03/23/15 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Again, coming up in about half an hour, we'll have Mike Swanson on from wallstreetwindow.com talking a little bit about the economy.
And then I got all kind of more news to cover for you, too.
But first, we go to our friend Phil Giraldi.
He's the executive director of the Council for the National Interest, a former CIA officer and writer for UNZ.com.
That's U-N-Z, UNZ.com, and the American Conservative Magazine.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Phil?
I'm fine, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing good.
Appreciate you joining us here on a Monday morning.
Well, I guess it's noon in the east, but anyway.
Happy to have you here.
And where we ended an interview last week, I didn't get a chance to talk to you or to ask you about Syria and Iraq.
I saw this funny tweet over the weekend where someone had more or less a quote or a paraphrase of Brennan saying, no, we can't get rid of Assad.
That's the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
We can't get rid of Assad because that would just open the door for ISIS.
And then the other half of the quote was David Petraeus saying, oh, no, the biggest threat in Iraq is not ISIS at all.
It's Iran and the Iranian-backed militias taking over Iraq.
And so we've been discussing this schizophrenic policy for quite a few years now.
Was it 2015?
So since 2011, we've been talking about the madness of America backing the Mujahideen in Syria.
But I guess I'm curious about what you think about where the policy stands now.
Or is there a policy?
Are these guys brilliant geniuses playing both sides of the sectarian civil war over there for some end?
Or are they just mindless idiots up there running the American empire at this point?
Or what?
Well, it's hard to say.
You know, I read that piece by Petraeus with complete astonishment that the real enemy is Iran.
Now, that's a straight neocon talking point.
And obviously, Petraeus is buying into it.
And indeed, one has to suspect that he's been buying into it for some time, including when he was a general and probably when he was CIA director.
So it's pretty scary stuff because that's so wildly off target.
If you and I were sitting and playing a board game or something and trying to figure out who the enemy is and so on and so forth, and I think you have to regard ISIS as seriously the enemy, then the two forces that are best positioned to be on the side of the United States in eliminating ISIS are Iran and Syria's government.
I mean, they're the two forces that are fighting most effectively right now.
So the whole thing is absurd.
I mean, why can't they just kind of go back to the simple principles and open up their eyes and admit what's there?
But they're agenda-driven.
These guys are agenda-driven.
That's why they're successful in Washington.
Yeah, well, and the agenda is a Jerusalem agenda or Tel Aviv agenda here.
And, in fact, I forgot if I joked this to you before, but it seems to me like if it wasn't for all the treason in Washington, D.C., and all these politicians who put their loyalty to Israel before their loyalty to America, we would have a much simpler, clean-cut case that, like you said, the Islamic State, they're the bad guys.
They're the ones who got to get gotten.
But since everybody in D.C. puts Israel first, they go, well, you know, I don't know.
Maybe Assad and Hezbollah and the Baat Brigade are the bad guys.
And it's kind of because the issue is so confused by their treason, they can't get their act together to have a worse war over there.
Maybe to our benefit.
Yeah, I think you've got it right.
And that's why I basically, you know, that's why I talk and write so much about Israel, because I think Israel is the driver on a lot of these policies.
I think that the – and, in fact, I'll have a piece coming out on The American Conservative this week about – I call it the neocon cursus honorum.
And I explain how the neocons have all these institutions and foundations and media outlets and everything that they control, and they basically run their people through these outlets and through these systems to give them credibility.
And if you look at the actual careers of most of these neocons, they're academics.
That's all they are.
And so, anyway, Israel is at the core of a lot of this stuff.
Israel has basically been pushing for the kind of anti-terrorism policy we have.
Israel has been pushing for us to go to war with Iran.
Israel pushed us to go to war with Iraq.
You look at every big blunder, and you find that there's an Israeli hand in it.
And it almost makes you feel guilty, you know, to be saying these sorts of things, because we all grew up with the typical anti-Semitic tropes and things you weren't allowed to say or allowed to think and so on and so forth.
And this is not really about Jews.
It's really about the Israel lobby, which is like a cancer, I would almost say, on the Jewish body.
Well, and there's really just no doubt about the role of Israel and Americans' politicians' willingness or motivation to please the Israelis and the Israeli lobby in this insane policy.
I mean, back in 2012, Obama said to Jeffrey Goldberg, or Jeffrey Goldberg said to Obama, don't you think that backing the rebels in Syria would be a good way to weaken Iran?
And Obama said, yeah, that's exactly why we're doing it, is if we could get rid of Assad, then that would help weaken Iran.
Yeah, yeah.
