04/14/15 – Ray McGovern – 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.
On the line, I got Ray McGovern from Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, V-I-P-S.
And he's a former CIA analyst for 27 years.
And right now he works with an organization called Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the Ecumenical Church of the Savior in Washington, D.C.
And he also was in the Army.
I guess I forgot about that.
Anyway, used to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush in the 1980s for his President's Daily Brief was, I forgot the title, but you were actually in charge of the USSR Analyst Section.
Is that right for a while there, Ray?
Yes, I was.
I was chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch.
All right.
So that, oh, I see.
That's not everything, but it's a lot.
Well, yeah, there was an internal branch as well, but we had lots to do in those days.
I see.
All right.
So when he talks about Russia, pay attention because he knows what he's talking about.
And especially he's got, as you could tell, the experience to compare, to take notes from that situation to the next.
But anyway, we'll get back to Russia in a minute.
Let's start, you start your article here at Consortium News, Neocon Chaos Promotion in the Mideast with General Wesley Clark, who was the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO under Bill Clinton and ran for president unsuccessfully in the primaries in 2004.
Anyway, so there's this eight minute clip that you link to here of Wesley Clark in 2007.
What's that about?
Well, Wesley Clark is talking about his experience after 9-11.
And bear in mind, he's sort of a candidate to be for president.
This is actually 2007.
And he's recounting his shock that when he appeared at the Pentagon, he said, I couldn't stay away from Mother Army.
He dropped in on Rumsfeld, who only gave him a couple of minutes, Powell, who only gave him a couple of minutes, but then he saw a senior general on the Joint Chiefs of Staff who gave him more than a few minutes.
And it was quite something.
He said, you know, we've been told to get ready for regime change in seven countries.
And he said, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.
And I said to him, what is this?
He said, no, no, it's right here in this memo.
And Clark says, well, I told him I don't want to see a memo because it's classified.
Yes, it's classified.
So he said that really, really impressed me.
So I went and saw Paul Wolfowitz, who at that point was a number three in the in the Defense Department.
And he said, Paul, how you doing?
You asked me to drop in on you when you were in Washington.
So Paul says, well, you know, this is really something.
He says, Desert Storm, Desert Storm in 1991.
It told us a lot of things, but nothing more important than the Soviets won't stop us.
They can't stop us.
They're on their back.
They have no real functional military.
And so when we did what we did in invading Iraq in 1991, and we saw that the Russians weren't even inclined to protest very much, well, that gave us the green light.
And now you're going to see some real regime change throughout the Middle East.
This is Wolfowitz.
OK.
So he had, of course, been part of part of the Defense Department under Dick Cheney.
And he had written, you know, he had written in the very famous five year defense planning guidance that, you know, now that we're the sole superpower in the world, our objective should be simply to prevent anyone like the like the former Soviet Union from rehabilitating themselves to the point where they might threaten us.
So that's our policy.
So here he is now after 9-11, Wolfowitz is Deputy Secretary of Defense.
You know the rest of the story.
But what grabbed me here, Scott, was, you know, I often wondered whether it was the absence of a deterrent from the Soviet Union that gave these folks that we used to call not just we, but in Washington, who wasn't a neoconservative, we call them the crazies.
OK.
The crazies.
It gave them carte blanche to implement their crazy, their proposal.
Of course, they had Dick Cheney and they had Don Rumsfeld and they had a president that wasn't paying much attention, but certainly could be persuaded to be man up, you know, so tough, tough guy.
So that indicated to me that, well, maybe back then, maybe back in 91, 92, and even early into this century, the Soviets won't stop us, as Wolfowitz said.
Well, the question is, how about now?
How about now?
Well, now, in my view, the Soviets have stopped us.
The Russians?
Yes.
Yes.
That's what I mean.
The Russians.
The Ukraine.
The Russians have said, look, you know, nyets means nyets.
We really don't like coup d'etat on our borders and we're not going to allow Ukraine to go into NATO.
OK.
So that's the most obvious thing.
Georgia.
That was an example of that in 2008 when Georgia, too, was slated to become a member of NATO and Shakashvili very foolishly took the advice of people like John Bolton and gave Soviet troops in that area a bloody nose.
