03/24/14 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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Well, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our next guest is Phil Giraldi.
He is formerly a CIA officer and DIA officer, and now he is editor, contributor, this, that, the other thing, writer for Antiwar.com, the American conservative magazine, as well as Uns.com.
Well, pretty much just like Eric Margulies.
And then also he's the executive director of the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
Put on any good conferences lately?
Well, we had one a couple of weeks ago that you attended and spoke at, you know, about reevaluating the Israeli-United States special relationship.
I think it was a pretty big success.
We had a packed house of over 350 people at the National Press Club, and it was actually on C-SPAN Live, which is a first.
Yeah, yeah, that was a really big deal, and I would definitely say a great success.
And now, so tell me this, where might people be able to go and see the footage and or hear the audio from this great conference and all the great speeches that were given there?
Well, we're gradually putting them up on the website.
It's at natsummit.org.
Most of them are up.
In fact, all the speeches are up in terms of audio.
We have transcripts of nearly all the speeches.
If you go to the bios of the 24 speakers, you'll see transcripts of the speeches that they gave, and so it's all pretty much there.
It should all be completely there in the next day or two.
And there's some really good speeches in there.
I mean, all of them were pretty good, but some of them were absolutely great and definitely worth people's time to go and take a look.
Again, it was the National Summit to Reassess the American-Israel Special Relationship.
It's at natsummit.org, and I think you watched the video on C-SPAN, too, cspan.org, I think they still have it there.
Yeah, it's available on C-SPAN.
You might have to search a little bit for it, but it's there.
Yeah, it's on there.
All right, good deal.
Now, I want to start with something that you said on the phone earlier when I was calling you to see if you could do the show today, and that was that you were talking with a mutual friend of ours who's been going to some kind of conservative meetings around Washington, D.C., and he's been learning some terrifying things.
Like what?
Yeah, well, this is a good friend of mine, and you know him, too, who's a long-time traditional conservative, and he attends all these weekly gatherings by conservative groups like Grover Norquist and others have, and he says it's absolutely frightening what's going on.
He says that the bloodlust that seems to be currently out and visible and audible over confronting Russia is astonishing, and he says that in some ways he almost thinks it's worse than it was before Iraq.
Now, I've got to wonder about that, because when I think back to 2001, 2002, and early 2003 in that era, and not just lying us into war, but intimidating us into war, it sure seems like Washington, D.C., they were either gung-ho fully on board, or they were at least intimidated first among all of us in the whole country, and seemed, I mean, I can't imagine the pressure that somebody like Grover Norquist was under.
I know he's much more fiscal conservative than any kind of imperialist ideologue, and I don't know if he was really for Iraq or not, but I'm sure that he didn't have much choice in supporting it at the time, you know?
Yeah, well, Grover actually was not supportive of the Iraq war, and he takes fairly moderate positions on many foreign policy issues, but I think what my friend is saying is that he's astonished by the level of this anger that seems to be surfacing.
Sure, I mean, recollections of what it was like back in 2003, yeah, it was a lot different.
In fact, this friend of mine and I, for the only time in our lives, marched at peace demonstrations in Washington, so it was different, there's no question about it, but I think what's really surprised him is just, you know, why this issue has caught fire.
I mean, why are all the leading newspapers calling for aggressive steps against Russia?
Why are all the talking heads, you know, we expect that?
Why the politicians are all on board with this?
I mean, it's just that it makes no sense.
We have no reason to be doing this.
We don't have to approve of what Russia does, we don't have to approve of Putin, but the fact is that it's a sovereign country, and what it's doing, it has plausible reasons to be doing, and the fact that we want to get involved in the middle of this is just insanity.
Yeah, it's funny, because it seems like, well, I don't know, I mean, I guess I'll ask you, you know, what you think all the different incentives are.
It seems to me like one incentive that ought to be in play would be, especially among some of these older, you know, maybe former secretaries of state and things like that, that they could play cool, gray beard, easy there tiger, cooler heads prevail type of a role in this thing, you know, maybe a Baker or a Scowcroft or somebody, I guess Kissinger wrote something about everybody calm down a little bit, but for the most part, it seems like there's been very little of that.
And I guess I don't understand why not.
It seems like there would be at least some of these people would think that's the reputation that they want for their own future, that that they're the wise man for later on, you know, after Brzezinski dies or whatever.
Yeah, well, the funny thing is a lot of this agitation is coming from Democrats.
