12/27/13 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
I'm Scott Horton.
Welcome back to the show.
Again, we are live today, the 27th of December, 2013 here.
Hope everybody had a Merry Christmas.
Our first guest on the show today is Sheldon Richman, the vice president of the Future of Freedom Foundation and editor of their journal, The Future of Freedom.
Welcome back.
Sheldon, how are you doing?
I'm doing fine, and it's great to be back with you.
Good times.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
Now, you've got an article here about Iran, and this might be confusing for some people in our audience today, Sheldon, because we were just talking about how America's policy since 2003 has been to back Iran in Iraq.
But when it comes to Iran, we're against Iran.
We're only for them in Iraq.
We're against them everywhere else.
Is that right?
Yeah, it is really bizarre.
For a long time, I thought about what the Bush people could have had in mind when they went into Iraq, knowing the new government would end up being, you know, leaning toward Iran.
The only thing that I can make of it is they had Iran in their sights as the next stop.
And then, you know, knock out Iran, and then you, I don't know, I guess help undermine the new Iraq government.
But, you know, I don't know what they were thinking at those times.
It's still puzzling.
Well, you know, I think maybe what happened was Ayatollah told Shalaby to tell Paul Wolfowitz that, oh, yeah, the Iraqi Shiites, they love America way more than they love Iran.
And they're going to freeze out Iran and they're going to make Iran look really bad for not being nearly as democratic as the new Shiite Iraq is going to be.
And then that'll shame Ayatollah into holding more and better elections.
And then they'll elect Paul Wolfowitz to be the new leader of Iran, I guess, I don't know.
But as you have many times pointed out, and some of your guests as well, Sadr in Iraq, who, you know, was a leading Shiite, was also sort of the least leaning toward Iran among the Shiite leaders.
And yet the United States opposed him.
So that doesn't make sense if you figure there's going to be the Shiites are going to, you know, become the power in Iraq once you knock out Saddam Hussein.
It seems like you would side with Sadr, right?
The guy that's more nationalistic and less prone to be influenced by Iran.
And yet that's not what the Bush administration did.
So I keep scratching my head.
Yeah.
Well, I think what made him anti-Iranian was the same thing that made him anti-American was his Iraqi nationalism.
And I think they underestimated him right off the bat, too.
I went to find the original quote about, oh, Sadr, don't worry about him.
He's just some minor cleric, because I'd read that somewhere.
But then when I googled it, it turns out that the Bush people had repeated that over and over and over again.
It wasn't just some idiot said that to Paul Bremer once, and then they kind of based a policy around that.
But this was a thing that was, I don't know, just one of these slogans that they memorized up there in the Bush White House that, oh, yeah, don't worry about Sadr.
So I think they just kind of convinced themselves that he wasn't going to matter very much.
And then they took him a long time and the hard way to figure out.
But anyway, yeah, the best and the brightest, you know, blunder into some area where they know nothing about what's going on.
Right.
All right.
So and you know what?
I think that that's really apt when we're talking about these senators.
I mean, they know what they're doing in a very limited way, but I don't think they really you know, Charles Schumer.
Does he really have much of a grasp of the scheme of things going on right now as he and his allies in the Senate bipartisan group, as you point out in your article here, as they push to pass these sanctions to undermine the current nuclear deal?
Well, the answer to that is simple.
They don't have to think about it.
They let APEC do their thinking for them.
And I really think that sums it up.
I don't think they're capable of thinking that out two or three steps.
They know that they don't want an agreement between the United States and Iran, which will end this Cold War, this idiotic Cold War that's been going on for, what, 34 years.
So they're putting impossible conditions on any agreement.
Like Iran may not do any enrichment whatsoever, even to the three or some percent for electrical power and which is, of course, Netanyahu's position in Israel.
And they don't want an agreement.
They don't want a rapprochement.
They either want regime change or they want Iran to continue on as this pariah state because it's a great foil for the Israeli government.
They can use it to take people's mind off the Palestinians.
And they have this existential threat, so-called, to point to.
I really wonder if they want regime change in Iran.
What would they do if a sort of benign-looking regime succeeded the ISIL and Israel could no longer point to it as an existential threat?
I think they'd meet the existential threat.
Yeah, I mean, after all, what they're working on now, you couldn't call it regime change, but you could call it regime conversion or something where they're basically, you know, they're never going to get Iran's independence back the way it used to be, you know, before 79.