Six days later, the Georgian forces were crushed.
OK.
So in this neighborhood, in what Russia considers to be its soft underbelly, the neocons are no longer going to be able to do things and, quote, Russia won't stop us, end quote.
The question is whether they realize that.
And that's the danger in all this.
These guys really are crazy.
Bolton is ranting and raving now about, well, about the deal announced yesterday that the Russians are going to provide defensive missiles to Iran.
Well, this deal's been in the works for five years.
The Russians let themselves be persuaded to put it on the back burner while they worked out a nuclear deal with Iran.
But now the nuclear deal framework is worked out.
So Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov yesterday said, look, you know, there's no more reason for us to forego the 800 million, it's almost a billion, right, that we make on this deal.
We signed the contract and we're being sued by the Iranians for $4 billion in court.
So, hey, you know, these are defensive missiles.
Now what's Bolton say, John Bolton?
He's on Fox News yesterday and he says, this is terrible.
He says, because this, this could be a game changer for Israel.
Israel wouldn't be able to attack the nuclear facilities in Iran if they wanted to, if this system goes in there.
Now the U.S. could, the U.S. could because they got stealth bombers, but the U.S. doesn't want to have a war.
So you know, who's this good for?
Well, it might be good for the, for the Obama administration, but it's terrible for Israel.
Now I ask you, who is John Bolton advocating for?
Does he care more about Israel or does he care more about preventing a war that the U.S. would be drawn into and Russia as well?
Well, it's clear from his remarks that he thinks this is a terrible thing.
It's a game changer, his word for Israel, but the U.S. could still, could still destroy Iran if it wanted to, but it's too chicken.
That's the, that's the, that's the level of the sophomoric logic that's very prevalent on the Hill.
And I dare say, we'll have to see how the legislation comes out now.
But I guess one thing I'll add, and I was curious, curious to learn this, when Kerry was up there on the Hill testifying yesterday, precisely about the Iran deal and all, and he was asked about this, it's a, it's an S-300 system, very sophisticated, he said, well, you know, you have to take into account the perspective of other countries.
Whoa, that's new.
Yeah, well, taking into account the fact that if we have a deal, then it doesn't matter if they've got anti-aircraft, but now their program is even more safeguarded than before.
Back in one minute with Ray McGovern, right after this, y'all.
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All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Ray McGovern, veteran intelligence professional for Sanity, essayist at consortiumnews.com.
This one is called Neocon Chaos Promotion in the Mideast, and where we left off, Ray, you were talking about Kerry's testimony in front of the Senate and bringing up the Russians now going ahead with, I guess they'd been convinced to hold for a few years now, but they're going ahead with the sale of the S-300 anti-aircraft missiles, which I was kind of joking that, hey, you know, if there's nothing to bomb, then you don't have to worry about them being able to deter your bombing so much, and you have a deal right in your hand, so what's the big deal?
But of course, that assumes a false premise that the nuclear issue was ever actually the issue rather than Iranian independence in the first place, but anyway, I'm sorry.
Please go ahead, sir, about John Kerry and what you were going to say there.
You got that right, Scott.
You know, the whole thing is surreal.
Here's Kerry before the Congress yesterday, and during his testimony, the story breaks.
Putin has relaxed the restrictions that have been imposed, self-imposed, voluntarily imposed by Russia on the sale of these S-300 missiles, which are not their most sophisticated, but they're certainly much better than what Iran has now.
Now, $800 million is at stake.
That may not seem very much to neocons, but to the Russians who are suffering under the sanctions and other things, that's almost a billion dollars, right?
Not only that, but as I think I mentioned, the Iranians are suing them in world court, an international court, for reneging on their agreement.
What billion dollars is at stake on that?
So Lavrov, the foreign minister yesterday, makes it very clear, look, we have this framework agreement, and we have this self-imposed embargo that we wouldn't give them these missiles.
It had nothing to do with UN sanctions, so we've decided to give them the missiles now and get the money.
You know, I mean, it's not like, you know, the U.S. defense contractors are the only ones to profit from arms sales.
I mean, the Russians won't.
