03/17/14 – Nicolas J.S. Davies – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, first guest on the show today is Nicholas J.S. Davies.
He writes for Alternet, and I apologize to him and you that I don't have a complete bio here, but anyway, welcome to the show, Nicholas.
How are you doing?
Yeah, hi, Scott.
Yep, doing alright here amidst all the chaos that our country's creating around the world, but I'm sitting here in Miami.
It's a nice day, and you know, all's right in my little corner here.
Well, that's good.
They haven't gotten you nuked off the face of the earth yet.
We'll take that as a blessing.
Well, good.
I'm happy that we're all still alive.
We can do a radio show.
So I really like this piece.
I like when anybody will take the time to go through and make a catalog like this.
This is the sort of article that can kind of live forever, even sort of maybe in pamphlet form or something, and I bet will.
It's the kind of thing that a high school student on a bus somewhere or any housewife visiting a doctor's office or anybody can just pick this thing up and start looking at it.
Thirty-five countries where the U.S. has supported fascists, drug lords, and terrorists.
And I already know that you're right about this stuff, so go ahead and go down the list A to Z here, as much as we can fit in half an hour.
Yeah, well, I don't know, we started A, Afghanistan, and I think Afghanistan should be a lesson to all of us and to our policymakers of where this leads.
They had a socialist government that had evolved over many years since they really achieved complete independence from Britain back in 1919, and successive governments in Afghanistan were trying to improve the lives of their people, and they had a government that was doing more than any previous one for women's rights and education and very critically land reform, and of course that was where a lot of the established tribal leaders and rural landowners were very unhappy with the government, and so the U.S. and its allies exploited that to back the most conservative, socially regressive forces in the country and ultimately overthrow the government.
One doesn't even necessarily have to concede to the graciousness or the benevolence of the government in Kabul to recognize that, at least according to the Americans like Zbigniew Brzezinski, they bragged, Robert Gates too in his book, they bragged that they didn't just react to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by bankrolling the Mujaheddin, they started backing the Mujaheddin in order to provoke the Soviets into invading in a war that ended up costing millions of Afghan lives, approximately 2 million people died during that thing, and then of course, you know, all of the blowback and reaction that we know has come since then up to and including and through the American invasion and occupation that's now lasted more than a dozen years.
Yes, absolutely, and I mean, this is where, you know, the title talks about fascists, drug lords, and terrorists, you know, in Afghanistan we are talking drug lords and terrorists, you know, the people who we have consistently backed and put into power there have turned the country into, you know, a narco state, you know, in my article, I talk about the actual production of heroin, of opium and heroin from that country, and I mean, previously, you know, you were talking maybe, you know, tens or hundreds of tons, you know, once these guys seized power in the 1990s, you know, there was just a tenfold increase in production of opium to where it fluctuated between 2,000 and 3,500 tons per year, but since the U.S. invaded in 2001, since 2004, for the last 10 years, the country has produced more than 5,000 tons of opium per year, and, you know, this is what our government has done in Afghanistan, you know.
I thought it was great the way you linked to this New York Times story about how Hamid Karzai, the sock puppet so-called president there, his brother is a well-known CIA-backed drug lord, and that was the article where it was so obvious at the time that it was the CIA that put the article in the New York Times in the first place, because they were trying to discredit Karzai in favor of Abdullah Abdullah, which didn't work, but they were trying to regime change him back in 2009, and so they leaked this story about how Karzai's got no credibility because he's a heroin dealer backed by us.
Right.
Yeah, no, I mean, and, you know, and then when you come to terrorism, well, you know, here we are, if we ever needed an object lesson in the kind of trouble this can cause when we back these kind of people and arm them and train them, you know, here we have, you know, the very roots of Al-Qaeda, and, you know, this is, and yet, here we are, you know, what, 20, 30 years later, just going down the same road, Libya, Syria.
We've got a deal to stay in Afghanistan until 2024, never mind the rest of them.
All right, now, and speaking of the rest of them, we've got about two and a half, three minutes here before we've got to go out to our break, and so I guess instead of doing alphabetical order, it makes sense for the article, but let's go, you decide whether you want to go, if you want to divide up the nations by, for example, geography, Latin American interventions, or African ones, or whether you want to talk about, you know, chronologically, 50s and 60s interventions versus 70s and 80s ones, or however you want to break it up.
I want to give you a chance to really kind of go down the list and shock people a little bit at just the quantity and the amount, the endless reach of the American intelligence and military agencies and regime-changing other people's countries around the world.
I mean, for someone who doesn't already know this stuff, it ought to blow their mind, you know?
Yeah, well, it really should do, because it's sure not the way the U.S. likes to present itself.
You know, I think, perhaps, you know, I could start by, you know, I would urge people to read the article, but secondly, if they want to see more of this stuff, more of this big picture, I would, there's a book I would recommend by William Bloom, that's B-L-U-M, and the title is Killing Hope, and this really documents, you know, on a broader scale, just all U.S. military and CIA interventions in countries around the world since 1945.