It's coming from there was a piece in the Washington Post two days ago by Madeleine Albright calling for aggressive steps.
There was a Sandy Berger about two weeks ago had a similar piece.
I mean, this is a if there ever was a failed foreign policy, it was under Bill Clinton and which we've unfortunately continued ever since then.
But the fact is, you know, he started all this stuff.
And so they're calling for, you know, confronting Russia.
And of course, we have the the the progressive interventionists that are in the in the administration right now.
And Susan Rice, you know, it's these people.
And I'm just doing a little research on the ambassador who just left the U.S. ambassador just like Russia, McFaul.
And this guy was it was a democracy promoter put in as ambassador to Moscow.
I mean, what kind of sense does this stuff make?
Yeah, well, it's not like they have any H-bombs anymore, right?
Or do they?
Only about 800 of them.
I mean, it's not like America would use nukes if the Russians were busily working to overthrow our government and they put our governments back up against the wall.
A situation like that.
Right.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We were the only nation in history to use nukes.
Yeah, I mean, I can I can see the mushroom clouds now.
I can feel the heat from them.
All right.
Now, so now here's the thing about it.
It seems like, you know, for Berger and Albright, for example, that you mentioned there, the Clintonites who really, you know, push this expand NATO policy for whatever reasons, is it now that they just can't admit that?
Well, geez, if this is a problem, then that means I got us into it and I can't admit that.
So I got to just double down.
Is it that obvious and that simple?
Well, to me, I mean, being an adult about these issues, if you make a mistake and in retrospect, it was a mistake, you admit it.
But you're right.
I mean, our ruling class in this country can never admit that it's made a mistake.
I mean, how few of the people who pushed for the Iraq war, for example, have have said it was a mistake.
I didn't count them on the two fingers of one hand and that's about it.
And it's just absolutely amazing that these terrible policies continue and the people who who coined the policies or the architects of the policies can never seemingly admit that they did something wrong.
I mean, it's just you can go back to the Balkans and everything, how screwed up that was and bombing Serbia and everything.
None of these policies were thought through to the point that they made any sense and they don't make any sense now.
Yeah, well, you know, I'll contradict myself, too, about the consensus, because at least well, no, I mean, it's still right.
It's the exceptions that prove the rule, but they're pretty powerful exceptions in the media lately.
I'm thinking of Jack Matlock, the former ambassador of the USSR, who wrote in The Washington Post and was on this show, as well as Leslie Gelb, who is a former president of the Council on Foreign Relations and helped Dan Ellsberg write the Pentagon Papers back when and is, you know, very influential sort of mini Brzezinski type among the Democrats, as best I can tell.
And and then, of course, Paul Pilar has written some stuff like this, former leader at the National Intelligence Council there saying, hey, hey, guys, let's at least tell the truth about what's going on here.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
We don't want to have our relationship with Russia based on policies that really are based on the narrative that we're saying on TV here.
Right.
And there's supposed to be a difference between lying and believe in your own lie.
And when it comes to our relationship with Russia, we can't afford to be dishonest about what happened here.
We sort of kind of picked this fight.
OK, that kind of thing.
So I don't know if that's really getting through, but it's sort of in fact, it probably isn't.
And it's a measure of of how desperate somebody like Leslie Gelb would be to write something like that to say, hey, guys, come on, can we please get back to basing our our discussion of what to do on the real facts of the matter instead of just what we're telling the rubes, you know?
Yeah, absolutely.
It's crazy.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry.
I talked us all the way to the damn break.
Now we're talking with Phil Giraldi from the Council for the National Interest and Antiwar dot com and the American conservative and all that.
We'll be back in just a sec.
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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.
And we got Phil Giraldi on the line here, he writes for the American conservative magazine and antiwar dot com and owns dot com.
There are a lot of great stuff over there, owns dot com.
And I guess I'll go ahead and ask you about this now, because I want to get back to Ukraine in a sec.
Well, no, let's do Ukraine and then I'll ask you about this.
And writing a note to myself here, Ukraine.
So there's a lot of things about Ukraine worth discussing.
But one thing that I wonder whether you saw this and what you think it really means, maybe if you could explain the relative power of these groups and how much it may matter, if it does matter.
This article that I saw here about how this Voboda party is building a very close relationship with Germany's neo-Nazi NPD party and the German Nazis.
They approve very strongly of America's regime change over there in Ukraine.
I was wondering if you could just talk about, I guess, maybe what you know about the regime change and and how important is this?
