12/16/13 – Daniel McAdams – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Next up is Dan McAdams from the Ron Paul Institute.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
Great to talk to you again.
Good to have you here.
Man, you've been writing a lot of good stuff lately.
Some of it's at RT.
That's the Ukraine piece.
We're going to get to that in a minute.
But first of all, you had a guest article by a guy whose name was hard to memorize, but it was a brilliant rundown of who's who and who's doing what in the jihadist war in Syria against Shiite and Christian civilians in the Jabhat al-Nusra and et cetera like that.
And then you've got one here that I hope everyone will go read again, ronpaulinstitute.org.
Is the U.S. waking up to the insanity of its Syria policy?
And I can say I only hope, but I wonder what you could possibly be referring to that would give you hope that such a thing could be true.
Yeah, well, I, you know, my hope was it lasted about five minutes while I, you know, finished writing this piece.
And then it started to damper again because we heard news that we heard some whispers that the U.S. might be starting talks with this Islamic Front, which is created and financed by our wonderful friends, the Saudis, who always seem to be financing extremism everywhere, basically as a as a fig leaf over the al-Qaeda who's running things in Syria, you know.
So that's already tarnished.
So they created this Islamic Front, which is like a super group.
You remember Asia in the, what was it, in the 80s?
It's like a super group that's going to to make us not think about al-Qaeda too much.
The problem is the Islamic Front and al-Qaeda have been cooperating for quite some time in Syria.
So it's it's a move by the U.S.
They realize the reality on the ground is that their so-called moderates do not exist.
They've what little there was in the first place has disintegrated.
They're left with, you know, a couple of Ahmad Shalabi types.
So they're they're trying to figure out what to do.
And so they're, you know, apparently getting ready to hold talks with this group, which would be which would really do nothing but prolong the war, prolong the agony, prolong the killing.
So, you know, we can be slightly optimistic.
And what the piece was about was that the former CIA director Michael Hayden said, you know, of all the bad scenarios in Syria, probably the least bad would be, you know, at this point, if Assad stays in power, because the the alternatives look even even worse.
So, you know, it's it's the U.S. has put itself in a tight spot with its interventionism, you know, now doesn't know what to do.
Well, yeah, and I guess the previous policy was at first they thought he was going to go, but then they must have realized back in what by late 2011, while we're talking about the Democrats.
So at least by halfway through 2012, or at some point they they had to have accepted that.
OK, Assad is not falling.
It's not as easy as we thought it was going to be.
And so then Plan B was, well, just make them, you know, fight each other scorpions in a bottle kind of a thing and weaken everybody all around.
But now, I guess they're worried that the jihadists are going to win or or only half the government is retired.
Bush officials are concerned, but the Democrats want to persist.
Is that it?
Yeah, well, I think they're hoping that the different jihadist groups might fight it out and that some of the I don't know if they're hoping this, but that some of the what moderates there are, some of them have gone back to the government because they realize that the people they have been fighting with are much worse than than Assad in terms of brutality and that sort of thing.
Yeah, I read that.
But, you know, I mean, the U.S., unfortunately, it falls victim to its own myths and its own stories.
You know, it believes the lies and the propaganda that it tells us.
And so it came to believe that there was this massive uprising in Syria of people who wanted democracy and all these wonderful things.
And that would be enough to to change the regime.
But the fact of the matter is, if if the entire country was as unhappy as they were saying, there's no way the president could have lasted this long.
So, you know, it was largely fomented from without.
It was fomented by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the Gulf states, you know, who are fighting sort of a proxy war with Iran in Syria, you know.
So it's it was much more complex.
But they wanted to portray it as the, you know, as a little guy standing up against the dictator.
And that's not to say that we want to go over there and give Assad a hug.
That's irrelevant to us, because at least, you know, you and I, what we care about is interventionism and the U.S. role in it.
We don't care who rules anywhere as long as they don't bother us.
Right.
Well, sure.
I mean, I care, but that doesn't mean I'm trying to give a permission, a permission slip to my government to do anything about or do something horrible in the name of what I care about.
You know, they mess up everything they touch here and they mess up everything they touch overseas.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But no, I mean, I agree with you that in this day and age, opinion means something you want the national government to do to somebody.