But they could bring them back into the fold, you know, the way they did Qaddafi before they betrayed him.
Yeah.
Well, look, we have some experience in this, and you've talked about this lots and lots of times back in, what is it, 2009?
You'll correct me on the date if I'm wrong, where Iran agreed that it wouldn't enrich uranium anymore, that it cut a deal after Obama had urged this.
They came to an arrangement with Turkey and Brazil, right, to swap uranium for enriched uranium.
Well, they would quit going up to 20%, anyway.
They would stay at 3.6.
They quit going to 20%, which was demanded of them by Obama.
So they sit down with Turkey and Brazil and come up with a deal where they'll trade their uranium for enriched 20%, which they can use for their, in the medical, I suppose.
And Obama couldn't take guess finance, or Obama said, never mind, that's not our demand anymore.
Right.
So we know what's going on.
They won't take guess finance, and I don't know about Obama, but who knows what position Obama will take on any given day.
But we know that AIPAC and their people in the Senate and Netanyahu in the House and Netanyahu won't take guess finance, or anything that Iran agrees to won't be enough.
We know that.
Right.
Well, and the Brazilians complained, and the Turks, too, complained that Obama had personally asked them to pursue that channel and make that deal.
It was virtually the same deal he had offered them back in October, that they had begun to accept it, and then he told them no, and preempted them with, I guess, Israeli-sponsored Jindal attacks, and then, of course, Obama pretended to out their program at Qom, the new facility they had just begun construction on that they had already declared to the IAEA four days before, that he pretended was outing them for betraying all their agreements, et cetera, like that, in order to scotch the deal.
Then a few months later, he has the Brazilians and the Turks make pretty much the same deal again, the 20% fuel swap, and then completely pulled the rug out from under the Brazilians and Turks, our allies, or at least our friends, Turks, Turkey's definitely our NATO ally, and Brazil's at least a friend, and we're doing it on Obama's behalf.
He asked them to do it, and then hung them out to dry.
Well, one thing they get by not accepting that, and instead going through these talks that are going on, they can say, see, the sanctions work.
The sanctions got them to the table, which is what everybody likes to say, and erasing in a Norwellian way the facts that you just recited.
At an earlier time, I actually go back to 2001 or 2003, at an earlier time, before there were these biting sanctions, Iran was making dramatic overtures toward cooperating with the United States.
They were turned down.
They were put on the list of, they were joined to the Axis of Evil by Bush, and then when a grand deal was offered, they reprimanded Bush, reprimanded the Swiss for even bringing the message to the United States, and then the events under Obama that you just recited.
You get the feeling that maybe they don't want a settlement.
They just want to look like they, they look like they, they want to look like they want one.
Well, which is, you know, it's confusing to me why they would try as hard as they've tried, the Democrats now, I mean the White House, the Obama administration, why they've tried as hard as they've tried to get the interim deal just to fail, because they could have just not tried this hard to even get the interim deal in the first place, and still just claim that, hey, we tried.
Why go through this level of show?
I mean, do you think it's really some kind of policy fight within the departments?
Maybe Kerry really doesn't or does want the deal, and Obama really does or doesn't on the other side, something like that, or is it all just a play?
Yeah, you know, I, the speculation on my part would be pure guesswork, I mean, I just don't know.
You'd have to know the people, I guess, and there are people that are qualified to try to read those tea leaves.
Maybe there is a fight within the administration, and some of them really want to go for this, realizing it's a golden opportunity, and others are more susceptible to, you know, Israel's, the Israeli government's wishes in the matter, and AIPAC, the political impact that AIPAC brings to it, are dragging their feet.
So I wish I knew, I wish the inside story was being written, and we may have to wait years before we read about it.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it looks like Obama has sent Kerry to the Senate to tell them, please wait, you know, and he's put them off this long anyway, I mean, maybe some of that's for show, but, you know, and he's, they're both former Democrat Senators themselves, the President and his Secretary of State.
It seems like, maybe I'm wrong, seems like the President himself is still a bigger lobby than Israel, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, if he chooses to really stand up to them and insist, but...
Well, next year's an election year, and, you know, the Senate is not secure for the Democrats, that's already being talked about in other connections, but the Democrats could lose the Senate.