It's playing a chess piece against the Americans that, you know, all the more reason for you to go ahead and see this deal through now that, you know, your ability to attack will be more limited, right?
Well, it'll limit, you know, if, assume it goes through, there's many a slip between cup and lip, but assuming it goes through, then the Israelis really will be deterred once it's made nationwide.
Why?
Now, as always, you know, the Israelis, they have potential to attack Iran from sea, under the sea, air, you know, missile planes, you know, so it's folly to assume this would be airtight.
The Israelis could still do it, but they'd suffer very great losses, and they wouldn't be able to do the whole thing.
It requires the United States to do the whole thing, even now, okay?
So what happens yesterday, this is kind of interesting, and a little bit hopeful.
I've been down on Kerry, as you probably know, but he's up before Congress, and they're saying, whoa, what about, oh, now those dirty Russians, now they're selling them air defense missiles to Iran.
What do you think about that?
And what he says is, you know, you've got to understand things from Iran's perspective.
Whoa, since when did John Kerry admit that it's a good idea to look at things from another country's perspective?
That was big.
Now, how do I know that?
Because a Republican representative named Kinzinger, Adam Kinzinger from Illinois, ranted and raved.
He said, look, I braced the Secretary with this new development, you know what he said?
He said, can you imagine this?
You've got to look at things from another country's perspective.
Not only that, but Maria Harf, that wonderful blonde lady there that speaks at the State Department, she said, look, this is not going to derail the framework agreement.
So there's a degree of maturity here that is sending Netanyahu up the wall.
And Netanyahu himself yesterday, amid all this, again threatened airstrikes against Iran.
Now, I noticed something, you know, I live near Washington, so I get the Washington Post here.
And usually their neocon flagship really does violence to real stories.
And that's the case this morning.
But just the first paragraph, here's the first paragraph.
Russia revived a deal Monday to send an advanced air defense system to Iran, bucking U.S. objections and potentially altering the strategic balance in the Middle East, period, altering the strategic balance.
Now, wait a second, Washington Post.
How many nuclear weapons does Israel have?
Oh, well, people say between two, two and four hundred.
How many does Iran have?
Well, actually, none, right?
So this defense system is going to alter the strategic balance in the Middle East.
Guess what, Scott?
The rest of the whole story written by a young lady named Demirjian is factual.
It's good.
It even quotes Lavrov in some detail as to how he explained this whole thing.
So my diagnosis of what happened here is they got this report.
It was factual, but they had to make it a little bit, you know, alarmist.
And so the editors took that first lead and made it into a potentially alter, altering of the strategic balance in the Middle East.
That's what's going on here.
And it's real hard for people like Kerry, at least based on past precedent, to face up to this kind of thing or the president.
So what I'm saying here is that, well, I guess I still don't trust Kerry.
There's too many lies he's told and too many treacherous things he's done, particularly on Syria.
So I'm still for Missouri as to whether by the end of June this thing will go through.
It's going to require the kind of, what's the word, guts that the president has not shown before.
I like the fact that Kerry hung around there for a week.
And let me say this.
When the Fox News reporter talked to John Bolton, this is yesterday, he said, well, what about that intensive week of negotiations?
This is what Bolton said.
I copied it down verbatim.
It wasn't one week.
It was after 12 years.
And after 12 years, Iran still hasn't convinced anybody that it's really got a peaceful nuclear program.
Well, wait a second there, John Bolton.
The National Intelligence Estimate of November 2007, which you know, Scott, said that Iran does have a peaceful nuclear program and stopped working on a nuclear weapon at the end of 2003.
Now, those kinds of details don't matter to John Bolton, but they do matter to people who know about this and those are the countries that have negotiated this framework agreement.
And so I think whether the Bolton's like it or not, if the president has the cojones to follow through on this thing, it's going to be very, very good.
And my major concern at this point is not only the president's guts, but also what Israel can do, you know, in the way of actual provocations as they've done in the past to derail the whole thing.
All right.
Now, hold it right there.
And that's where we'll pick up this conversation.
On the other side of this break, more with Ray McGovern from ConsortiumNews.com right after this.
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All right, guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Ray McGovern about the Iran nuclear deal and the Israelis and the neocons and the Russians and the Americans and the gigantic mess our politicians have gotten us in.
