02/06/15 – Sina Toossi – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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All right, y'all, welcome back.
Next up is Sina Tusi, who put together this profile of Ashton Carter, the very soon to be confirmed new Secretary of Defense, replacing Chuck Hagel at the Pentagon.
The profile is at RightWeb.
And, well, just Google RightWeb because the URL is all screwy.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Sina?
Hey, Scott.
I'm good.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
Thanks for having me on.
It's great to be here.
Yeah, yeah.
So good work on this thing and much appreciated.
I learned a hell of a lot.
I guess, can you just start with the basic background of who's this guy?
They say he's not a party guy.
He's a technocrat.
I don't know if that's supposed to be to his credit or exactly what that means, but he's one of them, right?
Yeah.
Sure, sure.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, he's definitely more of a, his background is in academia, so he is kind of more of a technocrat.
Like, he has a PhD in theoretical physics from Oxford.
He also has a BA in medieval history from Yale.
But he does seem generally a little more pragmatic and not as ideological, you know, like super neoconny.
But he is, you know, he's definitely dedicated to, like, you know, maintaining U.S. hegemony across the world.
And so he was, you know, President Obama's Deputy Secretary of Defense from August 2011 to December 2013.
And in that role, he was in charge of the Pentagon's budget.
And he really, he was against sequestration.
He wanted to maintain a higher budget.
He didn't want any budget cuts.
He really kind of, you know, tried to manage his pivot to Asia.
He's been more aggressive on China.
He's, you know, he's reached out to India and, you know, he negotiated all these arms deals with India as well during his time as Deputy Secretary of Defense.
And so, yeah, he's definitely been committed to just, you know, maintaining that kind of just U.S., you know, great power status and military hegemony across the world.
Yeah.
And then so he was also, you know, before that, he was the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics in the first Obama term from April 2011 to October 2011 or from April 2009 to October 2011.
And in this role, he was like the Pentagon's main weapons purchaser.
And he was actually referred to as, like, Wolfie in reference to Paul Wolfowitz, because Paul Wolfowitz, you know, also came from academia and people were kind of worried that he would be similar to Paul Wolfowitz.
And but, you know, during that time, he didn't really have, you know, weapons experience like weapons development or acquisition experience.
And he was he faced criticism for, like, approving a lot of bad programs and things like that.
And but overall, you know, he's got a he's been in the Pentagon for many years, including during the Clinton administration.
He was the assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, which saw him deal with nuclear arms control issues and like disarming a lot of the former Soviet states and stuff like that.
Hey, let's when we get to review and all this, let's start right there.
Back in the Clinton years.
That makes me I don't know, I guess I want to look at a silver lining kind of thing there that if he, as you say, in there was working with Belarus and Ukraine on their nuclear disarmament, he must have been working in close cooperation with the Russians.
He must know somebody in Moscow on a first name basis.
Right.
Hopefully.
But then the one part of the Senate confirmation hearing that I was able to catch the other day, he was saying, oh, yes, I definitely think we should be arming the Ukrainians.
But but still in the in the midst of this crisis with Russia, so I don't know, it seemed like I was hoping maybe familiarity might be, you know, a possible opening for a ratcheting down attentions here.
You know, it's yeah, it's that it's interesting because I was just reading that.
So, yeah, during his time during the Bill Clinton administration, he actually opposed NATO expansion like he favored this partnership for peace approach with former Secretary of Defense William Perry during the 90s.
But yeah, I mean, as you've been saying, you know, he's been very hawkish during his Senate confirmation hearings this week.
He's been saying, you know, we should have you know, he would he's inclined to provide defensive arms to Ukraine.
He wants to finish the job in Afghanistan and not necessarily like, you know, remove all U.S. troops.
He said he doesn't want to speed up closing Guantanamo either.
So I mean, he's he's definitely more of a hardliner than Hagel, Chuck Hagel.
But yeah.