So people just make that leap immediately.
And I certainly am not in favor of that.
But, you know, all things being equal, nobody's got the right to inherit a dictatorship from anybody who never had the right to one in the first place ever.
So, you know, that's pretty much that.
But, you know, we don't like to tell our neighbors how they should live.
And, you know, I mean, it's we we may we may like our system the way we have it.
But other people do have have different views of the way they want to live.
The the Iranians seem to want to live in a country with that, you know, religious rule tends to to to be very strong, much stronger than here.
It wouldn't be my cup of tea, to be honest.
But who am I to say?
I don't know.
Yeah.
No, I mean, and there are certainly societies where the hugest of supermajorities would agree that they want religious law and that would be up to them and not me anyway.
But so in this case, to get back to the specifics here, I was wondering if you could help break down because there I don't even know what difference there ever really was between the Al-Nusra Front, Al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq, except maybe the Islamic State guys were more Iraqis and the Nusra guys were more local Syrians.
But they've been working together this whole time.
And so I'm just hoping you can help me understand which factions the Syrians basically they're trying to separate the Syrians away and back the Syrians and separate them away from the Iraqis more.
Is that what's going on here?
Yeah.
I don't know.
You know, I often think of the life of Brian when I try to pick these groups out, you know, it's like the People's Front of Judea.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly.
And it's the Indian People's Front.
Which group of suicide bombers is, you know, why is, you know, who?
Yeah.
But, you know, I mean, I tend to focus more on on U.S. policy.
Obviously, we have to understand as much as we can about what's going on on the ground.
But at the same time, we can't understand everything because we're not there.
And unlike people like John McCain and the others who pretend they know everything about everything anywhere, everywhere, we have a pretty good handle on what our policy should be.
And I think that's the most important part, you know.
And so that's that's what I tend to focus on more.
Well, yeah, I mean, although it's a very important argument to make, though, when, for example, John McCain is saying, oh, well, you know, everything's just hunky dory with the Northern Storm Brigade and the Free Syrian Army when, as you're reporting here, yeah, there is no Free Syrian Army.
And even the Northern Storm Brigade were a bunch of veterans of the Iraq War where they'd practiced on killing our guys over there in the last war, Mr. McCain kind of thing.
So the facts on the ground count there, especially, you know, when now we're talking about this new Islamic Front, which even if they're trying to say it's somehow separate from the worst of the sworn Al-Qaedaists, it's no different whatsoever.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, I mean, and in fact, I think, Dan, that because of you and others, I think this view is making progress.
And like you're saying, even people like Hayden are sort of coming to their senses.
And I think that some of the propaganda about this is falling flat on TV news and stuff, too, where, you know, as even Hillary Clinton said, I mean, who are we supposed to be backing there?
It's kind of hard to pick out the good guys.
What I think is kind of funny, Scott, is that this Islamic Front broke into some warehouses and stole a bunch of military equipment that the U.S. had meant for the so-called moderates, you know, and the U.S. sent them a memo saying, could you guys please return this?
You're not supposed to get it, you know.
We kind of promised the Americans who paid for this that it wouldn't fall into the hands of extremists, you know.
I heard that.
I thought it was a prank.
Did they really?
Yeah, and then they did.
They confirmed it.
Yes, we did send them a pretty pleased note, which they rejected.
Probably a tweet or something.
Yeah.
Alright.
Well, so anyway, I was going to say one more thing there was Patrick Coburn.
You referred to the fact that, you know, we're not there.
Well, Patrick Coburn has been there a lot of times, and he had this long-form piece in The Independent the other day, Britain's policy on Syria is falling apart, where it's, you know, virtually he's saying the exact same thing as you here about the hopelessness of what they've gotten us into, the rock and the hard place and all of that, and how nobody knows what's going to come next, but it seems to me it would be a surprise if there really was a Syria anymore after this, or if it had anything like its old shape anyway.
I mean, it's not to say that just by virtue of traveling and getting around, you're automatically right, but I find that people who do go to these places, they do have a better sense, you know, and I know you know Eric Margulies, who I have enormous respect for, and he's always traveling, he sees the world, and he, you know, so I respect his opinions more, because it's very difficult to understand these places, and the culture, things are driven by culture and history, and so it's just difficult to get a real handle on it when you're not there.
