspaper in Saudi Arabia.
And Okaz is a wonderful newspaper.
It's the Saudi version of the New York Post.
It's kind of a scandal sheet.
It's a beautiful publication, and if it's weird or strange or somewhat scandalous but not involving anybody really important or salacious, Okaz runs with it.
I love Okaz from that perspective, and I did some long-distance editing for Okaz as well.
I edited an interview with an executioner, which was fascinating, a swordsman, and then some pieces on Saudi charity work and some other things.
Right on.
Well, so I guess I'm curious to know what you think the biggest misunderstanding that the average Joe American has about the Middle East is from your time spent over there.
Well, I haven't traveled broadly enough, but I know enough people who have, and I can sort of put their experience together with mine.
There is an aspiration for, in particular Arabs, to be treated like they are people who want normal, ordinary lives, normal, ordinary, bourgeois lives.
That's about the best way I could put it, that they are people who want to live basically the way just about everybody else lives or the sort of aspirational Western dream of reasonably well-off life.
You've accomplished enough, own a little property, can send your kids to school.
You get some vacation.
You get a retirement, and in societies in which they are allowed to do that.
So, wait a minute, you're trying to tell me that Arabs are human beings now.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm telling you.
Huh.
Well, you know, because I saw on TV that once you believe in the Islam, that's when you want to commit suicide and attack an Israeli or an American for being an Israeli or an American for no good reason.
Oh, bah.
Saudi Arabia was actually, and it was kind of interesting being in Saudi Arabia because it's, you know, some parts of the United States have more churches than others.
You drive through Tennessee, eastern Tennessee or Alabama, or east Texas for that matter, and you see lots and lots and lots of churches.
And there are lots and lots of masjids across Saudi Arabia.
But I remember a couple of times being in a shopping mall in a very public place.
And, of course, they shutter public places.
They close all the public places during prayer times, and you're supposed to pray.
Well, a good portion of men, and identifiably Saudi men because they wore the thobe with the white dress and the headdress, didn't pray.
A good portion of Saudi men would not pray publicly.
And I never saw a significant religious police presence in Jeddah.
I only saw it a couple of times, but I didn't see it significantly.
And so no one was compelling anybody to pray.
And sort of as a statement, just about every woman who was identifiably Saudi, because there is sort of a hierarchy there, every woman who was identifiably Saudi, if she was in public, almost every woman prayed in public when they were in public and it was time to pray, which was also very, very interesting.
Both of those are intriguing political and social statements.
That just means that the men can get away with more and the women don't dare kind of thing?
I think it means that because there's not an expectation that women are going to do this in public or even be in public, that it is an assertion of identity.
Ha, we are in public and we are going to pray, which proves that our being Muslim is just as important as yours is.
But, you know, it doesn't change an awful lot.
Jeddah is not full of aspiring suicide bombers or jihadis.
The Saudi government struggled hard with that when I was there, because the thing I think the Saudis had feared the most since the late 1979 uprising that led to the siege of the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca was that Al-Qaeda or the Islamists would blow their wad and it would be so influential that the Saudi state would be stressed to deal with it.
I think the Saudi leadership always feared that.
And what they discovered in 2003-2004 is that when Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula did blow, in fact, blow their wad, there was almost no support or no significant public support for anything they did.
And the Saudis, the Saudi state did a fantastic job of both cultivating and engineering public sympathy in the other direction.
On the one hand, the Saudi state did what a lot of nations did.
Libya did it too, which was, if you're a young man and you're angry and malcontent, well, there's this war to the north of us in Iraq.
Go, go.
And we don't really care if you come back.
So there was this very private, go do this and the Americans will kill you and will never see you again.
And there was also this very, very sort of public, it's terrible that people did this.
Oh, there was one instance in which they ran a letter from a nine-year-old girl to her father saying, Daddy, please don't go.
Come back.
We need you at home.
It was just it was beautiful.
It was tear jerking.
It was beautiful.
Real or not, it did what it needed to do.
There were some compound attacks.
There was a particularly large compound attack in, I think, late 2003 on, it was the first time that the Islamists in Saudi Arabia attacked a compound inhabited by Arabs.
And it was Christian and Muslim Arabs from other parts of the Arab world.
And that was really what galvanized opinion.
And then suddenly the fear that the nine, nine young men living upstairs in the flat upstairs in Mecca might not just simply be here innocently for religious reasons, but they might be stockpiling weapons and explosives.
And there was enough of that.
And all I can tell you is that there were press conferences.
How legitimate any of it was, I don't know.
There were shootouts and there were people who wanted to do things and they found farms where people were training.
But as a whole, to the extent that there is anything that we call public opinion in Saudi Arabia, and I have a friend who's researching a book, who's living there and researching a book right now.
And it works differently in that part of the world.
But to the extent that there is any such thing as public opinion, it was echoed in the statement several people told me, which was, if we're going to take the bearded people we know versus the bearded people we don't know, the crazies versus the religious institution we currently have.
We're going to take the bearded people we know because we know how to live with that.
And so there was very little room for the crazies, the Islamists to maneuver.
And so when they blew their wad, when they decided that they were going to engage in violent insurrection in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, it didn't last all that long.
And they had almost no support for it.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I remember when that happened, how I guess it was just because of the civilians killed in those first few attacks that they just, I guess, calculated very poorly about their targets and whatever.
I mean, I remember reading in Robert Pape's study, Dying to Win, how 91% of the, of course, only the males were pulled.
So 91% of the males of Saudi Arabia agreed with bin Laden that they wanted American forces the hell off the Arabian Peninsula yesterday.
And they were very serious about it.
So then something actually happens on their own territory in that way, and they completely rebel against it.
Not like they all sided with the USA.
They just sided with themselves against the bin Ladenites.
There's a difference between sympathy and support.
And al-Qaeda has always reflected sort of an Islamist view that there is tremendous amount of sympathy for.
Even when you deal with things like the occupation of Palestine and American support for Israel, that there is going to be support even among a lot of Christian Arabs.
But there's a difference between sympathy and support.
And there is an awful lot of sympathy that's very broad and reasonably shallow.
And almost no support, in part because we saw it in Iraq.
We've seen it in Syria.
We saw it in Saudi Arabia.
We saw it in Egypt in the 1990s.
And we saw it in the 80s and the 90s.
And we saw it in Algeria in the 90s.
Push comes to shove.
Islamists resort to murder almost immediately.
And that alienates people very, very quickly.
Yeah.
Well, certainly we actually were talking about this on the show yesterday with Mel Freikberg about the situation in Iraq where everybody gives the credit to David Petraeus.
But all that really happened with the Sunni insurgency there was, first of all, they lost Baghdad and needed to regroup anyway.
And then, second of all, they were sick and tired of all the foreigners who came there to fight from Saudi Arabia and Syria telling them what to do and trying to create the Islamic State of Iraq over all of Sunni Iraq and declaring themselves the rulers.
And the local Iraqis pushed back really quickly and said, no, we'll let you help us fight.
But we'll be damned if you're going to boss us around.
This is our country.
There is.
And this goes back at least to Afghanistan in the 1970s.
There is always a third force in a society which is – I'll use Afghanistan as the model.
If it's rent by Marxists on the one hand and strong Islamists on the other, on the other hand, there's sort of a middle force which is kind of the conservative tribal sheikhs.
And one of the reasons that the communists were able to succeed at first is because the communists in Afghanistan didn't alienate the tribal sheikhs.
They began to with land reform and some other things, and that's when their venture went south and the things that the Islamist radicals were saying began to get traction with the conservative tribal sheikhs.
And it's my understanding what happened in Iraq was that the Sunni sheikhs of Al-Anbar and that chunk of sort of west central Iraq looked at the al-Qaeda types and said they were wonderful allies when they weren't in charge.
And now they want to be in charge, and we can't control them, and they bring us nothing but trouble.
We don't necessarily want to live in this world that the Americans have made, but we don't want to live in their world either.
Right.
Well, and then – so that's the problem of them continuing to send off all their angry young men to go fight in Iraq now and Syria is that at some point these guys got to come home.
They're going to have to deal with these generations of mujahideen that they keep helping create.
I mean after all, in the Iraq war, the Saudis to some degree or at least some of the princes were helping fund that insurgency against the Americans because it was a proxy war between them and the Iranians.
And it could also – With America on Iran's side.
And there is a tremendous unreasonableness that Sunnis, particularly Saudis, Sunnis have of Shia power.
It is a bigoted, if I can use that word, once upon a time Catholics and Protestants in the United States used to hate each other and were terrified of each other and told these stories about each other that were not remotely resembling true.