And he's, you know, even this week, you know, like John McCain and Joe Lieberman, like they've been singing his praises and been saying, like, we look forward to having you.
And like Joe Lieberman, like he says, he's still Lieberman says, but he's bonded personally with Ash Carter.
So he's got that going for him as well.
Good times.
Yeah.
Anybody who's nicknamed as Paul Wolfowitz's mini me, that's gotta just be wonderful for all of us.
All right.
So now I guess.
Oh, here's something that I didn't see mentioned here.
And you may have update for it at some point.
But has he taken a position on ground troops in Iraq and or Syria?
Because this is a place where Dempsey has felt free, apparently, to do kind of a McChrystal Petraeus maneuver and try to roll Obama into escalating the war more than the president wants to and has done already.
Yeah.
No, from stuff I've read, he's actually opposed ground troops in Syria and Iraq, at least as of like, like just before this all happened, before his confirmation hearing, before he was nominated.
Actually, last summer, he was on the Charlie Rhodes show and he actually said he believes in things.
There should be a political solution in Syria.
And he also said that Iran is actually part of the solution in Iraq and Syria, surprisingly.
So he was calling for a negotiated solution in Syria before the fall of Mosul and the Declaration of Caliphate a year ago, you say.
That's interesting.
This was.
Yeah, this was last summer.
I think it was right around that time.
And I forget exactly who it was before or after the fall of Mosul, but he was on the Charlie Rhodes show around that just last summer, around that time.
Even still.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's pretty reasonable for someone who works in Washington, D.C.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
I mean, I don't approve of the work with Iran part, but certainly, you know, maybe lay off them a little bit in the middle of this.
Well, and speaking of Iran, you cite two different reports that he wrote, one in 2006 or, you know, signed his name to anyway, one in 06 and one in 08.
And I think the one in 08, the more alarming of the two.
But they both seem pretty bad as far as the position that he took on Iran and their nuclear program.
Huh?
Yeah.
So he basically co-authored a report with a bipartisan policy center, which is this kind of hawkish think tank that despite its like credentials is like, you know, this kind of bipartisan, you know, organization that's brought together all these people.
It's a very hawkish organization, actually.
And so he co-authored this report in 2008 with like basically, you know, neoconservatives like Michael Rubin from American Enterprise Institute and people like Dennis Ross, who's a former Obama adviser at Iran, who's very hawkish as well.
And yeah, that report basically, you know, it said like Iran aims to build nuclear weapons and the U.S. has to bolster its military presence in the Middle East.
And it even repeated this kind of debunked idea that, you know, Iran's leaders are like these just kind of irrational extremists.
And it said like we can't really contain them like Cold War deterrence type just mechanisms like so.
The report basically said Iran can't even have to have a peaceful enrichment program because of that.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, basically.
Yeah.
I mean, and it calls for, you know, just applying more just harsh repercussions on Iran if it doesn't just scale back this nuclear program and just meet the terms that they, you know, bring forth towards Iran and stuff like that.
So that was a very aggressive report.
Yeah.
So now, as you note in the profile here, this is in contradiction to the opinion of the intelligence community that they put out in the N.I.E. in the fall of 2007.
So well, music's playing.
So when we get back, I'll ask you.
Here's a preview of what I'll ask you when we get back.
I'll ask you whether this was part of a campaign to contradict that CIA N.I.E. or just an honest disagreement or exactly what role that played politically then and then more about Ashton Carter was seen to see right after this.
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Hey, I'm Scott.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm talking with Sina Tusi from RightWeb dot IRC dash online dot org.
Just Google up RightWeb.
It'll come right up.
And it may have been 15 minutes or 30 since I told you how much I love RightWeb.
This is such a great project.
It's been there for more than a decade now.
And it's just the best profiles you could ever hope for on every single one of the neocons.
All of the worst think tanks and all of what they're up to and all the institutions and where they get their money.
And you should spend your whole freaking weekend trolling through RightWeb.
It will make you smart.
It's awesome.
All right.