Right.
Yeah, and both of those guys have been saying for a long time that something huge would have to change in terms of foreign intervention to make Assad lose now.
I mean, he's been, you know, winning in the rebellion, so-called rebellion, on the run for, you know, what, a year and a half in a row now?
Yeah.
The momentum hasn't been the other way this whole time.
Yeah, but I think it's funny, and I kind of mentioned it in the piece I wrote, is that, you know, this sort of leftist humanitarian interventionists, you know, they love to champion the rights of the minorities, and I think, you know, particularly in the U.S., and there's nothing wrong with that, of course, but, you know, the people they've been supporting in Syria, they have a long track record of just wiping out minorities.
The Christians, the Alawites, you know, all of these minority groups, they talk about extreme prejudice, you know, and it just shows the situational ethics of a lot of interventionists.
Yeah, and by the way, that article I was referring to earlier, it's Dimitri Minden at rompaulinstitute.org, the sinister fruits of the West's alliance with Jihad warriors in Syria, and that's some good writing there.
Some serious journalism.
Yeah, he's very good.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's all bad news, too, I'm afraid to say.
These guys are bad, bad news, and, you know, this is just, I mean, imagine that it's the 1980s, Afghan War, or even the Iraq War, only now this much closer to the West, you know, one more country, giving them direct access to the Mediterranean Sea, and, you know, who knows from there.
And when you think about all these foreign fighters, you know, I'm not super hyped up on the war on terror, because a lot of it's phony, but I am concerned about some of these Western fighters who go over there, and they become not only radicalized, but they do learn a lot of techniques that can be quite dangerous, and what's going to happen when they come home.
They come back to the UK, they come back to the US, and there are quite a few of them.
We should be pretty worried about that, I think.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, and this is something Patrick Coburn was saying on the show, too, was that, you know, right now, these guys are really focused on killing Shia, but, you know, if they're stopped from being able to continue doing that, they might just turn West, you know, when this thing is over, we're going to have a lot of leftover guys, the next stage of blowback from our interventionism is teeing up now.
Yeah, and all thanks to...
Is that easy to see?
Sure, and all financed by our great friends the Saudis.
And all because we invaded Iraq in the last decade.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, that's the nature of interventionism, it creates new problems that the interventionists want to do more interventions to solve, you know, it's a never-ending cycle.
Well, and speaking of which, let's talk about NATO expansion.
You've been really good on these color-coded revolutions, especially concerning these countries in Eastern Europe, bordering Russia, and I don't know how anybody could consider Georgia a part of the North Atlantic to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, but obviously, you know, NATO expansion is a big part of this, but in specific, there was a fight, a political fight in Ukraine over a trade deal with the EU, or a trade deal with the Russians, and at the last minute, the head politician changed his mind and all hell broke loose.
Why don't you get more specific, please?
Well, what's interesting is, you know, the EU's policy all along has been to view this as a sort of a geopolitical, geostrategic move to, you know, sort of bring Ukraine into the fold, i.e. make it part of the EU, and not to say the Russians are saints, but their approach has been to Ukraine that, you know, you can talk to both us and them, we don't have to make a mutually exclusive deal, but the EU, but Brussels is pulling you into one, and you should think twice about taking it, because we buy a lot of your stuff, and they're not going to buy any of your stuff, you know, so certainly it's reasonable to consider the reasons that Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president, at the last minute had some second thoughts.
He hasn't shut the door, although the protesters portrayed it as him slamming the door shut, he said, you know, this particular deal I'm a little bit concerned about, I don't really see that it's to our advantage, so I want to hold off and, you know, I don't know, get a better deal or something, but that's when, you're right, I mean, all heck broke loose, people jumped into the streets, and they've been there for a couple of weeks, and, you know, their intent is to overthrow the government.
They've used violence, they've occupied government buildings, and, you know, I'm not super keen on police violence, but guess what, you know, what would happen if you and I started to occupy the White House?
It wouldn't turn out well for us, Scott.
Well, and the, I don't know about all the internal politics there, and, well, let me ask you this, when you say that they've used violence, what have they done that's violent other than just resist the cops in the street, or what?