And that's a lot of how Sunni and Shia talk about each other in that part of the world.
And I think the whole reason that the Saudis are bankrolling who they're bankrolling in Syria is because the Saudis have gotten their knickers in a twist over Iran and Iranian influence.
And they would like to have something other than Shia power at work in the world.
And so they don't really care who comes after that so long as they can undo anything remotely tied to Shia power like the Alawi in Syria and the Baath state and elsewhere.
All right.
Well, so we got to talk about that and Israel and Iran and that whole thing.
But so back to the jihadists for a moment though.
My theory is, and you may have heard before you came in there, I was trying to, well I was giving my version of Shoyer's version of the mess we're in here.
And so my theory is that you could just abolish the U.S. government entirely off of the face of the planet Earth.
Or, okay, let's compromise.
You could end the empire and the terror war and bring all of our troops and spies and mercs and everybody, State Department goons too, everybody home from the Middle East.
And al-Qaeda would basically dry up and blow away other than maybe a few guys that still got to be arrested trying to sneak into the country somewhere or cut across Spain or something to get here.
But we've got that ocean and the DHS to keep us safe.
But anyway, it just seems to me like what we're talking about are what scumbags these jihadists are.
And you look at who they are in Syria cutting people's heads off and suicide attack in schools and all this.
They make everyone hate them, the Jordanians.
We could have done the exact same story about Zarqawi and his legions in Jordan and how they pissed everybody off there.
Instantly, with their first tries, they made everybody hate their guts there.
So it just seems like if America would just stop making these guys seem right about us and what we're doing and that they need to keep doing what they're doing, we would see not just sympathy for them, but we would see support for them dry up both completely.
These guys are, who wants them?
Agreed.
The difference is that while that might, and I'm not entirely sure how true that ever would have been.
But right now you have an international, you have an Islamist movement.
And I don't know what to call it because I don't think it's really, it's a movement.
It's a trend.
It's a way of thinking.
But it's also an ongoing global criminal enterprise at this point.
And I refer to Al-Qaeda, its affiliates and its franchisees.
And they have become like a lot of failed revolutionary organizations.
They did not sugarcoat that.
They wanted revolution.
They thought they knew how to get it.
They came out of the, the important thing you need to know is that all the Mujahideen who fought in Afghanistan came from Afghanistan saying to themselves, we won this with God's help.
They don't talk about the CIA.
They don't talk about the United States.
They don't talk about Pakistan.
It's we won this with the help of God.
There are a great many stories, and I've actually heard some Mujahideen tell this, in which they would be fighting the Red Army in the Panjshir Valley and then out of nowhere this legion of angelic horsemen would show up and help them fight and kill Soviet soldiers.
And strangely enough similar stories came out from Mujahideen fighting in Iraq.
So they think they won this war all by themselves.
So they have an ambition that they're going to take this, that they're going to take this revolutionary trend worldwide.
There's never been significant domestic support for what they've wanted, but that doesn't stop them.
But once you commit yourself to, well, we're going to blow stuff up, then what happens is the blowing stuff up becomes what you do.
It's like the IRA.
At some point in time, all that matters is the operation.
And it didn't take very many committed IRA members to continue blowing stuff up and killing the occasional British soldier or member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
So I think the remnants of Al-Qaeda, its affiliates and its franchisees, are going to be with us for some time, no matter what we do, because there will always be enough people attracted to what's left of its revolutionary ideology, nihilistic violence or whatever.
Yeah, but here's the thing about that.
If it wasn't for the United States overthrowing Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad, we could just leave it to these dictators to prevent these guys from existing just fine.
They need so-called failed states to be their breeding grounds.
The U.S. just keeps making more and more for them.
Absolutely.
Whether it's Somalia or...
And I actually think, to an extent, after the Obama administration got itself all wrapped up over Syria, listening to Samantha Powell and Susan Rice, I think the Obama administration finally came down.
At least they appear to have.
I hope.
For now.
That the only people you end up helping in Syria are the people we absolutely do not want helped.
I think the Israelis have even been smart enough up until a month or so ago to appreciate that fact, that you may not necessarily like Hafez al-Assad, but Hafez al-Assad is a thing you can deal with.
If the Islamists ever gain control of Syria, you can't deal with them.
Plus, you're going to have the refugee crisis of 3-4 million Christian Syrians trying to bail out of the country as quickly as they possibly can.
Well, look, I hate bragging and boasting, so I'll go ahead and say 100,000 other people also said over the last 10 years when looking at these neocons and their plans for expediting chaotic collapse, who are you going to like better than Assad in Syria?
Are you crazy?
Absolutely.
The best you're going to ever be able to do would be the Muslim Brotherhood, if you're lucky, pal.
So what in the world?
I mean, and this goes back years, and you know me.
I'm a community college dropout amateur here, and I could have told you don't overthrow the Baathists in Syria.
Was it 2013?
I could have told you that before the towers even fell.
Leave Syria the freak alone, man.
Are you crazy?
There are no aspiring social democrats in that part of the world, or if there are, they can fill up a tiny ballroom, and that's about it.
Social democrats are horrible.
I mean, we're living in America right now.
I've got my problems with it, you know.
That's all I'm saying.
Yeah, no, I mean, and they would be a great compromise when you're looking at, you know, the Baathists in Iraq, for example, but, you know.
There aren't enough of them.
You're going to get Russia power.
Well, of course, that's because the CIA helps Saddam Hussein hunt down anybody with glasses like Pol Pot.
Yeah, exactly.
Which, you know, is wrong.
Back in history when Saddam Hussein worked for America.
All right, well, so now back to this whole thing about Shiite power and the insane paranoia about it.
Obviously, you have the Shiite revolution of 79 and the end of the Shah's reign there.
And then the Iran-Iraq war where Ronald Reagan's policy, of course, was to help the Saudis and the Kuwaitis.
Bankroll Saddam Hussein's invasion and attempted occupation and regime change in Iran to restrain that.
And then I think I remember, I couldn't cite a chapter and verse if this is out of Rebuilding America's Defenses by PNAC and exactly what.
But I remember neoconservatives, war party, weekly standard types back before the Iraq war talking about what a danger the Shiite crescent was.
Yes.
And how, of course, because this is Israel's enemy is Hezbollah, is backed by Syria, is backed by Iran.
And there's your crescent if you look at a map there, that little curvature there.
So then the neocons theory was that if we overthrow Iraq and hand it over to the Shia, they'll be Democrats like us and they'll be pro-American.
And so that will help turn the whole Shiite crescent into a good friend of ours.
And what in fact they did was just put Iran's allies in power there, obviously.
But so now here's the question, and you can disagree with any of my premise that you want.
I'll give you free reign, please.
But so now my question is, is it even possible and why not just go ahead and make friends with the Iranians?
Then it doesn't matter.
I mean I used to say George Bush might attack Iran and try to go for that regime change.
That way it won't matter so much that he screwed up and handed Baghdad to them, right?
But now I'm thinking, why not just, is it possible that the Democrats could make a nuclear deal, could make even more deals, could warm relationships with the Iranians so that the keystone of the Shiite crescent becomes neutralized.
And then the whole thing is no longer even problematic.
And then Netanyahu won't even have anything to bitch about.
I think, well first off, the United States and Iran are locked in their own history with each other.
Partly it's history.
I know, I know.
Partly it's there are a number of Iranians who cannot and will not forget 1953.
And frankly there are a fair number of Americans who are not going to forget 1979.
In fact I remember specifically during the Clinton administration, that's when I worked in Washington, D.C.
And Warren Christopher, because he'd been a junior State Department official during the hostage crisis, Warren Christopher could not bring himself to dealing with Iran.
He just couldn't.
And so there is some deep personal, you apologize first.
No, you apologize first.
You say you're sorry for overthrowing Mossadegh.
You say you're sorry for invading the embassy and keeping our hostages.
And because of this suspicion, and because frankly some of the original revolutionaries in Iran were very militant and very evangelical.
In fact I recall one of their first targets was Bahrain.
They looked at Bahrain, because Bahrain is a majority Shia country, and wanted to accomplish some things there.
And they didn't.
But then there was this, for years, theory in Washington, D.C. said religion didn't matter.
Political scientists looked and said religion doesn't matter.
None of this matters.
Yeah, whoever identified themselves or their clan by their religious beliefs, I've never heard of that.
Especially in the Middle East, come on.
There were some people in the U.S. intelligence community who had been paying attention.
But for the most part, everybody looked at Iran and said modernization is right.
Secularization is right.
None of this religious stuff matters.
And so there were a lot of people who, because they hadn't paid attention when the Iranian revolution took place, were shocked.