So now that I got that out of the way, I'm talking with Sina Tusi and we're talking about this latest one or I don't know how long it's been here.
Newly updated for sure.
Ashton Carter, the former deputy secretary of defense and very soon to be confirmed new secretary of defense replacing Chuck Hagel.
And so at the break we were talking, Sina, about the the report that he signed on to that came out in 2008 with a bunch of AEI guys and, you know, veterans of the Office of Special Plans and them.
And they came together and wrote this thing seemingly in contradiction to the NIE of 2007 saying, oh, yes, indeed, Iran is making nuclear weapons and their nuclear program is a nuclear weapons program.
Somehow, I don't know if they just fudge that assertion in there or how exactly they try to prove it in the report.
But what I'm really curious about is whether this was part of a concerted effort at the time that was being made to push back on the national intelligence estimate of 07 and try to somehow discredit that as bad intelligence and that actually Team B really knows better and that kind of thing.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, you're right.
I mean, there was a lot of backlash against that 2007 NIE.
And that NIE was actually, from what I understand, it was kind of a move by the, you know, members of the intelligence community to kind of undermine the Bush administration's effort to, like, go to war with Iran.
Like, I know a lot of people from stuff I've read in the Bush administration among these like neoconservative and hardliner circles, like they were like furious with that NIE report.
So, yeah, this, you know, the timing of this, you know, Bipartisan Policy Center report, it's very much, you know, we can assume that, you know, it was meant to kind of, you know, challenge that NIE or just say it was untrue or something.
So, I mean, yeah, I mean, I think they were trying to contradict it, but I mean, you know, that's against the reality of what the situation has been.
Like, you know, we've had countless, you know, IAEA reports of Iran, Iran's nuclear program and, you know, it's heavily inspected and especially in the past year and a half with the Geneva agreement, the interim nuclear agreement, like, you know, Iran is not developing a nuclear weapon.
The program right now is very scaled back.
Even during that time, they, you know, various reports, you know, intelligence reports by the United States, even by Israel, you know, they confirmed that Iran had not made the decision to actually build a nuclear bomb, like they had a nuclear program, but, you know, they weren't enriching uranium at, you know, levels necessary to build a bomb like ever.
They've never enriched uranium to 90 percent, which is what that would be.
And yeah, I mean, so these people, you know, they were just trying to drum up an excuse for war, you know, like this bi-policy power policy center thing was basically a roadmap to war.
Yeah, that's bad news that he signed on to that.
I mean, it's sort of, you know, the best we can hope for, like with the Ukraine answer is, yeah, you got to tell these Republicans what they want to hear for a minute to make your money and move up the chain.
But maybe he's a little bit softer in reality.
That's about the best we got.
But boy, if he's and this is the guy who's replacing Hagel, right, as they're supposedly negotiating a nuclear deal with the Iranians.
So did he say in his hearing how well he supported Obama's effort on that?
You know, I didn't actually see him discuss Iran.
I looked it up and stuff.
He didn't really explicitly discuss anything related to Iran during his hearing.
Well, they didn't ask him about the nuclear talks, huh?
I mean, it's weird.
Yeah.
I mean, I I look for it and I didn't see, you know, any specific like statements he made regarding the and just Iran.
I think he did just generally Washington Post has this line in their story about his hearing that basically, I think he wanted to take a more aggressive approach in Ukraine and Iran, possibly.
Actually, I'm not sure if I'm reading this right now.
I know it doesn't really mention anything about Iran, the story I'm reading.
So, yeah, I'm not sure.
Yeah, I didn't.
I'm not sure if they didn't ask him anything or maybe just didn't give an answer that, you know, these people have chosen to report.
You do say in here, though, that he also has written that, you know, war with Iran would be no picnic and we don't really want any part of that.
And, you know, more cautious things along those lines.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that's a thing.
And he basically, you know, coauthored another report that basically he said that, you know, in Iraq, the U.S. attack on Iran would be very counterproductive in terms of just scaling back a nuclear program like, you know, Iran would just rebuild it or they would have to attack like, you know, repeatedly over time.