Well, one of the things that probably wouldn't go over that well here is they took a tractor and they drove it into the police lines, you know, so, and they've used, there's videos of them using long chains to beat the police with, you know, sort of five or six feet lengths of chains against the cops, and, you know, so the idea that they're completely peaceful protesters is not the case, and, but regardless, you know, obviously people, you know, we believe people should have the right to protest.
We have some pretty severe restrictions here in Washington, D.C. as to how you can hold a protest, what you can do, where you can do it, so it's kind of silly for us to expect that everywhere else would not have anything similar to what we've had, yet what we see in Kiev is certainly a lot more leeway being given to these protesters than you'd get here in Washington, that's for sure.
Yeah.
Well, I'd hate to see modern America be the standard for such things, but I do understand your point.
Well, yeah, look, down in Venice, you know, the cops are beating up a bunch of, uh, This is what happens in a democracy, 51% gets their way, or at least, you know, after a public choice theory vote is held, then the people who end up on top of that get to decide, and then if, uh, you know, 49% or 51% are mad, then they can either go along with the decision that they disagree with, or they can try to hold a general strike, or, you know, they don't necessarily have to go along, but that's part of having that kind of a divided society.
It's really divided, isn't it?
East and West, and Orthodox versus Catholic, and, uh, more Russia-leaning culturally versus more European-leaning, so it's sort of, uh, Republicans-Democrats, uh, only, I would say, with seemingly more substantial differences between the major factions there.
Sure, yeah, but you know, what really gets me is the hypocrisy on the part of the U.S. and the European Union, particularly the U.S.
You know, there have been some violence, there are some violent police reactions, some people have been hurt, but the U.S. is, I mean, literally sending U.S. officials to the protesters to express U.S. support for an overthrow of the government.
But look at Venice today, you know, the cops are beating up a bunch of Italians who are protesting against austerity measures that the IMF demands.
Look what happened in Romania when they're protesting against, uh, the fracking and other things, the cops are beating the heck out of them.
Look what happened in Egypt, a thousand people got wiped out who were simply trying to go out and protest in favor of a government that actually had been elected.
And the U.S. says nothing about any of these, you know?
Yeah, it didn't bat an eye over that.
Yeah, the hypocrisy is just so repulsive, and then you get these horrible people like John McCain, you know, going into the middle of Kiev thinking that he's some sort of Soviet commissar who gets to tell the Ukrainians what kind of government they have, and who does he run off to?
He runs off to meet with the leader of this extremist anti-Semitic party, you know, who, you know, I was reading up on them, and they wear t-shirts, you know, saying something like beat up Jews and things like this, you know, so here once again, you know, just like when he went to Syria and met with a bunch of jihadis, you know, he goes to Ukraine and meets with a bunch of skinheads and druggies, and it just shows how absurd the whole thing is.
Yeah, well, John McCain, and, well, let me ask you this, is there actually, the people out there protesting in the street, is there an argument that you can credit to them other than, well, we just don't like the decision that was made here, or are they saying that they were defrauded somehow, or anything?
What's their message that's so catchy that they got this many people out backing it?
Because it's not just a rent-a-mob, right?
They've recruited some young Democrats.
Yeah, they've, you know, and the US has been financing the NGO sector in Ukraine for, you know, for a long time, for a decade, you know, and they continue to finance, they continue, if you look at USAID and everyone, they still spend millions of dollars a year propping up these NGOs, and so, well, perhaps they're not rent-a-mob.
I often wonder who is paying the protesters to go ahead and sit in the middle of the square for two weeks?
I mean, I don't know about you, Scott, but if I were to simply walk off my job for two weeks, I'd have a heck of a time paying the bills and eating, you know?
It makes you wonder where they are getting paid from, and who is paying for them to sit out there endlessly.
And it certainly seems strange that this is the issue that's got them all rioting, right?
Like, in Brazil, it started as a protest over increased bus fares, price inflation, where it really hurts the poorest, the hardest, right?
Pretty easy explanation of what's going on there, but, and you can see how something like that could be hijacked, too, of course, but in this case, they were upset about a marginal trade deal that wasn't actually going to trade their previous trade deal with the EU that they already had very much.
Anyway, what?
How is this a spark for anything?
No, you're right.