They didn't know what to do with what had just happened.
And the refusal to look at Iran as another state, as a state that wants to normalize itself, as a state that wants to survive and preserve itself.
A lot of it perils how the Soviet Union was looked at.
This is not a normal state.
This is a messianic state with apocalyptic visions, kind of thing.
No, it's just a gerontocratic, it's an oligarchy that wants to preserve their oligarchic power.
But I think the United States and Iran are trapped.
I think a lot of what has come out of the Obama administration in the last few weeks is promising.
And I say this because, having come from where I come, the seminary I studied in Chicago was three blocks from the President's house there in Chicago.
Obama is well-loved among liberal Christians.
If I had to say that he has a solid constituency that will never change, it is liberal Christians.
And so I paid some attention.
And Obama, in March of 2007, gave a speech before the Chicago Foreign Affairs Council in which he talked about the need to potentially have a military response toward Iran's program.
And this is at the time he was selling himself as the peace candidate, largely on the role of Iraq.
And it was, no, as long as he's saying the things he's saying about Iran, he cannot be trusted.
He is not who he says he is.
But there are some people who just don't pay attention to that.
So I don't know.
I don't think we're out of the woods on Iran yet.
But I think that, for the most part, if everything I have been told by people who know, who are in the know, who are in positions, that nobody in sort of the junior-middle level of government, in the intelligence community, in the Defense Department, in the State Department, almost nobody wants war with Iran.
Everybody sees that as the disaster it is very likely to be.
And nobody wants to take any chance of that not being a disaster, being that Iraq was such a disaster.
So nobody wants to – nobody in government wants that.
And I believe that.
I take that at very face value.
But at the same time, there are enough people on the fringes of government in high levels and particularly outside in places like – oh, God, where was that miserable place I went and heard Richard Perl speak?
AEI?
Yes, the American Enterprise Institute.
Thank you very, very much.
There are enough people on the edges who want war with Iran and who can exact political pressure.
For example, the hardest thing that President Obama is going to have to do in dealing with Iran is deal with the U.S. Congress.
That's going to be the hardest thing he's going to have to do because the Iranians, in order to – for the Iranians to give, they're going to need sanctions to go away.
And Congress is not going to want sanctions to go away.
They've already made that quite clear.
In fact, in the midst of the alleged shutdown, Republican members of Congress were in effect introducing a declaration of war against Iran.
So, yeah, there's a lot of domestic politics.
You're right, and it seems like that's the only hurdle.
You know, reason and logic and the national interest, those aren't in the way.
I mean, the nuclear deal, even as offered, according to the rough draft, as Barbara Slavin published it in Al-Monitor, their proposal is perfectly reasonable.
It takes care of all of American Israel's irrational fears and it agrees to an additional protocol and expanded inspections and all of this.
And then it's just Netanyahu who says, oh, yeah, not one atom of uranium in the country at all.
You know, dig up their entire uranium mining region and transport it to the middle of the ocean somewhere or else they'll never be satisfied.
And so I guess Congress has their marching orders then.
Apparently, and that's going to be the tough spot.
I think most sanctions legislation gives the president some wiggle room in order to make declarations.
And waivers and that kind of thing, yeah.
And my hope is if something comes forward that that is utilized because I've never been a fan of sanctions and I don't believe in economic sanctions.
I do think that if you're going to do business particularly with a state monopoly buyer or a state where commercial transactions are dominated, particularly by cronyism, you at least need to know who you're doing business with.
And not have any illusions that you're doing business is going to change how they behave in the world.
Just know that and let that help you accordingly.
But, you know, Iran is I don't want to call it a fairly open state.
I've not been there, but everything I've heard about Iran is that it is an interesting place with a fair amount of diversity and a fair amount of dissent and that the Iranian state doesn't attempt to curb all dissent.
They attempt to deal with some, but they don't attempt to curb all.
Yeah.
Well, they do have regular elections for what that's worth.
For what that's worth.
It's better than none.
Yep.
And they are somewhat competitive, which, you know, we can look at most of the rest of the Middle East and know that for the most part, you know, outside of Israel, you have something resembling that in Jordan, Kuwait.
Now in Iraq, if you want to gloat about purple thumbs, that kind of thing.
Well, we'll see how long that lasts in Iraq.
The next time Maliki is up for anybody's choice, we'll see whether he gives them one or not.
Well, it's long been a theory, though.
I mean, if you look at how Iraq has been governed since the 20s, since it was effectively invented, it's always governed by a strong man.
You can't have it otherwise.
You had Nuri Saeed, who was the long-time Afghan prime minister of the place.
The Shiites are the majority in the country, though, and they control Baghdad.
And so it seems like they could have elections among themselves.
They could.
And, you know, not that they're going to give the Kurds or the Sunnis a real shot at it.
But it just depends on, oh, now that Iraq is federalized completely, and in fact, maybe even is back to being, you know, Mosul and was it?
Oh, Mosul, Baghdad and Basra were the former Ottoman regions.
I guess Baghdad and Basra are together now, so Mosul and Kirkuk would now be the Kurdish capital there.
But anyway, it's already coming down to that, it looks like, especially with the Syrian war.
And it's fun to always read the latest news out of the Middle East and see people reaffirming what Patrick Coburn was telling us a year and a half ago, or whatever, about the reason that things are picking up and getting worse again in Iraq now is because they're so energized by the revolution in Syria.
And so now it's washing back and forth again.
It is, and there's probably a fair amount of cross-feeding between the Sunni of Syria, particularly the Sunni insurgents, and then the Sunni of Western Iraq.
Well, it had been for 10 years since George Bush's great deed.
Yeah, no, the toppling of Saddam Hussein was a particularly stupid thing to have done.
You can make all sorts of humanitarian arguments in favor of it.
But the political situation it created led to, I think, far more suffering and death than leaving Saddam in place to have died a natural death and probably be succeeded by one of his sons.
Or I suspect Odeh and Orkuseh would have been murdered by one or more members of the army and not been allowed to take power.
Well, you never know.
But you never know.
All right, so now on the question of Iran, do you think anybody – I mean, hell, I know I'm a libertarian, which makes me a nutball and whatever.
But does anybody at the State Department agree with me that, man, screw 1979, let's just go ahead and be friends.
This would be the number one best way to defeat the Shiite Crescent.
We'll just make friends with it.
Who cares?
It's so simple and brilliant and perfect.
What in the hell is their problem?
I don't know because I don't know anybody at the State Department right now.
But I'm willing to bet that there are some younger people, some junior State Department people who have no memory of 1979 or for whom 1979 was something that happened when they were tiny children.
Like me.
That would be something that they would be considered.
But there's no diplomatic presence outside of the tiny contingent we have in the Swiss Embassy.
There's no diplomatic presence in Iran.
And so our ability to be there and to have junior diplomats make friends with Iranians is limited.
And the senior people, particularly in the Democratic Party – I'm going to set the Republican Party aside right now because I happen to believe they have all gone off the deep end for the most part.
Enough senior people in the Democratic Party still have a memory of what Iran did to a sitting Democratic president.
This is not just personal about the United States.
This is about Jimmy Carter having been defeated in the 1980 election.
Yeah, personal grudges.
I think that that is as much of the grudge as is what happened to the United States.
And by the way, Democrats and national security state people listening – I know you're listening – you should be mindful that you could still be sick, evil, child-murdering imperialists all day long and you could still divide and conquer the Middle East.
You could still pit the Saudis and the Iranians against each other.
Just don't pit the Iranians against us anymore.
That's all I'm proposing.
I'm not trying to take away every last bit of your fun.
Well, I am, but for the sake of this argument, I'm not.
I am not sure.
I think any relationship between the United States and Iran would be a cold friendship in part because – Yeah, like we got with China.
Exactly.
Oh, fun.
And that's perfectly acceptable.
You know, at this point, I think one of the greater concerns we have – and I don't think the Saudis or the GCC are going to do anything.
But as I said, the Saudis have really got their knickers in a twist right now over Iran.
The recent Saudis' decision not to accept the UN Security Council seat over Syria and Iran.
And the Saudis belatedly mentioned Palestine.
And there is – but I've come to the conclusion is that that's sort of a background emotional issue that no Arab government really cares about anymore.
I think mostly the Saudis are upset because Barack Obama threatened to bomb Syria and then didn't, and that made them mad.
And my one response was, hmm, you've got all this air force we've sold you.
Why can't you do it?
If you think it needs to be done, then you do it.
Right.
Yeah, but they don't even know how to fly those planes.
I mean, they just – that's just recycling petrodollars because they got an American hydrogen bomb to their head.
That's all.