And he's a former State Department official, correct?
I'm sorry?
He worked in the State Department in the 60s, yeah, and became pretty swiftly disillusioned.
But he, you know, you know, I think what's, the comment, the most common comment I got reading the comments to this article on Alternet were not, oh my God, 35 countries, it was more like people going, hey, how about this country you just mentioned, and only 35, are you kidding?
Right.
So yeah, anyone who has studied this stuff understands that this is, you know, as I said in the article, what it really represents in the big picture is, you know, this elusive but relentless quest for unchallenged global power, in which the U.S. has been completely unscrupulous in terms of who it is willing to work with to achieve goals that are, I think most of us would agree, are really unattainable.
And so this is, you know, just an incredibly tragic history of what our country and our government has done with its unparalleled wealth and power over the last century.
Well, you know, I mean, it's gone so far where people even think to refer to foreigners as humans whose lives and rights are worth considering at all as sort of some kind of pansy, lefty, liberal, hippie kind of a concept.
Everybody knows that when it comes to state and state action, foreigners don't have rights except to lay down and die and or, you know, do what they're told if they know what's good for them.
And that's about it.
And it's, you know, that's just the adult, reasonable, realist point of view about how the world works and what state action is.
So it really doesn't matter about collateral damage or anything like that.
That's where they came up with the name collateral damage in the first place.
And it's it's something unique for for Americans to actually consider foreigners as people at all.
I'm sorry.
We've got to go this break.
We'll be right back with Nicholas J. Davies in just a sec.
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All right.
All right.
Welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Nicholas J.S. Davies.
He wrote this thing for Alternet.
It's also at Salon.com.
You might have seen it.
Made the rounds.
Went pretty viral last week.
It's the era of the listicle, right?
What can we say?
Thirty five countries where the U.S. has supported fascists, drug lords and terrorists.
And then I'm sorry we got interrupted by the break.
I was sort of going on moralizing there about how ultimately Americans, all of us and I don't know all of us, but Americans generally speaking of all different races, have sort of this honorary white supremacy in a way or whatever it is that if you're an American, it's just perfectly OK to kill the hell out of anybody.
How could anybody justify nuking Hiroshima?
And the answer is because Japanese are considered basically the same as ants.
And in fact, Admiral Fallon, who stopped the war with Iran in 2007, later told, I guess, Vanity Fair magazine that, look, these people are ants.
And when it comes to time to do so, we will crush them.
He was the hero who stopped the war.
And his point being that, you know, they're kooks.
In fact, Noam Chomsky likes to likes to quote Lloyd George as saying, well, we must reserve the right to kill.
And then, you know, the N word I wouldn't possibly repeat on the air here for you.
And that really is the attitude that as long as it's the government doing it, there is no limit to the amount of murder that they can commit, other than maybe the amount of American soldiers that get wounded in the process or something like that.
Yeah.
And yet there's this incredible sort of propaganda system to convey the impression to Americans and to the world that, you know, that this is all well-intentioned and and that as President Obama has said, that the U.S. military is the greatest force for good in the world.
And this is remarkably effective.
And so, you know, I guess that's where I hope an article like this can help, because, you know, you have to sort of hold up this this image that the U.S. presents of itself to the world and then hold up what I'm writing about in this article on the other side and say, well, wait a minute, these can't both be true.
And, you know, hopefully, hopefully this this will encourage people to think about these things and do some more research of their own and really, really, really recognize that, you know, we need substantial change in the way our government behaves in the world.
You know, we're not talking about fine tuning here.
We need we really need to turn over a new leaf in or if we are not going to just continue to spread violence and chaos across the world.
All right.
Well, everybody knows about the massive war to prop up the fascist dictatorship of South Korea.
But for one example that you have on the list here, although people don't usually think of it in those terms, they know that that's true, that they didn't really start having regular elections until the late 1980s there.
But anyway, which which of these surprise you, which of these were ones that you had heard the least about or maybe learned something new about, you know, fascist dictatorships here supported by the United States?
Well, I'll tell you, I the last article I wrote for Alternet was basically about the failed war on terror.
You know, I used the State Department's own statistics to show that, in fact, the result of the so-called war on terror has been a massive explosion of terrorism all over the world.
And a guy called Larry Johnson, who worked really his whole career at the CIA and the State Department Department on these issues, read my article and he he respond.
I think his response was was pretty interesting because he he said that the main problem with respect to assessing the terrorist threat is to accurately define the state sponsorship.
The biggest culprits today, in contrast to 20 years ago, are Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
He also added that Iran is really not a state sponsor of terrorism to the extent that we are led to believe.
But, you know, this is to me, this was this this was pretty interesting.
You know, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
And in fact, Patrick Coburn has a brand new piece out just like that to the second act, Al-Qaeda, the second act, why the global war on terror went wrong.
And that's exactly what he says, too.
Right.
And, you know, and these are, again, you know, the three major U.S. allies, the U.S. in the past 10 years or so, the U.S. has given over 18 billion dollars in military aid to Pakistan.