The House, of course, is totally up, a third of the Senate's up, and, you know, it's a bad time to be going against AIPAC, and Obama, while Obama seems to be pushing against AIPAC right now, they've got to have politics on their minds, too.
There are Democrats that don't want to lose their seats to a Republican, claiming that, you know, they're weak, or, you know, that they're weak on our closest ally, Israel, and that AIPAC against them, putting money into their opposition, I mean, that's got to be on their minds.
And what's going through the Senate right now, this pending bill from Menendez, Schumer, and Kirk, the Republican, is really disturbing, especially because not only does it impose new sanctions, you know, there is this delay, and there's this 30-day business where Obama has to certify that Iran is behaving itself, so it does put the initiative on the side of Congress, but worse than that is the clause that says if Israel decides to attack Iran, the U.S. is in.
I mean, this is different, I think, from other, you know, alliances and bills that have been passed, where in effect the U.S. government is saying, if country X is attacked, we are obligated to, you know, come and help it somehow.
So in the case of Japan or South Korea, but they don't say, if those countries attack another country, the U.S. is in it, and I realize this is language that's non-binding, but I still think that's kind of a formality.
But how are they going to start the war?
Everybody knows Iran would never first strike Israel in a million years, Sheldon.
Well, of course.
Of course, that's absolutely right, and if you look at the language of this thing, I mean, I love the language.
If the government of Israel is compelled to take military action in legitimate self-defense against Iran's nuclear weapon program, so defense against the program, someone pointed out, what does self-defense against a program mean exactly?
So there are the conditions, right, if it's compelled to take military action.
You know, what it means is, they're defining what already exists there as a nuclear weapons program.
They're defining, they're saying nothing needs to be done from what they have now to change it to something that needs to be attacked, in which case we'll call it defense.
Well, because what they consider a weapons program, they have a very odd, I think, a very odd definition.
They mean, and this is what I guess they sum up with the phrase, breakout capability.
Number one, you have uranium in any state, any state of enrichment or non-enrichment.
Number two, you have centrifuges.
Number three, you have people who understand nuclear physics.
If you have those three things, to them, that's a nuclear program, which a lot of countries may apply to a lot of countries, but it doesn't mean you're making a weapon.
You got a breakout capability right there on wikipedia.org.
Right.
You just need to have knowledge, and of course, they've been killing scientists.
We know there have been covert activity assassinating scientists, because they want to try to stamp out people who know, which is sort of impossible.
You can always find other people to learn things, but if you merely have uranium centrifuges and know-how, then that constitutes an existential threat in this view, and the U.S. should not be a party to that.
Well, now, so I don't know if you've done the congressional count or anything like that, but Obama could certainly veto this and force the Senate to override the veto if it came to that, which it wouldn't come to that, would it?
I mean, he's a big stinking loser, but he's still the president, and it's his party that controls the Senate.
Yeah.
Well, this could be a really interesting fight between the Senate and an AIPAC on one side, or the whole Congress and AIPAC on one side, and the President on the other side, but then you have the, don't forget, you have election considerations once again.
I think it's going to be extremely interesting.
I mean, I'm, you know, strap yourself into your chair and, you know, pull up to the front row and let's watch this, because it's going to be real interesting.
I don't know how it's going to come out.
Yeah.
Well, of course, you know, my preferred policy is, I don't care if the Russians give the Iranians 50 ready-made hydrogen bombs, I mean, I guess I'd prefer they wouldn't, but, you know, that's, it's funny because we always talk about what a lie it is that they're making nukes and sometimes forget to mention that, you know, even if they are, it's still in the scheme of things, the U.S. state doesn't have any legitimate authority to try to prevent the Iranian state from doing any such thing.
Yeah, and like you said before, let's assume, you know, quote, the worst case scenario, that they're trying to make a nuclear weapon against all the evidence that you have gone through with expert guests over and over again.
So let's assume that.
So they end up making one nuclear warhead for some weirdo reason.
What good is it against thousands of American warheads and, you know, two to 400 Israeli warheads, some of which are on submarines and immune to a first strike, in other words, giving them a second strike capability.
They're not suicidal.
They're not mad mullahs.
Whatever you think of the Islamic Republic, I mean, I don't like theocracy, I don't like government of any kind, but I certainly don't like theocracy.
They're not suicidal.
They have no interest.
And then, you know, so even if they did build one, it would be obviously for deterrent purposes and nothing else, because there's just no scenario in which they could see that as a useful weapon, offensively.