Something has to be done to benefit Rockwell, Grumman, and General Dynamics.
Yeah, exactly.
And for whatever reason, I guess the profit margin on plow shares is just not the right market to get into right now.
And now, look, again, a big part of this is like you're – kind of like you're saying with Warren Christopher there is just the bureaucratic inertia.
And, you know, you have the dialectic of a peacenik like me on one side and Bill Kristol, Newcomal tomorrow on the other.
And then that leaves a nice status quo in the middle where everybody gets to keep their job enforcing sanctions.
This is something we talked about with Andrew Coburn on the show.
He brought up the blockade against the Germans after World War I and how the bureaucracy of the British blockade was finally perfected about a day before the war ended.
And they were going to be damned if you were going to take their ability to blockade the Germans away just because the war was over.
They had created the perfect department of blockading Germany.
And everybody had their job and everybody thought if they could only hang on six more months, everybody would move up a step and whatever, right?
All of their individual interest took place to enforce that kind of thing.
And that's the same kind of thing we're dealing with here, too.
How many Iran experts do you have in the State Department whose job it is to make sure that the kid can't get his hemophilia medicine or whatever their particular task?
That's actually all done out of Treasury.
And I remember a friend, someone I graduated from Georgetown with, went to work in the Treasury Department.
And he worked his way into a job where he was one of three people responsible.
Three!
In a U.S. government of what, two million people?
He was one of three people responsible for sanctions on Syria.
And it was very, very interesting because if the senior guy, the specialist, the guy who knew the program the best, went on vacation, because sanctions isn't so much about what can't get into the country as getting the waiver for what can get into the country.
And if you are selling, I don't know, there was, I don't know if it's still there now, but there was in Syria an Arid Agricultural Research Institute that does agricultural research on crops that don't require irrigation.
Because that's just the part of the world where that's done.
All right, sum up this part real quick because we're going out to break.
And if someone goes on vacation for three weeks, you can't get your waiver approved because the people who know how to do this aren't there.
Simple as that.
All right, well, we'll be right back.
We're talking with Charles Featherstone.
He writes for LRC.
He's a seminarian and a former journalist, and he's been all around the Middle East.
And we're going to talk about Libya and some other stuff, too, here in just a few.
This is The Scott Horton Show.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
3,000 interviews now in the archives at scotthorton.org.
And you can also follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at scotthortonshow.
And today is really cool because we've got Charles Featherstone from lewrockwell.com live in the studio with us here.
And we're talking about the Middle East.
A bit of a free-form conversation, and yet I think we're getting a lot of important ground covered here.
What do you think, guys?
Am I in the chat room right now?
Let me ask the chat room guys what they think.
Hey, chat room guys, what do you think?
All right.
It's a ghost town in there.scotthorton.org slash chat if anybody wants to get involved.
We're live on Liberty Express and No Agenda and all that.
Okay.
So let's talk now about I think we covered the bureaucrats like their jobs being bureaucrats.
Being bureaucrats.
The status quo containment of Iran.
The Cold War against Iran has a lot of individual interests involved in its permanent enforcement.
So hopefully that kind of inertia can be defeated.
But anyway, so hey, Legosi's in the chat room.
Hey, Legosi, how you doing, man?
And he says, been a good talk, enjoying it so far.
So good.
That was kind of a pun on the so far so good thing right there.
Did you see that?
It was like that game show where you...
Yeah, never mind.
Anyway.
We're good.
One of the last pieces you wrote for LewRockwell.com is called Some Reflections on the Revolution in Libya.
And this one quite advanced for March 2011.
I dare say this is good stuff.
So, well, geez, there's so much to cover here.
I guess first of all, let's talk about the situation in Libya as it existed at the time that you wrote this article.
This was March 2011.
Ben Ali in Tunisia had been overthrown and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt.
And then so next up, massive protests and let's overthrow him type movement in Libya.
And I'm not exactly sure of the day here, but it's before Western intervention.
And it's in fact, I think, perhaps it's still during the protests and before Qaddafi's men had really been...
And I think before Qaddafi...
...whooping on them bad and made it pretty apparent that he was going to win, not them.
Yeah.
And before he makes his I am coming to get you statement to the residents of Benghazi.
Right.
And now, well, let's talk about that.
Thank you for bringing that up.
What exactly did he say there?
Because, of course, this was the cost of spelling.
Barack Obama, in his speech, compared the town to Charlotte and said, can you imagine an army coming in and killing every man, woman and little bitty baby in Charlotte?
We have to stop them.
Morality dictates.
There's this has nothing to do with the Chinese or oil or anything like that or political fortunes of our French politician friends.
This is strictly about protecting every last soul in Benghazi from being exterminated.
Is that what he threatened to do?
And then secondarily, could he have done that?
One, I don't honestly remember.
It's been a while.
And two, could he have done that?
He would have done something like that.
There's a story I need to tell you because I have a history with Libya.
All right.
All right.
So there's a story I need to tell you.
Tell us all about your history, too.
I graduated from Georgetown from the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies with a Master of Arts in Arab Studies in 1999.
And I got a job with an outfit called Bridge News in Washington, D.C.
It was an up and coming financial newswire.
We saw ourselves as competitors to Reuters and Dow Jones and Bloomberg.
And for a time, we did.
And in 2000, in the year 2000, when the 2000 election was, I think, summer.
Yeah, it was early summer of 2000.
And I was trying as I was a tab to cover agricultural and trade policy.
So I did things like go to congressional hearings and attend USDA stuff.
It was, you know, the meat and potatoes of business journalism in Washington, D.C.
But one of the things I was interested in because the Middle East was my focus is I got myself invited to a number of Middle East related functions and tried to develop some contacts.
And a couple of weeks prior to this event, I got a press release from the Wheat Growers Association that they had arranged as a test to sell 25,000 tons of U.S. grained wheat to Libya.
Wheat had been embargoed, not necessarily been embargoed.
The Libyans had since the 1970s refused to buy U.S. wheat, just on general principle.
And so Libya did a test purchase.
And I tried to get some contacts in, but there were some trade associations.
No one would ever return my phone calls.
And then the Clinton administration hosted an Africa summit and invited all sorts of African diplomats, every diplomat from Africa to meet in Washington.
And as a concession, sort of as a let's try to improve our relations, they invited Libya's U.N. ambassador.
If you are the U.N. ambassador for a country under U.S. sanctions, you are restricted to basically a four block radius around the United Nations building in New York.
You can go to and from the airport to leave the country, but you are stuck in the east side of Manhattan.
And they invited Libya's U.N. ambassador.
His name was Abu Zayd Dorda, and he was apparently some sort of senior figure.
And so Georgetown leapt on this and invited him to come speak at Georgetown.
And I thought, well, OK, this would be an interesting thing to do.
I'm going to come see him speak, and maybe I'll get to ask him a question.
So he met with a group of us.
Now something I'm not going to give any names because I've not asked her if it's OK, and she hasn't said it's OK.
But I graduated from Georgetown with someone from a very prominent Libyan dissident family, someone whose father defected from the Libyan government in the late 70s, early 80s, and had been engaged in dissident activities ever since.
I graduated with her and she showed up and there were a group of us and some questions got asked.
And then she asked a question about human rights in Libya and is there the exercise of free speech?
And Abu Zayd Dorda started talking his sort of blah, blah about that.
And then he looked at her and he said, are you, is your father so and so?
And then he went into this rant.
We know how to deal with troublemakers.
We know who troublemakers are in Libya, and we do not tolerate troublemakers.
And it was just sort of a, and if your family is a troublemaking family and this and that and everything else, we know how to deal with troublemakers.
And it just sort of let the air out of the room because she had in effect been threatened.
Because as I understand it, she still had family in Libya.
So I sat on this for a bit, went back to my news operation, told my bureau chief, we sat on it for a bit.
And I wrote this long sort of, I wrote a short open letter to U.S. trade organizations, some U.S. news media operations, NPR, The Washington Post.
I didn't think anything come of it, ever came of it.
What ended up happening though with this letter, you know, he went on his way.
And what ended up happening with this letter is about four days afterwards, I started getting email, lots of it from Libyan expatriates living in Europe.
And I don't know how they got a hold of this.
Well, it turns out apparently, I was told a newspaper in Egypt, Al-Haram, I think, got the letter, translated it, put it top of the fold on the front page.
And it sucked up part of a news cycle for 48 hours.
And about two weeks afterwards, I get an email from a Libyan businessman living in the Netherlands who said he was authorized on behalf of the Libyan government to invite me to come visit Libya at their expense to get the real story.
So, you know, I had some group of people, my friends, who were telling me, take it.