Well, some of the messes.
Neocon Chaos Promotion in the Mideast is the name of the article at ConsortiumNews.com.
And where we left off, you were talking about the lengths that you fear the Israelis will go to to kill this deal.
Those are the words of Benjamin Netanyahu.
After the framework was signed and the president and Kerry had their little victory, he went straight on to, I think, all the Sunday morning news shows to say he will do anything and everything that he can to kill this deal.
How far do you think he might go, Ray?
Well, Scott, in cases like this, I think you have to go by precedent.
And let me just go back to the early year of the Obama administration, you know, after the estimate two years before in 07, saying that, well, let me just read you the key sentences.
We judge with high confidence that in the fall of 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.
We assess with moderate confidence.
They have not restarted the nuclear weapons program as of mid 2007.
And we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.
Well, that's the setting here, OK?
So Obama comes in and he knows he has to deal with Israel-friendly neocons.
And so it takes him until October to reach out for direct contact with Iran.
So, you know, January to October, finally, on October 1st, he sends Bill Burns to Geneva and he meets with a very high level Iranian negotiator.
And Bill Burns presents this plan, which would involve, among other things, Iran shipping out two-thirds to three-quarters of its low-enriched uranium abroad out of its control.
Now for your listeners, just a reminder here, the way you get highly enriched uranium is from low-enriched uranium.
So what Iran was prepared to do was to ship out two-thirds to three-quarters of its low-enriched uranium to be reprocessed in Russia or Turkey or someplace else and then used to fuel its medical reactor.
OK?
Now what happened?
Well, that was the 1st of October.
It was agreed to in principle and they were going to meet in Vienna on the 19th of October.
Guess what happened on the 18th of October?
Five, count them, five Iranian Revolutionary Guard generals were killed, murdered in the part of Iran, near Baluchistan, where a terrorist group supported by Israel, by the US and sometimes by the Paks, Pakistanis, had this incredibly accurate information about this meeting involving not only these five generals but others and zapped them, killed them.
Now that was the 18th of October, so you can bet that the Revolutionary Guard's commander went to the Supreme Leader and said, hey, now wait a second, you're going to negotiate with these folks?
In the event, they went to Vienna, which was the next stop in these negotiations, but they backed off a little bit and the thing just kind of was putted away.
Fast forward to the following spring, May 2010, the Turks and the Brazilians, to their great credit, said, you know, two-thirds to three-quarters of their low-enriched uranium, I mean, let's see if we can resuscitate that deal.
They got permission, permission mind you, from Obama himself to try again.
They went to Tehran, worked out a deal, this time it was only going to be 50% of the low-enriched uranium because they had created more, but the deal was great, I remember the pictures, the three of them, Stasilva from Brazil, Erdogan from Turkey, and Ahmadinejad actually from Iran.
They were willing to do that.
Okay.
Now what happens?
Well, the next day, Hillary Clinton gets up and she says, this is what I think of that deal.
We're going to have sanctions.
We've arranged these UN sanctions and that's what's going forward, not this deal.
Whoa.
Now, Stasilva was really so ticked off about this that he dug out the letter that the President of the United States had sent him, asking him precisely to conclude this kind of a deal.
He publicized it.
He said, what's going on?
Who's in charge?
Who's in charge in Washington?
So that's the history here.
In 2009, 2010, Hillary Clinton, the neocons, and when necessary, terrorists like Gondola are employed to derail this thing.
Now do I think that Netanyahu will do it this time?
I think he's actively planning to do it.
I don't know exactly how he would do it, but there are all manner of provocations that can happen.
The question is whether they will be serious enough or whether they will be very, very transparent and redound to his detriment.
But watch for that because he's got until the end of June.
He's not going to sort of sit back and forego this opportunity to provoke the kind of reaction that he did back in 2009 and 2010, and remember where you heard it first.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it certainly wouldn't be surprising, Ray.
I've been on the lookout for it.
I mean, already what he's doing in the Congress and trying to get them to ruin it is bad enough.
But yeah, like you say, just look at history.
Has he used Iranian bin Ladenite types to do his dirty work before?
Yeah.
So now let me ask you about the war in Syria here.
