12/05/14 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
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That's where I keep all my interview archives, more than 3,500 of them now, going back to 2003.
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All right, enough.
Phil Giraldi, he's a former CIA officer.
He is the executive director of the Council for the National Interest, the America lobby in Washington, D.C.
And he writes for the American Conservative Magazine and UNZ.com.
That's UNZ, UNZ.com.
The latest there is Neocon's Triumphant in Washington and Geneva.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How are you doing?
I'm fine.
How about you?
Very happy to have you on the show.
Now, so here's how I set up this conversation.
Got ourselves a new Secretary of Defense.
It was announced today.
Well, he ain't confirmed yet, but soon will be.
Ashton Carter to replace Chuck Hagel, who was forced out.
And so when it comes to the reasons that Hagel was forced out, all the stuff I've read about it is all very vague, really.
It sounds like, oh, personality conflicts and he didn't get along with this person or that person.
But nobody seems to want to really shoot straight about.
I mean, it seems like it was tied up in the Syria thing, but it wasn't clear whether, you know, who was the more of the hawk, Obama or Hagel, or who was more for the insane policy of attacking the Bashar al-Assad regime at the same time that he is actually the strongest force on the ground fighting the Islamic State, which we're also fighting.
Was it Obama is the crazy one or Hagel is the crazy one?
I know it was the Neocons were against nominating him in the first place bad, but.
Well, that's a that's a tough question to answer.
I've heard a number of different things on this.
It seems that the only thing everybody agrees on was that there was a major conflict between Hagel and Susan Rice, National Security Advisor, over Syrian policy.
And what I've been told is that essentially Hagel wasn't really coming down on one side or the other in terms of what to do.
But he insisted that we have clarity in terms of what the plan is.
And he was basically saying that the Pentagon, his people in the Pentagon, which means uniformed military officers, the senior level, were very concerned that there was no well-defined mission with real objectives and with any real plan for getting, first of all, success and for getting out of it.
And this is this is the viewpoint essentially that Hagel was representing, according to what I've heard, which to me makes a lot of sense.
And so anyway, he was out of the loop in terms of the White House, which was basically in managing this war, you know, and essentially saying, oh, well, this has happened today, so tomorrow we'll do this.
And Hagel was objecting to the whole way this thing was being run by kind of a, you might refer to it as a kitchen cabinet, the people really close to Obama, which is Susan Rice, which is, what's her name at the UN.
And yeah, and so the inner circle really was the one with Obama were the ones kind of running this.
And Hagel was left out on a limb on it.
And that's it.
That's the view apparently he was expressing.
OK, but see, I'm still terribly disappointed in what you just said, because here's why.
I think you're right.
I mean, it makes perfect sense.
Don't get me wrong.
But I mean that what you're saying, though, I think is that it's not that he said, look, we can either be obviously non-intervention isn't one of the options, but it's not that he said, look, we can either fight the Islamic State and pretty much leave Assad alone and or maybe work with him to fight the Islamic State and reestablish the borders of Syria, maybe work on a political political transition after that.
Or we can do this completely crazy plan that the Weekly Standard wants us to do, where we train up an army of so-called moderates that then is supposed to take on Nusra and ISIS and Hezbollah and the Syrian State Army backed by the Russians, which is completely crazy and stupid.
But what you're saying is not even that he was really saying, OK, here are our choices.
Which are we doing?
But that he was even just saying like, hey, does anybody have any idea what we're doing at all?
It wasn't even like he didn't even want to define the choices as as well as I just defined them, even though that's more or less what they're talking about up there.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right on that.
I think basically what he was saying was he wanted clarity in terms of what are we doing?
And, you know, he was willing, he as you know, good as a good soldier in this context, he was quite willing to attack Syria.
That's what I've heard, or at least view Syria as a as an opponent in this rather than as a helper and and do what was what he could possibly along the line of that policy.