So it's just nuts.
And again, I've made a heroic assumption about their intentions, because there's no evidence.
In fact, the evidence goes the other way.
We know this.
Again, I'm saying things that people can hear on the show, you know, very frequently.
Well, did you hear the one with Peter Jenkins, who he was negotiating on behalf of the British back during the 03 through 05 freeze under the additional protocol and all of that, the E3 negotiations.
And he had come to the same conclusion that the CIA told Seymour Hersh that they had come to that the Iranians back when they were ever even considering nuclear weapons and, you know, compiling a little bit of paperwork about how they might proceed down that path.
It was only because they were afraid that the Republicans were going to have Saddam Hussein invade them again.
That's all.
Yeah.
Or the Democrats.
It was actually Jimmy Carter that had him do it, right?
Once they were able to, and this is back to the beginning of the conversation, once they were able to use Ahmed Chalabi to lie the neocons into war on behalf of Israel, they thought, against Saddam in 2003, well, that was the last they needed to worry about that.
Now they've got, might as well be Mexico or Canada as their next door neighbor now.
Right.
And hence, we have the National Intelligence Estimates from, what is it, 07 and 2011 by the 16 American intelligence agencies saying there's not been a decision to make a weapon, they're not making a weapon, anything, anything in the way of the beginnings of a program was scrapped in 2003, just like you said, with the overthrow of Saddam.
And the Israeli intelligence people, same thing.
And so what do we need?
What more do we need?
And Netanyahu is simply using this to distract everybody from the Palestinians.
And what are they doing now?
Building more settlements.
They've announced they're going to build more settlements.
Some of these process.
Yeah, 2,000 new units going up.
And that's what I was just going to ask you about, was have you ever seen the documentary The Gatekeepers?
I don't think I have.
Well, I had only ever found it on Pirate Bay without subtitles.
But if you go to my new documentaries section at scotthorton.org slash documentaries, I got, well, all the good documentaries I could think of.
I need to add a couple of more that I thought of since then.
But there's about three or four pages worth of documentaries, other people's documentaries, not that I ever made any of them, that I've just embedded there, recommended viewing kind of stuff.
And it's got the subtitles there.
And what it is, is it's all interviews with former leaders of the Shin Bet, you know, the internal security.
If you count the West Bank as Israeli territory and then the Gaza Strip, then they're the, you know, internals, federal police or national police of of Israel.
And what they talk about is how they've all along thought, even though, of course, it's their job clamping down on anyone who resists.
They've all along thought since 67 that it doesn't make any sense to try to hold on to the West Bank, especially forever like this.
There are already people who live there, you know.
And and they even quote that guy that Justin Raimondo wrote about in his review of Max Blumenthal's book, Leibowitz, the rabbi who talked about how, you know, occupying the West Bank and in East Jerusalem and Gaza over the long term will change the character of the Israeli state to, you know, occupier and and quizzling operator and and all of these terrible things.
Anyway, so the reason I brought it up specifically, well, it's important, especially you mentioned how this Iran thing is a big distraction from it.
So I kind of want to focus on an extra.
But it finally occurred to me the other day, the correct answer to a question that I've talked about, I think with you a few times and with Phil Weiss, especially this comes up on the show where he likes to ask me what I think regular other people in America think.
The average like flyover country, American hicks, what do they think of the situation with Israel?
And so my best answer has always been and kind of don't know nothing about it.
And you always hear just the poor little Israel side of things.
But it's always pretty, you know, just a general impression.
They never really explain about the occupation.
But it finally occurred to me that that's not really right.
You know what it is.
It's they never really explain it.
But this is the before you really look into it kind of capsule of the situation over there, Sheldon, is that the is the Palestinians are holding the Israelis hostage and waging a terrorist war against them, trying to take land away from the Israelis.
And it's all just encapsulated in the slogan Land for Peace.
It's so unreasonable to insist that the Israelis should have to give up land for peace and then nobody ever has to prove that it's their land.
Right.
They only just make it sound like there's this terrorist horde coming from the east.
And the only way and how unreasonable and criminal of the world to insist that the Israelis should have to bribe them off by giving up land in order to not have suicide bombings on their buses and in their pizzerias and movie theaters anymore.