So in other words, you do something really short-sighted, and you think it's going to work, and then it doesn't work.
And the problem is that they never seem to figure out that every time they do something in Iraq or they do something in Afghanistan, something pops up somewhere else.
It's called collateral damage.
Yeah.
Well, and now, so back to Petraeus for a minute.
I was trying to pick a fight with Liz Sly from The Washington Post for that interview because she let him say, oh, my God, the Shiite militias running their rampage all over Iraq.
Well, if there's any part of the surge that quote-unquote worked, it was helping the Baader Brigade and their political side, the Supreme Islamic Council, win the civil war.
The pseudo-peace that they had there, the lull, the eye of the storm kind of situation that they achieved in 2008 was they finished helping the Shiite militias, the sock puppets of the Iranians, kick all the Sunnis out of Baghdad.
And now, in fact, I saw at Moon of Alabama they even linked to a piece where earlier in the war, even back in 2004 and 2005, he had helped lead the El Salvador option, which was taking the leaders of the Baader Brigade and using them to pinpoint, supposedly, to identify and target the leaders of the Sunni insurgency up in Mosul.
So this guy's so-called victory is the cause of the crisis that he's complaining about right now.
Yeah.
It's astonishing.
And if you want to go back a little bit farther, you can trace a lot of the things that have gone wrong in Afghanistan to the way this guy has seen his role.
But, yeah, I don't think there's a single policy that Petraeus came up with in his trajectory to become America's favorite hero, and that actually worked out.
But you're absolutely right.
I mean, the mess in Iraq can purely be attributed to the policies that we either endorsed or just looked the other way while things were happening that we should have known better about.
And it's possibly the greatest tragedy in American foreign policy history, the way this is going to play out maybe, say, 10 years from now, and looking back on how this happened and what was the collateral damage in different parts of the world and how this really turned sour on us.
I mean, it's just astonishing.
Yeah.
Well, and the thing is he was kind of right when he – well, only a little bit right – when he was saying that, you know, these Shiite militias and their butchery murder is a big part of the reason for the rise of ISIS in the first place.
And, of course, as Patrick Coburn was explaining on the KPFK show yesterday, the al-Qaeda in Iraq guys and now the ISIS guys, they deliberately target Shiite civilians in terrorist attacks in order to, you know, basically provoke atrocities against the Sunni population so that they are driven further into the hands of the Islamic State.
But, again, this guy Petraeus can't ever decide which side of this fight he's on.
He's either arming the Baata Brigade or he's arming the concerned local citizens on the other side, the guys that we're calling ISIS now.
And now the music's playing already.
Well, now he's lining his pockets.
Yeah, and lining his pockets.
Well, we'll get back to that in just one second.
It's Phil Giraldi.
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All right, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Phil Giraldi.
We're picking on David Petraeus.
Funny, everybody attacks him for leaking secrets to his girlfriend, which, you know, if you did it, they'd give you life in prison.
So, whatever, I guess it's kind of an important point there.
But the man lost two wars.
How about that?
That's not a blemish on his record, not in modern-day America.
It's not.
Nobody ever mentions that at all.
His greatest victory was for America's enemies, apparently.
But now at the break there, music was playing.
We had to go.
But you were saying that he's been lying in his pockets ever since leaving the CIA after losing the war in Iraq and losing the war in Afghanistan.
How's that, Phil?
Yeah, he's got a whole lot of financial interests.
He's head of a New York investment firm.
I think it's Kohlberg and Roberts or something like that.
And he's a chairman of their Global Institute.
He's a professor at, I think, the University of Southern California.
He's a professor at the University of Exeter in England.
He's a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.
He's got all these syndicators that he gets paid for, and he serves on lots and lots of boards of defense contractors and others.
This guy is turning over money left and right, and obviously as soon as we see him starting to turn over money, that's when suddenly you see him in the newspaper talking about Iran because that's what the people who are giving him money want to hear.
He's one of your typical crooked Washington politicians, but of the military type.
Yeah.
I just wish people, I mean, they all get in that Iron Triangle and make all that money, and it does go to speech of their corruption.
But I just wish that anybody would ever question him well on any of this stuff, ask a follow-up question on any of this stuff.
He gets such a blank check after such a series of failures.
It's ridiculous to me.
Well, it's like John McCain on this weekend, yet again.
John McCain is on every weekend, it seems, on the Sunday morning talk shows.
And this is when he announced that we would cut off funding to the UN if the UN basically didn't support Israel.
And then he also threatened the president and said that the president, what did he say, should stop whining or temper tantrum?