Is this what it looks like that?
Did I just say that the German Nazis are in on this with us?
Well, there's been a lot of there's been a lot of reporting that one of the certainly it's true that one of the coalition parties in the interim Ukrainian government is neo-Nazi.
It's a fascist party.
And clearly they have connections with other fascist parties in Europe just because that's the way these things work.
And yeah, so I mean, it's like, well, you remember all the denial that was going on about Al-Qaeda type terrorists being connected with the insurgency in Syria.
I think we're seeing the same sort of thing where obviously these these groups who are organized, have money, have connections all across Europe are a lot stronger than their numbers might indicate.
And this is the horse we're backing.
You know, John McCain put his arm around the leader of the party when they were when he made one of his notorious visits to Maidan Square.
So it's you know, it's the kind of it's the kind of things you get caught up in because you don't understand what's going on in these places and these people are manipulating you.
That's exactly what happens.
Yeah.
You know, I saw where people are complaining.
Ukrainians are complaining.
They're like, hey, nobody really likes these guys.
It's the American intervention.
And and for example, the deal brokered by the European Union that really gave them enhanced power.
And then I'm trying to remember who it was.
It might have been in a comment section where somebody was saying everybody thinks that they can use the fascists to get their little dirty work done, but that it's not going to be a threat.
But that's not how it usually works out in history, man.
These guys are fanatical and they've won themselves now.
And I don't know how much popular support they really do have, but they've won something around the order of eight major positions in the new government, including I'm not exactly sure, but I think the secretary of defense and the head of the National Police and the top attorney general and all this, right?
Yeah, they have they have serious leverage over the government.
And as you say, they have eight senior positions in the government.
And so, you know, it's like, all right, we don't know what these guys represent.
Maybe they're being misrepresented by the media, too.
But, you know, it's one of these situations you don't know what's going on.
And you're you're backing people because of some ideological agenda you have.
And it's it's it's a it's a recipe for disaster and it's a recipe for disaster over and over again.
And what makes this one particularly bad is the fact that the confrontation is with Russia and Russia is a serious, major military power.
And, you know, it's like, why are we seeing this?
God.
Yeah.
Well, it goes back to what you're saying about the conversation, especially among conservatives there, you know, where you have a window into the conversation in Washington, D.C.
I wonder, is anyone I mean, even John McCain said there are no military options here.
I mean, come on.
Nukes are nukes.
Right.
So, I mean, they realize there's some kind of limit, but they don't seem to realize where it is.
They sure do seem to push too far.
I mean, this this put latest push being the best example of that.
And then they want to act surprised about Crimea, but they're not really.
Yeah, well, the thing is, you know, McCain and these others are saying there's no military option because there is no military option.
We we don't have the resources in that part of the world to actually do anything militarily.
And he knows that.
And anybody who looks at the situation knows it.
But they're quite willing to push Russia into a corner by every other means, sanctions, you know, declaring the Russian leaders to be more criminals.
The whole the whole bag of baggage of things that they tend to do.
They're quite willing to put Russia into a corner and and and expect that Russia is not going to react.
I mean, that's what's so crazy about this.
It's not I don't expect nukes are going to be flying next week or anything like that.
But the fact is that there are consequences every time you create these kinds of situations where you're you're putting somebody else on the defensive and you're you're increasing the pressure like we do with Iran.
And their consequences are that you don't you can't really get out of the box yourself.
You're trapped in by your own rhetoric, rhetoric.
You're trapped in by what you're doing to the other guy.
And I think this is that this is what's awful about these situations.
Instead of sitting back and reasonably addressing the issues and talking about the issues, they just want to go ballistic every time.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so what if Putin decided to really call the bluff and invade the Baltics?
I mean, would they I mean, those are already NATO members.
Those countries are even I guess you could answer if you want about what if he invades East Ukraine or all of Ukraine.
But what if he went ahead and called our bluff on NATO in Eastern Europe altogether and said, enough of this, you know, you want to defend Germany fine, but, you know, this part of Europe is our backyard and your alliance is now null and void.
What would they do then?
Would they would it would that be a nuclear war or would they back down or what do you think?
Well, I think, well, first of all, I don't think Putin has any kind of ambition like that.
But the fact is that if that were that scenario were to play out, I think NATO would be obligated to defend the three countries there.
And it could be nuclear war.
And that's why this stuff is scary.
It's real world scary that we pushed the borders of NATO right up to Russia.