You talk about in your article this Israel first policy.
In fact, as Barack Obama himself explained it to Jeffrey Goldberg back in 2012, Jeffrey Goldberg said, hey, don't you think that helping the rebels against Assad in Syria is a great way to weaken Iran's position around here?
And Obama said, yes, exactly.
That's why we're doing it.
And I can't tell you everything, Jeffrey, because then I'd have to kill you, that kind of thing.
Well, he said, you're not cleared to know that or something, but talked about basically covert action.
As we know, they've been backing the same side as the bin Ladenites all along, if not necessarily directly the bin Ladenites.
But apparently when it comes to Israel, they've been directly backing al-Nusra.
And I think it's been pretty clear all along that whatever aid the Americans gave to the so-called Islamic Front and the Northern Storm and whatever, all that money and all those weapons ended up in the hands of the bin Ladenites anyway, first al-Nusra and now the Islamic State as well.
But so what about that?
Pat Buchanan has an article saying that Obama's doing a Nixon here and he's just dropping his old allies who are not serving our interests, the Turks, the Saudis, the Israelis, and he's going to go ahead and redirect back toward the Shiites.
After all, we've been fighting a war for Iran and their puppets in Iraq for the last 12 years with a little bit of a break there, here and there.
But now we're back at it.
And so at least that makes sense since it wasn't the Iranians that knocked our damn towers down, you know.
But anyway, so what do you think?
Is there actually a change in the foreign policy here?
Or are they just going to keep splitting the difference and fighting for Iran in Eastern Islamic State and against Iran in Western Islamic State?
Well, it is a mess, Scott.
And I think if I tried to reduce it to its most common denominator here, at least common denominator, I would say that that Kerry and the rest of them are being led by Israeli interests here.
That's just a matter of fact, in my opinion.
Nowhere was this clearer than the situation in Syria in 2013.
Now, you remember that the rebels, such as they were, had made some advances there in Aleppo and elsewhere.
And in the middle of 2013, Bashar al-Assad's forces were forcing them back.
It looked like there was a danger, as the Israelis see it, of Assad winning.
And that's precisely when they decided to mousetrap the United States into coming in with its military in support, in support of removing Assad.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry.
I asked that question too close to that break.
We'll be right back, y'all, with one more segment with Ray McGovern right after this.
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All right, guys.
Welcome back.
So, I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Ray McGovern about the giant mess in the Middle East.
Now we're on to Syria and America's crazy policy in Syria back in the Bin Laden nights.
Mostly because, I guess, that's what our allies want.
But anyway, what do you say, Ray?
What's going on there?
Well, you know, you need to go back to the late summer of 2013 for insights into why Israel wanted us so much to attack Syria.
They almost had us to attack.
The fighter bombers were revved up on the tarmac in France and Israeli defenses were on high alert.
And Obama changed his mind.
I think we know that story, but the implication there was, well, why would they want us to come in there?
Well, the answer was that their guys were losing.
And our guys, to the extent that we were supporting some of these rebels, they were losing.
It looked like Assad would be able to push them out of the country.
So a new correspondent, head of the Jerusalem Bureau for the New York Times, her name is Jodi Rudoran.
And she interviewed a bunch of people and she was kind of new at the job, and so she actually reported some politically incorrect things.
She wrote an article, it was very early in September 2013, and the title was Israel Backs Limited Strike Against Syria.
Limited strike by us, of course.
Here's a quote.
For Jerusalem, the status quo, horrific as it may be from a humanitarian perspective, seems preferable to either a victory by Assad and his Iranian backers or a strengthening of the rebel groups dominated by the Sunni jihadists.
This is a playoff situation in which you need both teams to lose, but at least you don't want one to win.
We'll settle for a tie.
So she said, Alan Pincus, a former Israeli consul general in New York, let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death.
That's strategic thinking here.
As long as this lingers, there's no real threat from Syria.
That clear enough?
Well, I don't know if she got into trouble for saying that, but that was the Israeli outlook.
Now, that's two years ago, or almost a year and a half ago.
So where are they now?
Well, it looks pretty much now as though they're hedging their bets and saying, well, if one side has to win, we'd really prefer that it will be the rebels.