You'll never get another opportunity like this.
And Americans don't really visit Libya right now.
So you're seeing a place no one's seen for a while.
And another group of friends were saying, yeah, go.
But remember that there's no U.S. diplomatic representation there.
So if, you know, there ends up being a problem or the Libyans decide to be pissy and letting you out of the country, you're screwed.
So I sat down with my bureau chief, who just was awesome to this whole thing.
And he, in the end, decided, well, because this is work related, this constitutes a gift.
I'm not allowed to take gifts.
So we'll take him up on his offer.
But we pay for everything.
And I told him that, this businessman whose name I don't remember.
And I never heard from him again.
But it turns out that when the revolution in Libya started, that my friend was very, that the person I graduated from Georgetown with was very involved in the organization.
The registering of the websites that reported the real-time news from Benghazi were all registered in the U.K. about 48 hours before the uprising began.
The flags had to come from somewhere.
I suspect they were all printed in Italy or Spain.
It was exceedingly well organized and orchestrated from the outside.
And as a matter of fact, when things finally succeeded, when Gaddafi was finally toppled, the Libyans then said, OK, people of Syria, do you need our help?
Because we are willing to help you.
And I think that there was some very early public, it's no longer public, but there was some very early, very public on Facebook, actually, sort of, OK, here's what you need to do.
Here's how we can help you.
Oh, that's something we need to talk about privately kind of thing.
But some of the people who helped organize and orchestrate the Libyan uprising were very involved in helping the Syrians.
And that includes the CIA, right?
You know, I cannot speak to that.
But I can tell you that if a group of Libyan exiles living in Northern Virginia are cooperating with a group of Libyan exiles living in London to topple a government, that somebody is at least not saying no.
Yeah, at the very least.
And that was the headline in McClatchy newspapers was, yeah, Libyan exiles living in Virginia in the suburbs just outside Langley.
Yeah, they're now on their way to go and be.
And in fact, there was even a thing right where one of the handpicked exile sock puppets was installed as the head of the militia.
And then he was killed and replaced by one of the jihadists, right?
Libya has a lot of jihadists, in part because eastern Libya, the Benghazi region, has always been very fervent in its Islam.
In its Islam, yes, I can say that.
And Islamist sentiment was not allowed during the Gaddafi regime.
And there was, I won't say regular unrest.
I think sporadic would be the best.
In fact, there was a fairly significant army mutiny, if I recall correctly, in the late 80s in that part of Libya that took several weeks for the government to fully extinguish.
And in fact, the name of the revolution referred to a date that was not about this uprising, but about a previous failed uprising.
And I forget exactly, like the February 24th or something like that, or February 19th uprising.
And so one of the things Gaddafi did is that knowing he had this fervor and knowing that it would be better, like the rulers of Saudi Arabia, Gaddafi was happy to let his aspiring young jihadists board planes and go fight in Iraq.
He was happy to let them do that.
And he encouraged it.
Well, he was happy to help the CIA torture them too.
Exactly.
It came down to that.
It's funny.
We were talking on the show about the three al-Libys and how this most recent guy that they've arrested for the 98 attack on the embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, who had been given amnesty and had been living in the UK in the previous year.
So apparently wasn't that hot of a suspect or something.
I don't know.
Or apparently he was that hot of a suspect and they were letting him go for no reason.
Who knows.
But he's not to be confused with the al-Liby that they tortured into saying that Saddam Hussein taught him and his al-Qaeda friends how to make and use chemical weapons and how to hijack airplanes.
That's an al-Liby that the Americans tortured him into saying that and then gave to Qaddafi.
And then Qaddafi actually continued on with the torture.
And then that guy supposedly killed himself back in 08 or 09 or something like that in prison.
I guess it's possible.
He might have been driven to suicide in there.
But then there's the other al-Liby who I guess they say was this guy's brother.
Was that guy's brother.
Who was killed in June 2012.
And Zawahiri gave the statement that said, hey Mujahideen everywhere, especially in Benghazi, you ought to seek vengeance for the death of this Libyan al-Qaeda guy.
He was killed in a drone strike in Pakistan.
Keywords in Pakistan in June 2012.
And then it was just before the Benghazi attack of September 11, 2012 that Zawahiri put up that podcast saying, hey the Americans are stupid enough to fight a war for the Mujahideen and put their consulate in the middle of Benghazi in the center of the hornet's nest.
Go get them.
And that was what happened to Ambassador Stevens.
In fact Rachel Maddow of all people was the one who got that right before the White House gave her her talking points.
But yeah, so three separate and distinct al-Libys there.
Now you got this guy who all his family is saying he quit al-Qaeda in 96, two years before this attack even happened.
So I guess that leads to the question, what do you think the Americans are doing abducting this guy?
Are they trying to provoke a reaction out of whoever is running Tripoli now?
I don't, I don't.
Keystone idiots or what?
I'm not sure.
And I'm not sure I want to guess.
What I do know is, I mean, you know, Libya is a country that's sort of barely run.
And the man who's currently president lived for much of, for the last 30 years outside of Washington, D.C.
So I am not entirely sure what that's about.
Sorry.
And unlike someone on CNN, I'm not going to speculate about something about which I have no knowledge.
No, go ahead and make up stuff.
Yeah, no, yeah, sorry.
And I was sitting there talking only through your mic just now is the only reason anybody heard me at all.
Because my mic was off.
Because I'm really bad at this.
I've only been doing radio for, I don't want to count how many years, more than ten.
But anyway, yeah, I'm talking with Charles Featherstone from bluerockwell.com and well and all over.
So the question you had was, did Gaddafi do this?
And having watched a senior, getting back to the point of my story, having watched a senior Libyan diplomat threaten someone in public, what this tells me is that this is a government that either doesn't know or doesn't care how it's perceived.
And is willing to do things stupidly like this, in which people are watching just to, because it doesn't know any better.
And so it wouldn't surprise me if Gaddafi made the kinds of statements that he did with the intent that he did.
I think it's always been interesting to note that you have had harsh statements come out of the Baath government in Damascus.
But you have never had Bashar al-Assad going, Hama, we are coming to get you.
He's never done that.
He has learned that lesson well.
Or bombs would have fallen on him sometime earlier than they have yet to.
Yeah, well, you know, I don't know.
I guess, did he have the, I mean, my understanding of Gaddafi's armed forces was that he didn't trust them at all.
So he had his own little private Gestapo and he didn't really have much of an army because he was afraid they would have overthrown him.
And so that, you know, obviously the people of Benghazi, their militias and whatever, they had NATO's help in overthrowing Tripoli.
But could they not have defended Benghazi?
Were his forces going to be able to go in there and do whatever they wanted?
As I recall, Gaddafi had two advantages.
Well, he had three advantages.
He had armor, he had artillery, and he had air power, of which the Libyan rebels had neither.
And so, as I recall, the advance to Benghazi, the rebels were unable to stop it.
All right, well, we've got to take this break.
Sorry about all the audio troubles.
Well, I'm distracted.
I'm not used to having guests in here and I was looking the wrong direction.
Hang on, y'all.
We'll be right back.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the thing here.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
All right, I'm talking with Charles Featherstone.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
ScottHorton.org.
I'm also at Facebook.com, Twitter.com, and YouTube.com slash ScottHortonShow.
All right, you ready?
I am, I think.
Went down the wrong way.
All right, there you go.
Yeah, I gave the guy a Dr. Pepper to drink and then he doesn't know how to control which hole in his throat it goes down again.
You're not supposed to breathe the Dr. Pepper in.
No, you're not.
It is the serum of life, but you're supposed to just drink it.
All right, so yeah, this is the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Thanks, y'all, for listening and for putting up with me.
I do have an impeccable taste in guests.
You have to agree.
So listen, what can you tell us, Charles, about the people who run Libya now, the so-called government there, how much power they've got?
You know, I was talking with – I mentioned Mel Freikberg from McClatchy Newspapers, and she just says that Benghazi especially is a complete mess, triply less so.
But is it a failed state?
Is it a new state coming?
Is it a civil war or is it just roving gangs of criminals, or what is the matter over there?
And then we'll talk about the race problems, too.
One of the first pieces I wrote for LRC talked about Somalia, and I remember sitting in a mosque one day in, of all places, northern Utah, talking with a couple of Somalis, and they told me why Somalia was a mess.
And that was because when Siad Barre had run the country – and he'd been dictator of Somalia for 20, 21 years, something like that – and basically in order to effectively run Somalia, Siad Barre had to destroy everything that was not Siad Barre's state.
Gaddafi did much the same thing.
And so in order to get rid of Gaddafi, you had to break Gaddafi's power.