I mean, some of which we know is being used through their ISI intelligence service, you know, to to support the Taliban and the same people that our troops are fighting in Afghanistan.
You know, and this this this is just I mean, this just seems like insanity.
I think that's the way the Afghans look at it.
They they just think we are completely, completely not to be essentially supporting both sides in a war in their country, you know.
And then Saudi Arabia, the United States just closed the largest arms deal in history, 60 billion dollars, you know, in F-15s and on all kinds of other other other weaponry, you know, to one of the three largest state sponsors of terrorism in the world.
And then, I mean, Turkey is pretty interesting because we don't hear so much about that.
But in fact, it seems that as the Saudis are starting to be alarmed themselves by what what they have unleashed in Syria and they have even passed a law now, you know, with long prison sentences for Saudis who engage in terrorism and then come back to Saudi Arabia, maybe that's just to deter them from coming back.
But but as the Saudis themselves seem to have scared themselves in what they've unleashed in Syria, you know, it seems like Turkey is is still full steam ahead.
You know, we don't seem to be seeing any let up in Turkish support for the Al-Qaeda related groups in in who are demolishing Syria as we speak.
And so and of course, Turkey is, you know, an actual member of NATO.
I mean, here where, you know, we're debating whether Georgia and Ukraine should be members of NATO or if that's part of the U.S. plan here, which the Russians seem to have managed to defuse.
But Turkey is a long standing member of NATO.
And yet here they are completely, you know, involved in a proxy war with U.S. support that has killed at least 100000 people in Syria, turned millions of Syrians into refugees, wrecked entire neighborhoods and villages and towns.
And and and it's still going on.
Right.
And while America's backing so-called revolution against a military dictatorship in Syria, one that they don't control, they support the military dictators of Egypt.
And, you know, I'm a libertarian and I think it sounds like you're coming from the left somewhere and it's pretty easy.
I'm not putting words in your mouth, but it's pretty easy for people like us to refer to pretty much any military dictatorship as fascism.
You know, certainly you look at Egypt as an economic system.
Maybe they don't have, you know, all 14 points of fascism or whatever going on.
But as an economic system and as a dictatorship, it sure seems pretty fascist if you're on the receiving end of it.
But now tell me what you think, Nicholas, about what's going on in Ukraine, because I got pictures of the guys that America's backing, including John McCain's friend, Tanny Bok, with his Hitler salute up in the air.
I got guys with SS lightning bolts and iron crosses running around in the Maiden and and apparently what, at least eight members of right sector and Svoboda have gotten high level positions in the new government, including as head of the police, you know, the national police force here is the kind of thing where, you know, any kind of right leaning groups anywhere else in Europe, you know, think like Haider in Austria back 10, 15 years ago, whatever, when when he had said some politically incorrect things about race, he was nothing.
He wasn't parading around with SS lighting bolts and Hitler's salutes, and they treated him like he was Hitler reborn.
But in this case, they're outright backing these guys who are proud to be descendants of pro-Nazi forces.
Absolutely.
I mean, they're putting up statues to a guy, Bandera, who was sort of the head of the Ukrainian right wing militia that worked with the Nazis.
And, you know, in Germany, you'd go to jail for any of this stuff.
So but as you said, I am off the left.
You know, the group I work with politically is the Progressive Democrats of America, and we put out an action alert to our members last week for them to contact the State Department and the White House and their members of Congress and demand three things.
Number one, the immediate resignation of Victoria Nuland and Jeffrey Piatt.
And for anyone listening who does not know, these are the two U.S. officials who were caught on tape by the Russians discussing how they were going to replace the government, the elected government in the Ukraine.
Just so you know, we got one minute.
OK.
And so we're asking for their resignation.
Victoria Nuland is married to Robert Kagan, the co-founder of the Project for the New American Century.
These are the neocons that most Democrats in this country thought they voted out of office in 2006 and 2008.
And they are still here.
They never left.
Right.
Yeah, that's such an important point.
And yeah, this listenership does know we play those clips many times on the show, have been trying to focus on that.
But yeah, that sure is a hell of a way to wrap this thing up.
Backing outright fascists, outright, as my friend, I'm a broken record on this show at this point.
But my friend Sheldon Richman and I were joking that anybody with a SS light with SS lightning bolts is not afraid that you're going to mistake them for a Nazi.
They really are a Nazi.
That's why they got the damn lightning bolts.
It's about as simple as that.
There is no alternative explanation.
So why doesn't Nuland put on one of those outfits?
It would be fitting.
You know, her and her brother in law, fat neck Fred, maybe they could go reinvade Iraq.
Yeah.
Frederick and Robert Kagan.
Yeah.
And Kimberly, too.
Boy.
All right.
We're out of time.
Thank you so much for your time.
Nicholas J.S. Davies, everybody.
Appreciate it.
All right.
Thanks a lot.
Salon dot com and alternate dot org.
We'll be right back with Gareth Porter in just a sec.
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