12/05/14 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Next up is our friend Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst for 27 years, expert on the former Soviet Union.
He's now a peacenik, co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and he regularly gives talks at local groups around the country about peace.
You can find out about that by way of a group called, it's Tell the Word, right, Ray?
Welcome back to the show.
That's correct.
Yeah, you can look on my website, raymcgovern.com.
That's what I was just going to say.
You can also find what Ray writes at consortiumnews.com, Bob Perry's site.
Ray and Bob both have spent this whole year, this whole last year, and more being good on Ukraine and America and American relations with Russia and the crisis over Ukraine.
If you want to know, you want to catch up, you go to consortiumnews.com.
Search Ukraine there and you will learn what you need to know.
And as the spotlight on antiwar.com today points out, it's this piece by Patrick L. Smith, who we talked to earlier this week, New York Times propagandists exposed, finally the truth about Ukraine and Putin emerges.
And he gives Perry credit there and Consortium News credit in that article.
And he talks about how now that Henry Kissinger has finally started speaking honestly in this interview with Der Spiegel.
And then the Washington Post published this article by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, which we're also running today at antiwar.com, that this is now basically amounts to the mainstream admitting that that Ray and Bob were right all along that America picked this fight, that their narrative of, you know, revitalized Russian empire on the march is false.
Is that pretty much the same way you read that, Ray?
Well, thanks for giving Bob and me, Bob and Ray, the old comedy team, some credit here.
You deserve a lot of it.
No, seriously.
I mean, the entire narrative on Earth would have been much fuzzier if it hadn't been for the clarity that you guys have provided.
Well, that may be so, Scott, but we're just as worried as ever.
I talked to Bob this morning.
He was appreciative of getting all that, all that good publicity and all that hope that's provided by the notion that even the mainstream press, so-called, in this country is starting to turn.
The same can be said, by the way, of the press in West Germany, West Germany, in Germany.
And that's a good sign.
But it's dwarfed, dwarfed in significance by what the House did yesterday.
My God, there's a declaration of war, pretty much, against Russia.
And, you know, if I'm Putin and I'm sitting back there in the Kremlin, I'm saying, my God, what's going on here?
I'm not going to take any solace from some marginal increase in insanity in the Western press.
I'm going to look at what the House has done and what this fellow Breedlove there, curious name, Breedlove, sort of like Dearlove, the old MI6 head.
Breedlove is, you know, shaking the sabres.
And so if I were Russian, I would be very, very perturbed.
I would be very, very much on the defensive.
And yet, in Putin's speech yesterday, he starts right off by saying, I appreciate the support of the Russian people for a mature, a mature reaction to what's going on in the Ukraine.
And, you know...
Let me stop you there for a second, Ray, and ask you to, if you could, please elaborate about this resolution that was passed by the House.
Declaration of war, that's a pretty strong term.
What it reminds me of, actually, is the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 that Bill Clinton signed under pressure from the PNAC crew, that Ron Paul at the time called it a virtual declaration of war.
This guarantees that sooner or later we're going to invade Iraq, probably in the next administration, he said on the floor in 98.
And is that this same kind of thing?
Well, it is, but it's insanity.
Saddam actually didn't have weapons of mass destruction he could fight back with.
But Russia does.
I mean, you know, it is beyond the pale.
Now, the president, of course, would have to sign any act like that.
And I don't know how it would fare in the Senate.
Presumably, the Senate would lockstep approve it.
But what really does it say there?
Well, it says that the US should be ready to move things on to an operational level here for U.S. missile strikes or whatever, permanently basing NATO forces in countries on the Russian periphery like Poland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, stockpiling a base in Poland with enough weapons to, you know, rapid deployment of thousands of troops against Russia.
That's a direct quote.
Well, this is a blitzkrieg scenario is what they're calling it.
And, you know, what this brings to mind is the incredible contrast between all this rhetoric and now some movement on the ground.
And Putin and his advisers approach, which I have to say, I agree with him when he defines it as mature.
And that comes of the fact that this is their backyard.