You had to break the state that Gaddafi had built.
And once you'd done that, there was nothing left.
And this is the same situation in Syria right now, too, where you can't really overthrow Assad without destroying the entire government.
Exactly.
I don't want to divert you too far off, but that's something to keep in mind.
Exactly.
That you can't just simply topple the leader.
Once you have this kind of rebellion, you have to destroy everything the leader has created in order to function.
And in doing that in Somalia, there was nothing left but the clans.
And I remember having a conversation at Georgetown – this was in 1998 or 1999 – talking with a very good friend of mine, who – what would post-Gaddafi Libya look like?
And we both agreed that it would probably look a lot like Somalia, that it would just be – because there would be nothing left.
You either break it or, if Gaddafi goes, there is nothing left outside of him.
And the state is so centered on him and he is so central to the state.
That's the same way Thomas Mountain describes Ethiopia right now, actually, with the death of Meleset Awu.
It still remains an open question whether anything like the state that he ran will survive or a whole new group of warlords will have to come to power, which means that much more of a mess.
Exactly.
And so, in breaking the state, they had to break everything that Gaddafi governed through, which means that there is really nothing left and they have to make it all from scratch.
Well, that's a process that can take an awful long time.
And in the meantime, the structures that you have – clans, the militias – I don't know how many Sufi orders survived Gaddafi.
There are probably some of them out there doing their thing.
But the point is that you have everything that is in his state and it's going to be analogous.
Well, I guess I don't think Libya is going to be anywhere nearly as bad as Somalia is because I think there is a commitment to maintaining a whole and unified Libya.
But at the same time, there isn't a cohesive thing holding Libya together.
And so it sort of is in suspension.
And I think it's going to be this way for a while.
Well, so wither Ansar al-Sharia and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and the veterans of the Iraq War.
I mean, they're not – I mean, that guy, Hakeem al-Belhaj, he's a minister of some influence at this point, right?
Yes.
Who's keeping track of who's who over there?
I actually haven't been, so I can't address much of how Libya is being governed at this point.
Well, I don't know who you would follow for the news, honestly, to keep up with it.
It's clear that the prime minister of the place doesn't matter because he can just simply be plopped off the street.
Apparently, they put him back.
He also doesn't matter because he's not worth keeping.
Yeah, there you go.
And it will be a couple of predictions about Libya, if I have to say.
The heads of the militias will matter.
The clans will matter.
And if there are any Sufi orders, whoever runs them is going to matter, too.
That has been one of the things that has gone sort of unstated about Iraq and Syria is that for all the jihadis that there are, the most important religious organizations have been the Sufi orders.
And they can still command.
In Iraq and in Syria?
Yes.
They can still command significant loyalty.
You know, Islamists can move thousands.
The Sufis can move and motivate tens to hundreds of thousands.
And it is my understanding that the most significant Sufi orders in Syria are still leaning to the government.
And then so can you estimate what percentage of the population of Iraq, for example, are Sufis?
Because I thought that they were very small numbers here, there, and the other place, and had been wiped out by Wahhabists and other extremists over the years.
I can't speak very, very much to Iraq except that it is my understanding that the Naqshbandi, who are one of the largest Sunni Sufi orders in the world, have led to a kind of interesting Sufi renaissance in western Iraq that has combined some elements of Ba'ath ideology with mystical Islam.
That's funny.
And what does that mean anyway, the Sufis?
Tell us about that compared to regular, you know, run-of-the-mill Sunni beliefs, for example.
At its core, Sufi Islam is just simply a mystical approach.
And it's one of those things like monasticism and Christianity, which arises at about the time that the religion is becoming institutionalized, and there are people who want something a little bit more rigorous.
So they adopt this path this way.
Sufis are organized into orders, and you join an order, and you are committed to an order, and what that basically means is you follow a sheikh.
And the sheikh is kind of your spiritual guide.
In this, there is the belief that when you take a spiritual journey, you don't go alone, that you have to follow a path that someone has trod out and have a guide.
And so these orders are very close, very intense.
The Naqshbandi order comes out of sometime in the 17th century, I believe, and the Naqshbandis begin in the Caucasus, and they begin as the jihadis who are fighting the expansion of Russian rule.
And they exponentially expand, particularly into the Levant, into the Ottoman Empire, and become one of the more significant political forces in the Ottoman Empire.
They are a huge order.
Last summer, I spent an evening with the Naqshbandi Sufi group on the south side of Chicago, which was absolutely fascinating.
I read Terman Geisen and did part of their worship, and their sheikh had been to Damascus to be with the sheikh of the Sufi order, whose name I don't remember, but he's the big guy.
Oh, wait, I've got to interrupt you again.
Sorry, we've got to take this break.
Be right back.
They gave me money.
I got to.
That's fine.
I'm Scott Horton.
I've got Charles Featherstone here, writer for LRC.
LewRockwell.com, that is.
I wonder if somebody owns LRC.com.
Lew should probably get that and have it redirected.
I haven't looked for it.
I never have either.
I bet somebody just bought it.
There's so much I want to talk to you about, but I guess I want to talk to you about religion some, and then this will all get back to actual Middle East politics.
But I want to talk about the religious aspect here a bit.
It's a puzzle to a lot of people.
Why do a bunch of white Christian conservatives in America care so much about Israel?
Because, of course, or as one way to put it, care so much about Jews.
When, of course, in America, as far as the cultural divide and all that, you know, Tea Party hates Occupy and whatever, Jews and Christian conservatives tend to be on opposite sides of all of this.
So, un riddle the riddle for me, what is the big deal about Israel and the Christian right in America?
Well, I think most of it, particularly the Christian right from a religious perspective, is theological.
I mean, there is a theology that has existed and become part of this fundamentalist worldview.
Or many, not all of it.
I have to qualify myself when I talk on these matters because someone's going to object.
Sure.
Hey, everybody's an individual and everybody knows that.
That based on a reading of the Bible that arose out of the mid-19th century, that there are various passages in the Bible that say that Israel will be regathered and that when that happens, a formula for the end of the world has been set into motion.
And then, so, that's it then.
But what about this is actually earth and there's a country here and a country there and people and land and politics and things.
Does that have nothing to do with it?
Is it all just Sunday morning stuff?
No, some of it is.
On the part particularly of mainline Christians from the 40s onwards, 40s probably up until the late 60s, early 70s, the mainline churches, the Episcopalians, the Methodists, the Presbyterians, the flavors of the Methodists and flavors of Presbyterians and Lutherans and liberal Catholics and whatnot, there was a guilt in the West operative for how Western theology had marginalized or even may have participated in the persecution of Jews and the marginalization of Jews in Europe for the entirety that Jews lived within Christian Europe.
Got no problem with that.
And so there was some guilt over that.
And so that's why, for example, the people we would call liberal Christians now, but the mainline Christians in the 40s and the 50s were bigger supporters of Israel than the conservatives were.
It didn't.
Israel doesn't become a big, big deal.
I mean, you can get these pamphlets from these organizations dating back to the 20s that talk about the centrality of the Middle East, but they would talk about a different Middle East, the centrality of the Middle East to the fulfillment of end times, of the end times of the second coming of Jesus.
But it isn't until the 67 war that Christian conservatives go nuts because then this whole of this land that supposedly was given to, that God gave to God's people is now under the control of the Jews, and that means it's going to happen.
And so you get dispensationalist pamphlets talking about the rapture and the second coming and the tribulation and all of this stuff.
68, 69 is when they really start in earnest.
And about that point, liberal Christians have decided, because liberal Christians were generally supportive of the civil rights movement and against the Vietnam War, and enough liberal Christians looked at what the Israelis had done in the Six-Day War as an act of aggression, and were very concerned with, at this point, how Jewish Israelis were treating Arab Israelis and treating occupied Palestinians.
And so there comes a flip.
But, you know, every time Middle Eastern events flare up, you have this same crowd of people who say, well, okay, now is the time.
You have various and sundry antichrists and all of this stuff, and they've always been wrong.
And now people can continue to, you know, ten years ago it was Saddam Hussein and now it will be Bashar al-Assad or whatever.
Don't you pay attention to the pamphlets you got ten years ago?
Well, look, I remember being in sixth grade, and, you know, Saddam, this is fun, right?
Because, you know, hey, did you hear that something terrible is going to happen in the year 1988?
And then this exact same Nostradamus TV special comes out in 89.
Talking about the end of the world is coming in 1994.
And then they just keep pushing it back.
But now here we are in 2013.
There's got to be a little bit of a...
I don't know where I got this.
Probably I think it was from a guy in my cab called the odometer effect.