Or temper tantrum, yeah.
Temper tantrum, I mean, this kind of stuff is unseemly, and yet clowns like, and you talk about temper tantrums, McCain has the worst reputation in the United States Senate for throwing temper tantrums and screaming at his staff.
So it's kind of ironic that he's coming out with this, but the fact is nobody challenges this clown.
This guy is probably the biggest psychopath in the U.S. Congress, which is saying a lot, well, Tom Cotton maybe.
But it's still saying quite a lot about McCain, and yet nobody challenges him when he's on these shows.
Well, and both of those guys could be in a contest for who's the most idiotic, who knows the least about what they're talking about, just aside from their talking points.
Like when there's that famous clip of John McCain accusing Iran of training al-Qaeda in Iraq, and Joe Lieberman has to lean over and go, no, extremists, extremists, because, yeah, they were training the militias who were fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq at the time.
But he just has no acquaintanceship with the truth.
He doesn't have enough information to even check his new talking points against old stuff or anything, and he just gets himself all tied up in knots about this stuff, and Cotton seems to me the same way.
And, you know, especially like when we're talking about a war like this where anybody who actually cares about the truth is going, boy, is this a contradictory policy.
Now, none of these guys ever even seem to notice that there's a kind of puzzle that they need to work out.
They just leave out who's Sunni and who's Shia, who's on Iran's side and who's on the caliph's side in this thing.
Yeah, it doesn't matter to them.
They come at it with an agenda, and the agenda is that, you know, it basically starts out that we're the good guys, and anybody else that is somehow resistant to our policies is a bad guy, and not only a bad guy, he's an enemy.
And they just project this from there, and they go on and on and on with it.
But to hit my point again, the real fault on a lot of this stuff is that these guys get away with it.
They're not challenged.
I mean, they're on television all the time, and they're interviewed by people, and nobody ever says to them, you know, you don't, hey, excuse me, Senator McCain, but you don't know what you're talking about.
Right.
And I think part of that, too, when we're talking about the Islamic State, the Islamic State question just over the last year or almost a year now, it's so explicitly sectarian that they kind of can't help but acknowledge the kind of sectarian civil war sort of nature of this thing, Sunni versus Shia, et cetera, except if you go back to the entire Iraq War II, they never told us who was who.
They never said who was fighting for who.
It was always America and the Iraqi people versus the terrorists.
And that's what every, especially on TV, that's as deep an understanding as any of these TV news people know.
And so they can't refer back to, yeah, but, Petraeus, I thought your greatest victory was for the Bata Brigade, not against them and this kind of thing, because they didn't know back then.
They talk about maybe the Shiite militias now, but they never really differentiated back then.
So, you know, they learned nothing, they've forgotten nothing.
Yeah, in fact, back then, a lot of this stuff was actually hidden.
I mean, they were talking about the success of the surge and everything like that.
The way it was reported, it was kind of an American thing, arming the friendlies over there and doing this and doing that.
But it was never really spelled out just how sectarian this was and what the likely consequences of weighing in on this kind of hostility between the two groups, what the consequences would be.
And this is so typical of the way the U.S. government has been operating for a long time now.
It's like the old joke about mushrooms.
They keep you in the dark and feed you shit.
And now, so, and the question about ISIS being the enemy, I'm not so sure about that.
I mean, obviously they're pretty evil, but I'm not so sure.
I mean, I was actually, if we rewind a little bit, I'm the one who's paranoid, and you're the one telling me, don't worry, they're not going to attack us here.
They're way over there and all that.
And I was paranoid that maybe they would try to attack us here, that they still might in order to try to draw us in further.
But really the worst they've done to America now is murder some American reporters who were over there in a war zone.
And I'm not so sure that's a cost to Spelly.
And I wonder really whether, you know, if we put Israel aside for a minute and it was the Americans making their own policy, and they identified ISIS as the real threat as opposed to Assad or the Iranian militias, whether it would really be a good idea at all to help Assad or the Iranian militias.
Because in that sense, we would just be playing into the narrative of the Islamic State, that it's the American Christian apostates, the crusaders, on the side of the Alawites and the Shiites against us.
So all good Sunnis rally to the Islamic State might be just as counterproductive as back and botter against the Sunnis in the first place.
Yeah, I suspect we don't understand very well what ISIS represents anyway.
And so this induces the, quote, experts at the American Enterprise Institute and places like that to come up with these, you know, explanations of what this is all about.
And of course, you know, after the fact, these explanations are always wrong.