And it's such a gigantic lie just packed into that little statement about what the peace proposal supposedly is, right, that they should give up this land, the implication that it belongs to them, that the West Bank is somehow Israeli territory, as though there aren't millions of Palestinians already living there, that they haven't been this whole time.
And and that's really the answer to the question about what I believe regular Americans think, you know, people who and by regular Americans, I don't mean non-Jews because I include Jews in this too, people who don't really care about foreign policy or think about the outside world at all, think about anything with their own life at all.
You know, that's just kind of the general impression of the situation is that, you know, poor little Israel is being held hostage by the terrorists.
Well, they've been told they've been told that for, you know, since the late 40s by almost by everybody.
That's a lot worse than my previous mistaken answer that I thought that they just don't really understand.
So I was trying to think back to what I used to think or whatever.
And I guess I just didn't really understand.
But I think that's what most people think they understand about it.
You know, a little more clarity anyway.
Sorry it took so long for me to explain.
That war and the ones that don't take that position, the one you just said, I think probably take the position of, oh, this is an ancient religious fight, you know, that, you know, I can't figure out.
It just goes back to antiquity.
And why don't those people get over it?
And which, of course, it isn't.
It's not an old religious dispute.
It's a fairly recent property dispute, land dispute, the water dispute.
It happens that the the occupiers, the ones who have taken land from the Palestinians, you know, are saying this in the name of the Jewish people and that they're declaring a Jewish state.
And but, you know, that's not I don't think that's really the essential issue.
The issue is one group taking land from another group.
But but the Americans are sympathetic to the Israelis.
And, you know, you can see the reasons, the reasons that aren't terribly relevant.
But, you know, they still they still affect people.
I mean, the stories of Germany in World War Two and the Holocaust.
But, of course, the Palestinians were nowhere near Germany during Hitler's regime, had nothing to do with it.
But they but they still think, you know.
The Palestinians are the ones at fault here.
And and the media reinforces this.
And you just hear it everywhere you go.
I mean, you know, I try to monitor the media, especially, you know, like these cable talk shows.
When do you ever see a Palestinian spokesman or a Palestinian American on TV for any extended time speaking about all this, you know, being given a chance to really spell it out?
You don't see it.
You see Israelis all the time where you see, you know, the organization representatives from from Jewish American organizations that come on and give Israel's case.
And, of course, the Israelis can have a spokesman who speak perfect English, like their ambassadors tend to not even have accents.
They're born and raised in the United States.
And that's who, you know, went to Cheltenham High School outside of Philadelphia.
And they worked with Romney in Massachusetts in the 70s in the finance industry.
So, you know, it's like advantage Israel because and it's all stacked up that way.
And that's where the sympathies are.
Of course, the Americans aren't going to understand it.
How many hours do they ever run into in their lives?
I mean, look, when Israel declared independence in 1948, Truman was, of course, some members of Truman's staff were saying, OK, let's we need to recognize Israel.
And he had other members of his administration, the State Department, saying, wait a second, wait a second, let's let's take this easy here.
We don't want violence to break out.
The you know, the Arabs were not consulted on any of this, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And Truman basically says, you know, don't forget, 48 was an election coming up in 48.
I don't there aren't that many Arabs that I have to worry about electorally, he said.
That's essentially what he said.
It was a political decision.
There's not an Arab vote that I need to worry about.
That's what he said.
Yeah.
Well, none of these politicians care about the long term whatsoever.
That's another big theme of that of that movie.
It's just like we always joke.
The exact words we use to make fun of the leaders of the right wing parties in Israel is it's all tactics, no strategy whatsoever.
Like the question we've been asking forever.
It's the simplest thought experiment in the world.
Oh, yeah.
Who comes after Assad?
The Muslim Brotherhood, if you're lucky.
Right.
And then what do they do?
They go push to overthrow Assad, replace him with al-Qaeda suicide bombers.
Really?
There really are that thoughtful about our foreign policy and what it has to be on their behalf.
It's ridiculous.
You can just take kids out of 10th grade and ask them to come up with a foreign policy and they do better.
I know we do.
We can't say, well, they must know what they're doing.
I mean, it's the most laughable line in the whole matter.
Because how much how what do they have to do to demonstrate that they don't know what they're doing?
I don't know.
There is no answer to that question.
Thanks, Sheldon.
Happy New Year, Scott.
Appreciate you too.
That's the great Sheldon Richmond, everybody.
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