That people are always going to get really excited about watching the numbers flip over from 1999 to 2000.
And this is really exciting for a lot of people.
And if you're a Machu Picchu type, you've got 2012, which has sort of a weird symmetry to it in a way, I guess.
Kind of.
Twos at the beginning and the end.
People love believing in that kind of thing.
But then now that's coming on too.
And, again, I see the fun in it a little bit, but it seems like we end up...
We have just these huge segments of the population who deal with real world subjects, but only through the eyes of just their pretend, their fantasy land or whatever.
So you end up having...
And, you know, I actually saw a clip that someone had played of Bill Maher talking about this.
I don't like to quote him, but plenty of people have said this before and including on this show that, you know, ultimately, according to the theology, Jesus is supposed to come back and tell the Jews that this is your last chance, pal.
You either convert now or you're all going to hell together in a handbasket.
And that's what they're...
And so then that brings up the whole question of why is this alliance so beneficial for Israel, really?
If the Christian right just want to see nukes going off over their home territory.
Well, I understand why it works from the Israeli perspective.
And I think, oh, God, who was it?
It was a primary...
It was a very...
Might have even been Ariel Sharon.
It was in the 80s.
And there was a kerfuffle about an American pastor, an evangelical pastor.
It was 80 or 81.
And he said, God does not hear the prayer of a Jew.
And it got videotaped.
And it was a...
You know, it dominated a couple of news cycles back when news cycles were long.
And a senior Israeli leader, a political figure, was asked about this because the same pastor also led trips to Israel on a regular basis.
And the Israeli leader said, look, we don't care what he says.
We care what he does.
Yeah.
And he brings us supporters and money.
And so...
And Republican votes.
So we don't care what he says.
Right.
Yeah.
In fact, Jim Loeb paraphrases Bill Kristol or, pardon me, Irving Kristol saying the same thing.
I don't want to get it wrong, but I think it was in the Commonweal magazine.
There was a debate going back and forth where they were criticizing because Irving Kristol had arranged for some Israelis, somebody to buy Jerry Falwell a jumbo jet.
And somebody said, this guy would have you all killed.
You know?
If it was the 30s, he'd be wearing jackboots, man.
Are you kidding me?
And they said, hey, it's his theology.
It's our Israel.
So...
Yes.
Same thing, right?
Believe whatever you want.
Just show me the political power.
And so...
And this is the...
I like bringing this one up because nobody else ever does.
And I actually need to read up on it.
So I've got my facts in a better row for you here.
But I know that it's right that Colin Powell succeeded in getting Bush Jr.'s ear about Israel-Palestine and a two-state solution in 2001.
And so you have the political capital now that no president has ever had.
You can have anything in the world.
Do this.
You have to.
This is the number one cause of terrorism against us.
Number one cause of terrorism in the world.
Make them give up the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Something along those lines.
We're talking about Colin Powell here, okay?
It wasn't great.
I'm just saying.
And then it was Tom DeLay, the exterminator from the House.
The House whip brought the message that you'll be a one-term president.
That's it.
Same thing happened to his father.
Was the Christian right turned against him?
It's not that they supported Bill Clinton.
Maybe some of them went Ross Perot.
Most of them just, I guess, stayed home and didn't support Bush Sr., who lost in 92.
And so Jr. decided that screw Palestine and screw the number one cause of terrorism in the world.
Re-elect me.
And so DeLay won the fight over Colin Powell.
Mr. Statesman, the second most famous man in the world and all of this crap, right?
But yes, the role of this is central.
And I think there is some – that this is a place where some tension is going to be in the overlap between the Tea Party and the Christian right.
Because they're, again, not contiguous either.
And I think that this is going to cause some tension.
And simply because it's a theological thing that commits the U.S. to certain kinds of spending that, frankly, when you ask Tea Party people in the abstract, they're less committed to.
Well, you know, I guess I wouldn't care that much.
I mean I'm against the U.S. government and therefore all of its foreign aid, that kind of thing.
But this wouldn't really be a problem except for what a problem it is, right?
You don't hear me complaining all day about support for pango pango or whatever because it's not of much consequence.
I'm sure the people of pango pango are suffering horribly under whatever American bacteria.
I don't know, but I've paid no attention to it.
But our support for Israel is so problematic for so many reasons.
And they just talk all day in slogans about our greatest ally in the Middle East, our best friend in the whole wide world.
Never heard of France, never heard of England, never heard of Canada, I guess.
But, no, Israel is our number one most bestest friend in the whole world.
And nobody ever has an argument.
Nobody ever explains what they mean by that because they sure as hell would lose if they got into a debate about it.
And this thing is a catastrophe.
It's the albatross hanging around our neck.
Well, but the emotional attachment, there was, oh, Grace Halsell.
If you've ever read any of Grace Halsell's book, she was a Mennonite, Quaker, who had done an awful lot of traveling and wrote an awful lot about that.
But she talks about some congressional hearings that were held in the 1920s in regards to Zionist settlement in what was then British Mandatory Palestine.
And one congressman, congressman in the 1920s, who had visited the settlements, responded because American Christians at the time were universally opposed to this.
The American Christians and the missionaries, you know, the Presbyterians and the Methodists and the Episcopalians and the whatnot, who had founded hospitals and universities and schools all across the Middle East, were opposed to this enterprise of supporting Zionism.
But the congressman countered back, not with an argument, but I visited there and it reminds me of California on the Mediterranean.
So it's this emotional attachment, and it goes back quite some ways to, you know, this is not just, this is a part, this place is a part of us.
Its stories are our stories.
Its life is our life.
It lives in a bad neighborhood.
We know what bad neighborhoods are like.
It's the South Side.
You know, you have to be tough in a bad neighborhood, that kind of thing.
So I think a great many Americans emotionally resonate, see Israel and America as effectively being the same places and sharing many of the same stories and wanting many of the same things and having many of the same enemies.
Sure.
Well, yeah, especially the last part and especially since 1967.
Well, yes.
I mean, at least the official story is that this is how the beloved RFK was murdered.
Yes.
A blowback from an American arms sale to Israel.
Want some F-16s?
Okay, it'll cost you your beloved prince.
And actually some statements I think he made during the campaign, which I find interesting because Democrats historically have always seen themselves as siding with the downtrodden and the discriminated against, except for Palestinians.
For liberal Democrats in particular, this is not so much true as it used to be.
But once upon a time, this was the one blind spot that they had.
You know, you could be as liberal on South Africa as you possibly could well be, but still be very conservative on Israel because it was just Israel.
Right.
Yeah, no mention of Israel's alliance with South Africa in defiance of all the rest of humanity.
Alright, well, so then I see things from time to time and I'm not a religious guy and I'm not involved in the community.
I couldn't tell you really the difference in the different Protestant sects that I've heard of other than my impression of their different social classes, right?
But as far as the technical difficulties between them, I have no idea.
I understand.
I mean, I know that the Pentecostals are more likely to believe something wacky than the Lutherans or something like that.
But that doesn't let the Lutherans off the hook for what they believe.
I have no idea.
Sure.
But so what does it mean and how big of a deal is it in American politics?
And in fact, in American Christian politics within the different Christian communities, not as far as state politics, but the politics of the different Christian communities, when you have groups like the Presbyterians come out and say what Israel's doing in the West Bank is wrong and it's got to stop and we need to organize against it, etc.
I'm not sure even how far they've gone, but I've seen some press along those lines.
It goes a long way.
I mean, the sentiment of religious liberals and their activism and their activity in this matter is very, very strong, very, very committed and very, very strong.
It may not be particularly widespread because even among Lutheran congregations, there are sympathies in support of the Palestinian and sympathy in support of Israel.
And the fervor is not quite the same for people who want Israel as central to their religion.
There are other churches that do that.
So what percentage, I mean, I have no idea really the demographics here.
What percentage of Protestant Christians, first of all, what percentage of the population of Protestant Christians, you know, roughly speaking, and then what percentage of those believe in this nonsense about forcing Jesus to come back on their timetable?
The problem of the nonsense is it's widespread because it is sort of part of the default definition of being Christian in the United States.
They sell it at Walmart.
Exactly.
It's easier to read than the Bible when you just read the novel version where all the magic happens.
So it's in the air and it's in the water.
And clergy for churches that aren't dispensationalist and don't believe in that theology, even if they are interested in this, then have lots of work to do because there is just sort of a default.
And it's especially true since September 11, 2001.
But it's just sort of the default position of the Israelis are good, the Palestinians are bad.
That's just how it is.
I think there was probably, you know, the first Intifada probably did a lot to generate support, particularly among more thoughtful, civil rights oriented people on the left and in the church.