They hold all the important cards with respect to the Ukraine, including some very, very powerful economic cards.
And so what is particularly impressive to me, having watched Russia and the Soviet Union for 50 years now, is that, thank God, if I could say it that way, we have some maturity in the Kremlin.
They're going to watch the Senate and the House hoisted on their own petard, because no one, not even Breedlove, in their right mind, is going to challenge Russia militarily.
Because if they do, they realize that this would involve the most acute crisis since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
That was in 1962.
It could happen again.
Man, yeah, you know, Eric Margulies said he spoke with Russian diplomats in France, and they said they couldn't think of a higher state of tension between America and Russia since then, since Kennedy and the almost war over the missiles in Cuba.
Which, even if that's hyperbole, hell, coming from them, it's worth taking into account that that's the kind of language they're using.
You know, maybe Reaganite brinksmanship got worse at one point or another, I don't know.
Well, it's the perception.
Now, for example, everything is thrown at the Russians here in this act, as though it were fact.
I'll say again, as though it were fact that the Russians are responsible for downing that Flight 17 over Ukraine.
That is far from clear.
My guess is that the, well, I've looked at a lot of the evidence, it's more than a guess, is that the Russians are not responsible for that.
It was the Ukrainians, and there's lots of circumstantial evidence to suggest that.
But here, the House just says, well, because the Russians are responsible for downing the airliner.
So everything is thrown into the kettle here.
Now, if one adopts some perspective and looks back to the old KAL-007 event, where an American plane was downed over Siberia, well, there was propaganda hay made out of that by the Reagan administration.
But it was just a couple of years before people came to their senses and some very sound strategic arms limitation talks took place.
And it prepared the way for Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush to follow the Berlin Wall and the unique opportunity, I say unique in my lifetime, of a real, a genuine peace, as George H.W. Bush put it, a Europe complete and free from Portugal to the Ural Mountains.
And that, of course, was squandered as soon as NATO and the U.S. and Germany violated their promise not to move NATO to the Russian border.
So we put this into perspective.
These things do go in waves.
I don't think Obama has completely lost it, although I wish he'd speak out earlier that he does.
But I think Obama and his advisors realize how close they're coming to really provoking Russian reaction.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, hold it right there, Ray.
We've got to take this break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with the great Ray McGovern.
RayMcGovern.com, ConsortiumNews.com.
All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And I got Ray McGovern on the line, former CIA analyst.
We're talking about the aftermath of America's coup in Ukraine and the breakdown of America's relationship with Russia since then.
Now, where we were interrupted by the break there, Ray, you were talking about, I think, something along the lines of the president understanding just how much jeopardy his State Department has put the world in, what a precarious position they put his government in.
But I think my question then is, so what?
What does Obama have to do with it anyway?
The fact that, and I think it's probably even right that Hillary picked Newland.
Maybe he could have overruled it, but he didn't.
But then it's plausible to me that this whole kind of coup went off with him barely taking note of it or even necessarily being in the loop on it or whatever.
The whole thing blew up in everybody's face.
But then again, how much power does the president really have anyway to change it?
It sounds like there are so many vested interests, powerful ones who would like to have a cold war.
Obviously, no one wants a hot one, but who would like to have a cold war with Russia.
Is there any force that can stop them, all the generals and all the admirals and all the promotions they could get, all the procurement officers and all the money that they can take under the table, all the congressmen who are going to get re-election money in both parties from the military industrial complex and all that?
It sort of seems like going back into a rock.
It's just on there.
What's Obama going to do about it?
Better keep his bubble top up if he wants to even try to stop him.
But I don't even see where he's trying to really.
Well, that's the big question, Scott.
One thing that can be established is that Obama has very little backbone.
He's getting some good advice from some people who know which end is up.
But the sophomores, those real tough ladies, Samantha Power and Susan Rice, they seem to have him intimidated, actually.
And so they'll go along with this kind of draft legislation and leave it up to him in the end to veto it.
Now, this is very serious stuff.
General Dempsey, who prevented a war back in September of last year.
He was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest ranking military officer.