It would have been fine to, you know, bring these countries into the European Union because that's essentially an economic union and a political union.
But to push a military alliance up to the doorstep of a country that you had promised not to do this, it's it's crazy.
Every all of this stuff has been crazy.
Yeah, I mean, you know, that guy Matlock, Jack Matlock, the former ambassador, his piece in in The Washington Post said America's been a bully this whole time, kicking them while they're down this whole time for 20 years instead of being a good sport about it.
We whooped them in the Cold War.
Their empire fell apart.
And then we do nothing but persecute them and humiliate them and degrade them.
And then we're, you know, and as you're saying, push right up to their borders and then act like, oh, no, history began the other day as soon as, you know, their troops left their bases on the Crimean Peninsula.
And never mind leading up to that.
The research I was just doing on this ambassador of McFaul, I mean, he he met with opposition as soon as he arrived in Moscow.
He met with opposition politicians before he even presented his credentials at the foreign ministry.
He was sending a signal that that were with the opposition.
How does an ambassador from a major power do that to another major power and expect that there are no consequences?
This kind of stuff is just it is so crazy.
I just I mean, I can't even believe that I get I have a feeling like I'm just going to go crazy at some point because I don't understand this anymore.
It is.
It's madness.
I mean, even with John Kerry running the State Department, still, it's almost unbelievable that that could be true.
All right, well, hell no, we don't have that much time, but I want to ask you about Turkey because we talked before about how, yeah, you let them have democracy in Turkey.
They elect conservative Islamists and that's what Erdogan is.
And the young and the high tech and the people that live in the city, they're, you know, the Turkish version of the Democrats, basically.
And they may not like it and they may throw a big protest.
But he really does have majority support.
But then, boy, sure, things sure don't look like it on CNN nowadays.
I don't know what is going on.
Well, he's basically gone a little nuts.
What's coming up is elections, local elections on Sunday.
And the two biggest prizes are Ankara and Istanbul.
And Istanbul is by far the biggest prize.
It looks like his party is going to lose in Istanbul.
Erdogan was mayor of Istanbul.
So, you know, he's that's one of his bases of support.
And it looks like he's going to lose it.
That kind of changes everything in Turkey.
It means that Erdogan will not be able to run for president in September.
And it means that his party will be back on its heels.
The guy is basically, you know, he's gone in a way crazy in terms of trying to suppress the opposition to him, which is every time he does something, he grows.
He he closed down Twitter a couple of days ago.
He's he's against the Internet.
He's done a lot of things that are making people very nervous about what he represents.
Syria.
Yeah, yeah.
He shot down a Syrian plane that was inside Syria, apparently.
But he's doing that as a diversion.
And so the thing is, the guy that shows the the the downside of electing people that, you know, run basically on a religious agenda because his support is essentially religious is that his supporters are the peasants in the countryside who are deeply religious but don't really think seriously about other issues.
And, you know, how this will play out in Turkey, I don't know.
The Turks are very tough, very hard minded people.
And this can go in a lot of different directions.
Well, so now what about the National Endowment for Democracy and or the CIA in Turkey?
I mean, they would prefer the old secular military dictatorship to any kind of elected religious conservative like him, wouldn't they?
Yeah, they would.
I don't think that is operating there because the Turks probably would not permit that.
And having been in the CIA in that country, I could assure you that CIA is being very careful about what it does because the Turkish security services are very good.
So you don't think this is a color coded revolution in a way here?
No, I don't think so.
I don't think we have that kind of leverage and I don't think that we're involved in that kind of level.
All right.
They'd like to try, but they just don't figure they can get away with it.
Yeah, I think that's probably the best way to put it.
Well, now I'd say till we got no time whatsoever, hardly left for you to address this.
But did you see the five part series by Patrick Coburn about the next generation of suicide bomber Al-Qaedaites in Libya, Syria, et cetera?
And what do you think of it?
Overstated, understated, big deal?
I think it's overstated a bit because, you know, you got to tell a story.
But the fact is, I think his facts are certainly credible.
So far as I was aware of the background to them, it was a very, it was very, very good, very well done.
Yeah, well, that's really too bad.
I really like his journalism, too.
I think he does a great job.
Unfortunately, that means what he writes is accurate and what he writes is horrible.
But there you go.
Yeah, I know.
That's Phil Giraldi, everybody.
Antiwar dot com.
Appreciate it.
Right on time.
All right, Scott.
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