But, you know, I think the undeniable fact is that what we see now in Syria and Iraq is a creation of American policy, and essentially, you know, starting with the invasion of Iraq and then the turn on Syria, which was always, to me, inexplicable.
Syria was kind of a nasty regime with a nasty leader, but in a way was none of our business.
And yet we got more and more involved in it.
And the consequences of that are these groups that have sprung up out of the resistance which we've been funding and giving weapons to.
Right.
Yeah, and, you know, as crazy as it would be if we were talking about, you know, or an evil too, if we were talking about just some country, I don't know, in East Asia somewhere or in South America or something like that, but this is in Syria where the guys our side has been backing for the last four years are the veterans of the last Iraq war where they were the bad guys that we had been fighting against, the Sunni-based insurgency.
So for the Obama administration to side with them in Libya, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and all those guys, and then especially in Syria, it seems to me at least as bad as what George Bush did by invading Iraq in the first place and really where what Bush did benefited al-Qaeda more than they could have ever dreamed.
Obama outright took their side, right?
Bush benefited them by turning, by siding with the Shia and by turning western, northwestern Iraq into lawless jihadi stand, but that was sort of an accidental byproduct of his folly as opposed to Obama outright backing these guys this whole time.
I mean, this is the kind of thing where if there was such a thing as a rule of law, he'd be impeached and removed and convicted of treason.
And at the very least, he'd be sitting in the Supermax next to Ramzi Youssef.
Yeah, well, I agree with you.
I mean, it seems to me that when you look at what Washington does in these situations, they're just getting a whole lot of bad advice.
And I don't know really where it comes from.
Obviously, when you have Stephanie Powers and Susan Rice and Barack Obama himself, these people have no experience in foreign policy apart from writing books.
And the fact is they just don't seem to figure things out very well.
And I was having an exchange with a friend the other day about Rand Paul.
It's the same thing with Rand Paul.
I mean, the guy probably was a decent eye doctor, but that doesn't make him an expert on foreign policy.
So somebody's telling him these things.
And I have some suspicions who they might be.
But anyway, the point is he gets everything wrong.
And this is the same kind of thing I think we're seeing with Obama.
There's less excuse for Obama because he's president.
He has resources that Rand Paul doesn't have.
But I don't know.
It's just a complete disconnect in Washington.
It's terrifying because this stuff could go anywhere.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, on Rand, even when he's good on Syria, which he has been pretty good on Syria, he accuses McCain of palling around with ISIS when the truth was bad enough.
He was palling around with the Northern Storm Brigade, who were al-Qaeda and Iraq veterans, but they were not members of ISIS, and they ended up all being killed by ISIS.
And it was just because he's such a dilettante.
He's running with this conspiracy theory, part of the Internet kind of memes going around.
And I guess his staff tells him, yeah, say this, boss.
And he ends up, you know, hanging himself.
He's making an accusation against McCain that it's almost true and it would be a huge zinger, a huge burn if he had gotten it right.
But instead he overplays his hand and blows it because, as you said, he really doesn't know anything about it.
And, you know, a year ago Barack Obama called ISIS the junior varsity.
And this is at a time where Patrick Coburn was, well, he's a very calm man, Coburn.
But he was warning us with his pen at the top of his lungs about the extreme danger of the Islamic State and its rise and its eclipse of al-Qaeda and al-Nusra in Syria and the re-energization, as he called it, of the Sunni-based insurgency in Iraq and the coming Islamofascist caliphate and all this.
And I guess they just don't read The Independent in Washington, D.C.
I mean, I spent all last spring interviewing you and Coburn and Landay and Scheuer and every al-Qaeda expert I could think of all last spring, you know, hair-on-fire style, quote-unquote, about the extreme danger of ISIS, the metastasis of this al-Qaeda-ish cancer across North Africa and the Middle East.
And Obama's calling them the JV team and laughing it off like it doesn't even matter.
I think he really thought that.
Yeah, yeah.
And then the funny thing is, of course, when suddenly it comes across the political screen and they need a new enemy, it becomes the varsity.
It's like, come on, guys.
I mean, these are political movements.
You know, you might want to call them terrorists because it's a convenient kind of shorthand for you.
But the fact is these are political movements.
And these are things you should be able to figure out because you guys are politicians.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, but they're Democrats and Republicans, so not so much, I guess.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, thanks again for your time, Phil.
Okay, Scott.
Take care.
All right, y'all.
That's Phil Giraldi.
He's from the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
He writes for unz.com, U-N-Z, unz.com, and also for the American Conservative Magazine.
We'll be right back with Mike Swanson in just a sec.
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