Now, I think he's hanging in there just so that he can prevent worse things from happening.
He's already questioned the president about boots on the ground.
You know, there are six thousand boots on the ground already, if you count two for each shoulder.
Right.
Is my math right?
So six thousand boots and it's going to be more.
Dempsey doesn't see where this all ends, to paraphrase Petraeus's famous remark.
And so he is a voice for caution.
Surely.
Are you sure about that?
Because it seems like Obama's the one saying, no, really, no boots.
And he means special forces and advisers, but no actual troops, no infantry to fight battles, maybe help lead them, wink, wink, that kind of thing.
But then Dempsey's the one saying, hey, listen, we might need troops.
And I have an open mind about that.
And I might just recommend that to the president when and if I feel like that's exactly right.
What you're hearing from Obama, however, is political rhetoric.
What you're hearing from Dempsey is a man who knows that he owes the Congress of the United States representing us people as well as the president, his best military judgment.
And so he is undermining the rhetorical posture, the political posture of the administration by saying, look, my job the chief military officer of this government is to tell Congress as well as the president, there's going to have to be boots on the ground, OK?
And and he says, no, the question really is whose boots?
And that's a feckless question, because we know that Petraeus and the other generals bragged about training up and equipping some 300,000 Iraqis and many Afghans.
And look at the chaos.
Look what happened when when the so-called Islamic State shot some AK-47s in their direction earlier this year.
They all fled.
They ran away.
Four divisions, four divisions, Scott.
Well, I exaggerate.
They didn't all run away.
The the officers took helicopters out of the area, you know.
And so what happened?
Well, they left their tanks.
They left their army personnel carriers.
They left their artillery behind.
So what do we do?
Well, obviously, we had to destroy them, all that equipment, billions of dollars of worth of equipment for four divisions so that ISIL or the Islamic State or Daesh or whatever we call it these days wouldn't get them.
Now, who profiteers from that?
Well, the people who make the weapons.
Now they can sell billions of dollars of war weapons to Iraq.
And that's what's happening.
So it is the military industrial congressional security services and media complex.
Now, media is important.
And so let me go back to that and say if I were Putin and I had seen the media blackout on what the House did yesterday, man, I would have some real questions as to what's going on in America.
When the House votes for essentially for forgiving the president war at war power to wage war against the other superpower in the world and they still are with nuclear weapons and the press is told not to say anything about that, I would be really worried if I were Putin.
I also am worried by this missile defense business, which is authorized in this draft legislation and which Putin has made clear.
What he said way back last spring was, you know, my or our decision to accept Crimea back into Russia proper was partly due to the notion that NATO might incorporate Ukraine.
But even more weighing on our decision was the defense, the missile defense system, which is being installed in and around Europe.
And we didn't want that to be deployed unhindered in the Black Sea.
And so since a lot of these missile defense so-called systems are being put on ships now because Bobby Gates thought that was a real clever way to get around the Czechs and the Poles and the others who didn't want it on their territory.
So that was a major factor.
What the Russians want to avoid is giving the United States armed forces the impression that they can take out their strategic deterrent in a first strike.
Now, that hasn't been a concern since the ABM treaty in 1972.
And I remember that quite well because I was in Moscow for that.
That was the big deal that put restrictions not only on defensive systems, but on offensive systems.
Now that is all done by the board.
Bush exited from the ABM treaty.
And what Putin and his advisors are worried about is that the U.S. forces will get it into their head that with this missile defense system, they will be free to mount the kind of first strike that has given everybody the bejeebies ever since 50 years ago.
So that's really important.
Putin came back to that in his speech yesterday.
I mean, that just means the Russians have to put their nukes on an even lighter hair trigger in in reaction.
Yeah.
The technical term is launch on warning, right?
Yeah.
So you get a little warning that a missile has been shot from a ship in the Black Sea.
What's a few H-bombs between friends, Ray?
It's not that big of a deal.
I'm sorry.
Music's playing.
We got to go.
Thank you so much for coming back on the show.
I sure appreciate it.
Talk to you again soon, Ray.
Thank you.
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