But the fact was, he wasn't even given clear directions on that.
He was basically the White House was basically saying, oh, we we favor regime change in Syria.
They've been saying that for years now.
But the fact is, what does that mean?
What does that mean when you're fighting an act of war on Syrian territory and you and you don't have any any real guidelines in terms of what you're doing or not doing and how you're going to do it?
And this is what what Hegel was was basically objecting to, as I understand it.
Right.
Well, and it seems like that's no different than the entire chaos in all of D.C.
I missed it myself.
But Eric Garrison, antiwar dot com told me saw a Republican senator was actually asked by a reporter.
This would be the first time somebody asked this on cable news probably in four years.
Well, geez, who's supposed to come after Assad once the Baath regime falls and all that?
And the answer was, well, you know, we're just going to have to hope that someone will come to the fore.
Yeah, I think there's somebody who asked that question.
You're absolutely right.
And that's exactly what the way it played out.
You know, what are we going to do when he goes down or or what is the plan for after Assad?
And there was no answer.
And this is three years into the thing, which is funny because, you know, I mean, I've been talking with you since 2005 and I guess with Margulies since 2004.
We've talked about David Wumser and the neocon plans for Syria all this time.
Right.
And we've been saying rhetorically all this time.
I guarantee it's in the archives from nine years ago, Phil, where we're talking about, yeah, but who's supposed to come after Assad, the Muslim Brotherhood, if they're lucky, those will be the moderates.
And and then it'll be Al-Qaeda to their right.
Yeah.
And here we are.
Yeah.
OK, so that's exactly what it is.
I mean, the fact is they keep and in fact, if you read over the newspapers last two weeks, you're getting all kinds of contradictory accounts that are clearly being leaked by the White House in terms of how this war is even going.
There was something like two weeks ago saying that there has been no significant erosion of ISIS as a result of all these bombing attacks.
And now we had I don't know who was Dempsey or somebody a couple of days ago saying, oh, yeah, they've seriously been hurt.
I mean, who's who's telling the truth here and what is the truth?
Right.
You know, I was talking with Chris Woods, author of the book on the drone war, did all the great research on the drone war.
And he was saying that there are geez, I don't know the numbers he was saying, but he was saying that this is certainly the biggest air war since the invasion of Iraq.
You know, Iraq, too, in 2003, certainly bigger than the air war over Libya in 2011.
And we just there is no Bernard Shaw in Mosul reporting.
So we just don't even know.
That doesn't necessarily mean they're achieving anything necessarily.
And I would bet as a former intelligence officer that we don't know anything that we don't have that the only people we have on the ground are kind of in safe places where they're talking to Kurds or they're talking to the six or seven guys that are in the Free Syrian Army.
And, you know, and they're getting bullshit from all those people.
And I would bet that's exactly what's going on.
Careful.
We're on the radio.
But yeah.
Yeah, well, you know, I just somebody in the chat room just posted this thing.
I just heard back from a friend who works in the Pentagon.
And I know this guy has a friend in the Pentagon.
I spoke with him before about this.
After asking him about the new sect death, he asked a couple of co-workers who knew him and responded, quote, One colleague had him as a professor at Harvard and another went to brief him on something while he was sick.
Both said he was an arrogant, butt sniffing prick.
So he's definitely going straight to the top.
Yeah, no doubt about it.
He co-wrote a paper on Iran's nuclear program with Michael Rubin.
So I think that'll do it.
Happy future here.
All right.
We'll be right back.
Phil Giraldi.
Since I wore radio more or less here.
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OK, guys.
Welcome back to the show.
Last segment for the week here on the Scott Horton Show, Liberty Radio Network, talking with Phil Giraldi from the Council for the National Interest Foundation.
And so, Phil, we're talking about Syria policy here, mostly in terms of the new Iraq war, Islamic State war and this and that.
Is it really just up to Obama and Susan Rice to figure out what to do?