Did a lot to excite support for the Palestinians.
I'm not sure mass support for Palestinians in the United States is possible at this point.
Well, I mean, when they ask the question without loading it, they just say, should we be fair over there, even handed or what?
People go, yeah, even handed.
That's what we like to believe about ourselves.
First and foremost, especially if we're killing you, we're only doing it out of fairness.
That's our overriding thing.
So, you know, this has always been my belief is that if the American people, including these, you know, dispensationalist, whatever, whatever type you describe them, Christians that we're talking about here.
If they actually even understood the simple fact that, oh, no, really?
They just live under martial law in the West Bank there ever since 1967 and it's horrible.
They would have a different opinion of it, right?
But they don't ever, I mean, I think the common understanding is that Palestine is this terrorist state next door to Israel that won't stop invading them with suicide bombers.
I read this crap on my own Facebook page and comments every day.
Oh, poor Israel.
The West Bank won't ever stop attacking them.
They're living in, well, like they watch Fox News for, you know, entertainment.
I know.
I think some people can be swayed, but some people also won't care.
And there's only so much tempering I think knowledge will do.
You know, I would like to believe that knowledge would affect how people decide, but I don't.
I think in many instances it doesn't because opinions tend to be more emotional than they are based on fact.
In some instances, people are not going to be persuaded by whatever information they get.
Yeah, well, too bad, too.
I mean, look, right now the Secretary of State is supposedly leading negotiations over there, getting the peace process back up and going again after years of this.
And I don't know who, but somebody's hopes are up about this.
And then, yeah, it's easy to predict that they'll go nowhere.
I remember once listening to a Syrian artist.
He was speaking to Farouk al-Assad.
I don't remember his name now, Farouk al-Assad.
He was at that time Egypt's foreign minister, and he was speaking at Georgetown.
And this Syrian journalist said, look, once upon a time the American government considered the settlements to be illegal.
And then they were an annoyance, and now they're a difficulty.
At some point they'll just simply be an eyesore.
And I think that's kind of where we have arrived.
And I think a great many— No, now it's the Palestinians in their bulldozed village.
That's the eyesore, right?
And the settlements are the nicest thing around.
I once thought that trying to make an argument that Palestinians don't have property and the ability to contract and they have no rights that are respected would work.
But I've rarely seen that argument work.
I don't know what it would take in the United States.
Frankly, I have long thought that the solution to our problems is poverty and collapse.
But I'm not sure those are things I want to see either.
Well, yeah, it's horrible, but it seems like—you know, I'm not even sure if it'd be—I think the empire would be the last thing to go.
So that's a lot of starvation between here and there, man.
I mean, they're not going to give up on this.
I do think, however, that despite how this administration has presented itself, I think Barack Obama has lived abroad enough and seen enough of the world and is in a particular place in time that he is aware that American state power is diminishing.
And the ability of the United States particularly to engage in certain kinds of foreign policy aren't as possible as they used to be and may no longer be possible.
I think he understands this.
I don't think he knows what to do with it as president, but I think he understands it.
Because I think he knows that given who he is, he cannot sell decline to the Americans.
He just can't.
Yeah.
Well, and after all, too, and I'd hate to give the man credit or anything, but he could have just bombed Syria.
He didn't have to go through this whole dance of making Congress tell him, no, hold me back, guys, and all of that, you know.
Well, I think there got to be a point after— And he didn't.
After whatever happened in Damascus, because I don't honestly know.
And to say that we know for sure is silly.
Whatever happened in Damascus with the chemical weapons, whatever they might have been, that Susan Rice and Samantha Power got to Barack Obama and had him say some things he didn't need to say, particularly given his previous track record of noting that in the event of chemical attack, that is our red line.
And, you know, he made it known deliberately in the New York Times that he never meant to say red line.
And, in fact, probably something along the lines of whatever you do, don't say red line, boss, was what took place right before he went out there.
And then he did a George Bush and kind of spaced out and catapulted the propaganda like he wasn't—you're not supposed to say that.
You're supposed to do it, you idiot, you know.
And it was just one of those where, you know, my calculus and red line.
Yeah, red line.
Oops.
And I think after whatever that was that in Damascus, Barack Obama got himself cornered by Susan Rice and Samantha Power and into something I don't think he wanted to do.
But he also didn't know how to handle the situation he was in.
And eventually he got talked back from it.
And it was actually a good thing that the whole mess with John Kerry and Sergei Lavrov and Vladimir Putin, I'm just actually very grateful that that whole mess worked out the way it did.
It may seem in some years, hence, like the brilliant thing it ended up becoming.
Or it may be a disaster, but it may seem the brilliance that it will be portrayed as then.
It's a great—it's actually fascinating to note how many brilliant things we now hailed started out as accidents, like the Marshall Plan.
The Marshall Plan was an accident.
It wasn't anything on purpose.
It was a reaction to a situation.
It was not planned.
So if Libya can be—not Libya—if Syria can be effectively disarmed, this would be great.
I don't know if it's going to change—I don't think it's going to change the course of the war.
I think eventually the Assad forces are going to win.
I didn't think that two years ago.
I thought the rebels were going to win fairly clearly at the rate they were going, but they stalled.
At some point in time, the majority of the Sunnis in Syria will look at the areas controlled by the Islamists and go, no, we don't want that.
Right.
Yeah, I think that's probably already happening to a pretty good degree.
And I don't know that they were ever really winning, certainly not since, I don't know, the beginning of 2012 or something.
When, I guess, spring 2012, there was that big offensive in Homs.
I'm not sure what it is about Islamists that has them go to this kind of violence immediately.
There was always some questions about how much of the violence in Algeria, because it got awful in Algeria in the early 1990s.
How much of that was the army engaging in false flag operations and how much of that was the actual rebels?
It was some combination thereof.
But I have no idea.
It seems to me so utterly self-defeating for Islamists to hit the ground and say, Sharia, the most intense, angry, hateful version of Sharia that we can possibly find, we will enforce upon this place.
And that means cutting people's heads off and otherwise killing them.
I don't know where this happened.
It is probably the most important thing that we can be grateful for because it means that no one wants to be ruled by them.
Right.
Well, like we were talking about before, they're really only useful as shock troops.
What are they going to do?
Be administrators?
That's all they know how to do is blow stuff up.
Yep.
So I find that absolutely fascinating.
And actually, part of me is very, very grateful for the fact that they're not going to learn any lessons on effective government.
It means that they're not going to ever get a chance to govern.
And at some point, this will all burn out because it will become a general sense in the parts of the world where – And did anybody notice, just as an aside, all of the talk about Muslim radicals doing violence in the United States, and it took what?
Two or three Somalis living in Minneapolis.
The terrorism they did wasn't here.
It was in Kenya.
They had to go abroad in order to do violence.
That should put top paid to any talk that there are cells waiting somewhere in the United States to do this kind of thing.
But in any event, no one is going to want to be ruled by these people.
And it's going to be one of the most amazing things that's ever happened, that when it's done, it will have burned itself out kind of the same way that the revolutionary anarchists – and know what I'm saying about revolutionary anarchists – did in the 19th century, late 19th century.
They thought that the way that you built that better world was by blowing stuff up.
And it generally tends to not be a feasible plan to move the world forward in the direction you want to move it in.
Yeah, violent and destructive means determine violent and destructive ends.
So there you go.
And I think in a great many of these states, this is also something that the United States didn't understand.
They could not effectively morally do in Fallujah what the Syrians did in Hama or the Algerians did.
And that was basically an Islamic state, in dealing with Islamic resistance, has a moral legitimacy to do really horrific violence, which is what the Algerians and the Egyptians and the Syrians did, facing their rebellions when they did.
Those states have a moral legitimacy to do things that the United States cannot do because it's a foreign country and an occupier.
We've got to go.
That's Charles Featherstone, writer for LewRockwell.com.
And he's a seminarian and on your way back to somewhere to go be a preacher.
Chicago.
To go be a pastor.
Very good.
And a master in Arab studies.
That's very important.
And now here's the website.
It's of course LewRockwell.com.
Just look at the author archives there.
And also there's the Feather blog.
That's thefeatherblog.blogspot.com.
And then Feather Songs, which is also at blogspot.com.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's semi-defunct.
I haven't been updating it in a while.
Well, whatever.
Go and check out his songs.
And also you can follow him on Twitter, too, at Feather Songs.
So thanks for listening, everybody.
We'll be back here tomorrow from 3 to 5 Eastern.
Hey, you own a business?
Maybe we should consider advertising on the show.
See if we can make a little bit of money.
My email address is scott at scotthorton.org.
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