And he even said like an Israeli strike would be it would have a negative impact for the United States.
But so, yeah, he's kind of warned of the consequences of an attack on Iran, but he also in that report, he still said that, you know, military action must be an integral part of just any strategy aimed at, you know, halting Iran's like, you know, presumed nuclear bomb program or nuclear program, you know.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, so it basically sounds like a pretty centrist kind of a guy, really, as if that's where the seems I'm not saying moderate, but yeah, he just doesn't seem super ideological and he's definitely more of a technocrat.
He comes from academia, you know, so he's not like, you know, somebody like Donald Trump himself, obviously.
But at the same time, I think it seems like he's definitely more hawkish than Chuck Hagel was.
Yeah.
So but I mean, it remains to be seen how much he can actually do in, you know, these last year and a half of the Obama administration.
I feel like, you know, Obama, like, you know, this is Obama's fourth secretary of defense.
So at the same time, you know, Obama doesn't want a fifth secretary of defense in the next year and a half.
So maybe maybe that'll give Carter some more leverage to do stuff he wants to do.
But at the same time, it seems like, you know, the Obama White House, they kind of dominate the decision making on foreign policy issues like, you know, his NSA advisor, Susan Rice, or his chief of staff, Dennis McDonough.
Like they really have much more control, it seems like, of foreign policy, or at least they have had in the past six years than like the secretary of defense.
So I yeah, I'm not sure how much of a change we'll be seeing in terms of policy and stuff.
By the way, is he taking a did he take a position in 2011 on regime change in Libya?
You know what?
I I'm not sure, to be honest with you.
All right.
Interesting to know, too.
Can you tell us a little bit about his relationship with Goldman Sachs?
Yeah.
Yeah, so he's you know, he has a lot of he's had a lot of business ties and stuff, and he was an advisor to Goldman Sachs for a time, and he's basically, you know, he's like a theoretical physicist.
So I think he deals more with like those technical issues.
But yeah, he was an advisor for Goldman Sachs.
He was on he worked for the Lincoln Laboratories and Draper Laboratory as well for MIT.
And actually, last year, when he left the his position as deputy secretary of defense, like last September, he went on to work for this corporation called the Merkle Foundation and he was a senior executive director there and he was working on, like, just just globalization issues and how technology can affect globalization.
And I think he advised them on stuff like that.
So, I mean, he's got a lot of business ties as well.
This is the military industrial complex.
You know, all these people are tied to all these different businesses and military groups and stuff.
Yeah.
It's that revolving door.
Yeah, exactly.
All right.
Now, can you tell us a little bit more about his role in pushing the pivot to China thing?
Yeah.
So he was definitely, you know, as Obama came in in his first term and, you know, announced his pivot to China, like the U.S. wants to, like, lower its footprint in the Middle East and just, you know, China's the rising power.
We need to go contain them, like maintain our own hegemony in Pacific, in the Pacific area.
So he led that, you know, he led that effort from the Pentagon for the past couple of years.
Like he really enhanced U.S. ties with India because that's a key part of the U.S.'s strategy is pivot to India and pivot to Asia.
They really want to, you know, bring India closer to the U.S. sphere of influence and kind of use it to counterbalance and contain China.
So he established all these defense ties with India.
They created something called the Defense Trade and Technology Initiative, where they sell weapons to India, military technology.
And he's even, yeah, even said during his confirmation hearing that China's causing issues in the Pacific and they need to be contained and stuff.
So he's definitely going to be more aggressive in the Pacific.
All right.
Well, we're all out of time.
Thank you very much for your time.
I sure appreciate it, Sina.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, y'all.
That's Sina Tusi.
Check out RightWeb.
Just Google it.
The URL's a mess.
See y'all tomorrow.
Thanks for listening.
I'm Sina Tusi.
We'll see you tomorrow.
Thanks.
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