It is pretty suspicious, and, you know, Yanukovych is not, he's no sort of iron-fisted guy, either.
If anything, he's been kind of wimpy, you know, immediately after this thing, you know, after the first week or so, he said, oh, no, don't worry, guys, you know, we're going to go talk to the EU, he dispatched a team to Brussels, he wants to renegotiate, so it's not like he's sitting up there crossing his arms and sticking out his tongue, you know?
I mean, they probably wish he was a little bit more difficult to deal with, but if anything, he's a proven client.
And now, what about that?
Am I right about this trade deal wasn't actually going to trade their current, change their current trade deal that much?
I guess I heard NPR lady saying that, so I shouldn't take that to the bank, but she sort of seemed to be conceding it, that, you know, this is actually not that big of a change of policy, one way or the other, really, maybe just in a symbolic way, because it's about whether to lean west or east?
Yeah, I think that has a lot to do with it, you know, starting the process, and, you know, it's starting to, and it's also starting to suck Ukraine deeper and deeper into the IMF web, you know, here, take out a bunch more loans, guys, that's what you need, you know?
Yeah.
That'll help.
Yeah, you can buy some Lockheed products with them.
Yeah, that's a good point, and actually, we're about to put this up, but one of our board members who I admire enormously, Dennis Kucinich, wrote a great piece on, you know, what's this going to mean?
What they really want is NATO membership for Ukraine, so they can start selling them a bunch of garbage they don't need, you know, and stirring up arguments and fights that they don't need to have, so, you know, that's a, that's certainly something to consider.
Yeah, well, and that's certainly been a Lockheed project all along, right?
Bruce Jackson, from Lockheed, created a committee on NATO expansion, where it was just the committee on coming up with excuses for NATO expansion, that's all it was back in the 1990s, was, you know, get all these guys on the F-16 dole.
Yeah, and what's it done for any of these countries?
I mean, it's given jobs to people like Roderick Sikorski, who, you know, not that long ago, was haunting the halls of AEI in Washington as just another neocon, and now he's, what, foreign minister of Poland, he's down there marching in Kiev, he's screaming at the Ukrainians that they better do this and that and the other, he sounds just like an old Soviet apparatchik, you know?
It's just, it's incredible how intolerable these EU bureaucrats are.
Well, you know, I remember Pat Buchanan once asked, hypothetically, and I'm afraid of this hypothetical, honestly, but he said, you know what, what if an angry right-winger came to power and Russia decided they want to take some old territories back?
Are we really going to give up all our major cities to fight, you know?
I mean, that's what NATO membership ostensibly means, is that an attack on Kiev is an attack on D.C., but really, I thought an attack on Kiev is a tragedy, but not an attack on D.C.
Exactly.
Exactly.
No, you're right.
I mean, that's the ridiculousness of it, and I think if it came down to it, you know, we probably wouldn't do it, because it is insane and stupid.
Although we seem to be getting closer, and China has nothing to do with NATO, but we're certainly, you know, there are plenty of provocations between Japan and China, and we seem to be wading into those waters, too, so who knows?
I mean, interventionism is a virus, you know, it's a disease.
These people need to take a 12-step program or something.
Right.
Yeah, did you see, they had naval warships, American and Chinese warships had a close call, these klutzes out there, with all their high-tech gear and their zillion-dollar radar systems.
Oh, hard maneuvers to the port side, Captain, and all this and that, and they almost crashed.
And I don't know if that would have led directly to a war or something like that, but actually something like that could well be misinterpreted, you know, on one side or the other.
Or for political reasons, twisted, you know?
We'd rather have close encounters between U.S. and Chinese businessmen, you know, that's something that produces something that we all want and like, you know, products and commerce and jobs.
Yeah, and let them provide their own security out there on the high seas.
They're making money.
That's a good point, you're right.
Kick American shipping off of the security doll.
We don't need a U.S. Navy anymore.
Not on the Chinese coast or the American one either.
All right, well, maybe that's just me.
Thanks, Dan.
Thanks, take care.
Appreciate it.
That's Dan McAdams, everybody, he's running the Ron Paul Institute.
Over there at, man, I'm clicking on my Ron Paul section, you know what it is, ronpaulinstitute.org.
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