And do they really have absolutely no idea what the hell they're doing over there?
Because it seems to me like I mean, and I know and you know, I talk about this stuff and I interview people like you every day on this show.
So I'm much better immersed in it than many, maybe even than some on the National Security Council.
I don't know.
But it seems like any idiot could tell you.
George Bush started a giant sectarian civil war in the region over there, started in Iraq.
He he gave Baghdad to the Shiites and now consequences.
Then Obama goes, takes the side of the Mujahideen in Syria, makes it that much worse.
But now.
So here we are.
We've got a guy calling himself Caliph Ibrahim.
They swear they're at war with him.
And yet they still are on the Saudi and really the Islamic State side in a de facto sense in Syria.
And I'm wondering, is it really possible that this is all just such blundering and domestic politics that they can't even get it straight, which side of a sectarian civil war they're on or that they're not being cynical in playing both sides of it against each other?
Well, I don't know.
I mean, you know, I wish I could look inside Obama's head to see if there's anything functioning there.
The fact is, it's just as you outlined it.
There's basically no way to make sense out of this.
It's probably partly politics is partly an attempt to seize the national security issue away from the Republicans, who, of course, come January are going to be beating on that drum constantly by showing how tough the administration could be.
I'm sure it's partly that.
But what bothers me is that we're getting back to the Hegel issue.
What is the end game here?
What do they hope to accomplish?
As you noted, there's this huge conflagration taking place in the heart of the Arab world right now that we started.
And is the solution to get rid of Assad?
Is the solution?
What is the solution?
What is the solution they're looking for?
And what do they expect to be the scenario or the series of scenarios that will replace this?
I mean, I I'm at a total loss for it.
And and I don't think I'm unique in that.
I guess you're on a similar page.
But I don't think anybody's figuring this out.
If the if the administration had a coherent policy, it would be telling us that wouldn't it it would be in its own interest to tell us that.
But the fact is, I just believe that what we're seeing here is a community organizer and his buddies, and they're sitting around and they're responding in an ad hoc fashion to a series of crises that develop and continue to develop.
And I don't think they have a clue about where this all goes.
Yeah.
Well, now, you know, J.D.A. in the chat room says that you only have to ask what the Likudniks want.
And, you know, there's always that argument, but of course, this is much bigger than that.
It's there are there are a lot of Likudniks who are not necessarily just Likudniks.
I mean, I'm doing a piece now for next week for on how the military industrial complex and everything fits in with all this this kind of nonsense going on.
And that's big bucks.
And and the real irony there is, of course, it's big bucks that come straight out of our pockets.
So they're basically taking our money and then using our money to to propagandize and propagate a war economy.
It's it's there are a lot of clowns that are involved in this game.
But the you know, the neocons are obviously the most visible and the Likudniks.
Yeah, yeah.
It's just it's absolutely amazing.
Well, you know, there's that article by Richard Cummings, Lockheed stock and two smoking barrels where he traces all of the worst and the most famous, most infamous of the neocons of the Bush junior administrations to Lockheed and how virtually all of them had represented Lockheed in one way or another, had sat on the board or something.
The one furthest removed was Hadley, and he worked for the law firm that represented them and on their case.
And, you know, it was Andrew Coburn that said that that's what really the neoconservative movement is.
It's where the military industrial complex, the post World War Two, new right, M.I.C. money where they met the Israel lobby and they said, hey, we need intellectuals to come up with reasons to sell bombs and you guys need money for your think tanks to create all your own little CFRs so that you guys can take over the policy.
And they made their their deal with the devil.
That was back in, you know, 78 or whatever.
Yeah, well, like, for example, the American Enterprise Institute is largely funded by Grumman.
The the founded the FBI is largely founded, funded by Raytheon.
I mean, it's just you're right.
I mean, that's and this is all like, OK, let's let's work this out, because there's a lot of money to be made and there's a lot of stuff to be done by both of us.
And, you know, it's it's depressing.
That's to say the least.
Yeah.
Well, and and, you know, just like our previous conversation with Ray McGovern on the show, I mean, messing around with the Islamic State is not quite as dangerous as messing around with the Russians.
But then again, you see how much mileage they got out of 9-11.
I mean, our government cynically exploiting it.
You see how much mileage they get out of a couple of beheadings.
If there was just a couple of terrorist attacks, you know, real Islamic State or or inspired terrorist attacks inside this country, we could see a whole new level of Patriot acts and red alerts and and, you know, Ferguson level martial law on a regular basis in every town in this country.
That's near as bad as a H-bomb.
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure you've noticed the some of the pushback against the Rand Paul proposal to declare war on ISIS, you know, because that that would create a mechanism for the United States government to lock up me and you and a whole lot of other people for being opposed to the war.
Right.
And so declaring war is not it seems like a maybe a right way to go, but it ain't a solution.
It just empowers the people that we don't want to empower.
Right.
And of course, it it gives the Islamic State a whole lot of credence that the government, you know, presumably would be trying to deny them that really these guys are a bunch of heretics and gangsters and murderers.
And just because they sacked Mosul doesn't make them a caliphate.
And, you know, saying, yes, they are, in fact, a caliphate and we declare war against them like we haven't done against any enemy since Nazi Germany, you know, raising them to that level of enemy against us only does them a favor, like letting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed wear camouflage to court down in Cuba.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Exactly right.
We are the ones that we created the mess in the first place and we're empowering the very worst, you know, people that have surfaced out of this mess.
And it's just absolutely astonishing that nobody in Washington, seemingly can figure this out or can or nobody who has the ability to change course on this can figure it out.
It's just it's it's it's never ending.
I mean, it's just absolutely amazing.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I don't know if you remember that back in October of 2002, Ron Paul introduced a declaration of war in the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and it was on C-SPAN.
He instructed them all that he he was going to vote against it and he wanted them to all vote against it, too.
But if they were going to vote for war, he wanted them to take responsibility and declare war against Iraq instead of deferring the responsibility and giving it to George Bush.
But that's not what Rand is doing.
Rand is saying, yeah, let's declare war against the Islamic State.
And then he's trying to add restrictions in his declaration of war like, oh, but no ground troops and there's a time limit and that kind of thing, which if the whole thing passed, those parts would be null and void.
You wouldn't be able to put those restrictions on a war.
Exactly.
That would be I mean, they would be overlooked into any subsequent developments.
And the argument from the White House would be that the situation has changed.
Well, yeah, sure.
Right.
Yeah.
And of course, you know, it makes sense to challenge Congress that they should take responsibility for the war power.
It's their responsibility.
But you don't have to then say, yes, let me champion the actual passing of that resolution.
You know what I mean?
That's kind of a whole different question, you know, whether it should happen or not.
And of all of them in the in the U.S. Senate, he's the one who ought to know better.
He's the one that we know he knows better because of whose son he is.
Yeah.
And that's been the disappointment with Rand that basically he seems to get the big picture, but he doesn't really figure out anything beyond that.
And I don't know.
It's just he's still he still may well be the best Republican to surface in 2016.
In fact, I'm sure he will be.
But the fact is that he's he's going to be kind of a mixed blessing.
Yeah, already has been in many ways.
And at least I'm glad to hear I actually hadn't heard of any of that pushback that you mentioned.
I'm glad to hear that.
I guess even the Hawks don't want a declaration of war, which would really be worse than authorization in many ways.
As you said, it would make us all enemies of the state overnight in a World War one kind of way, like like Bush and Ashcroft never did to us as much as they scared the hell out of us.
Yeah, exactly.
All right.
Thanks so much for your time, Phil.
Appreciate it.
OK, Scott, take care.
All right, Joe.
That's the great Phil Giraldi, the American conservative and owns dot com.
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