We really would prefer that al-Qaeda would win.
Now, am I making that up?
No.
It's an amazing age here.
And Aspen, we have the former Israeli ambassador, Oren, mouthing off.
And even before that, well, he was still ambassador.
Hang on one second, Ray.
I have the clip right here.
It'll just take a second.
Good, good, good.
We have to choose the lesser of evils here.
The lesser evil is the Sunnis over the Shiites.
It's an evil, believe me.
It's a terrible evil.
Again, they've just taken out 7,800 former Iraqi soldiers and shot them in a field.
But who are they fighting against?
They're fighting against the proxy with Iran that's complicit in the murder of 160,000 people in Syria.
You can just do the math.
And again, one side is armed with suicide bombers and rockets.
The other side has access to military nuclear capabilities.
So from Israel's perspective, if there's got to be an evil that's going to prevail, let the Sunni evil prevail.
He just leaves no doubt about who he's referring to here.
This is after the Islamic State has declared a caliphate and sacked Mosul and taken all our equipment.
He specifically refers to the suicide bombers, not the so-called mythical moderates fighting, as Megyn Kelly on Fox News put it.
The doctors and the lawyers who were fighting before the jihadists showed up.
The mythical moderates.
I like that.
Mythical moderates.
Can I use that, Scott?
Yeah, I might have plagiarized it from someone else.
I'm not sure.
I wouldn't claim credit.
But anyway, making very clear that that's the former Israeli ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren.
Just illustrating your point there.
But please continue, sir.
Well, you know, what's important here is how the Russians look at all this.
I mean, that's still the transcended consideration here.
They're pretty close to the Syrians and they don't want to see Assad take it on the chin.
They're not going to allow a lot of bad stuff to happen on their soft underbelly.
And you know, we have to look at how they react here.
Now, here's Kerry.
During this critical period when he was deprived of his war, when neocons missed out on their chance for US armed forces to attack Syria, Kerry gets up two days later before Congress and he says, the moderate, he didn't say mythical moderates, Scott, he said, the moderates are winning.
We are, we're strengthening the moderates, OK?
Nobody in the whole world agreed with that.
Of course, his underlings at the state, the moderates are winning.
The next day, President of the United States, Barack Obama, arrives in St. Petersburg for that summit.
And that same day, Mr. Puchin says, Он врет, он знает, что врет, это печально, which means, Kerry is lying.
He knows that he's lying.
This is really sad.
Now that's the only time in my 52 years of watching Russia and the Soviet Union very closely that the president or the premier or the party leader of Russia has seen fit to call our secretary of state a liar.
But it was a lie on two counts.
It was a lie on the moderates, the mythical moderates, the gaining strength, and it was also a lie, of course, when he accused Assad of arranging those chemical attacks outside of Damascus on the 21st of August, 2013.
We know now that it was not Assad, despite the fact that Kerry said it was 35 times on the 30th of August.
It was not Assad.
The sarin gas that was used was homemade, it was home manufactured, it was not the same sarin gas in Syrian army stocks.
We know that because we've got a sample of it, okay?
And that's what swayed the president, plus the fact that Puchin worked out a deal.
Now get this, not many people know this, but the Syrians were, the Syrians agreed to destroy all their chemical weapons, all of them.
Have they been destroyed?
Yes, they've been destroyed.
Do you see that in the New York Times, the Washington Post?
No.
So it was Puchin that came to the rescue, and I have to say, that's one reason why the neocons hate Puchin so much.
He prevented them from having their little war in Syria, and he's done other kinds of things that they really don't like.
So that's part of the reason.
They hate him from another picture, from another movie, as we used to say in the Bronx, and their hatred for him is going to get us in trouble unless Obama can get some, well let's put it this way, he's got a bunch of sophomores advising him, now if he can get some seniors, get some people like John Kennedy had around him during the Cuban Missile Crisis, get people who know something about Russia, unless that happens, he could be led down the garden path here and we could have another outbreak of hostilities, even wider ones in the Middle East.
Well, now, so, you know, Paul Wolfowitz's famous saying about Iraq was, it's doable.
The Ledeen Doctrine was, you take a weak little country and you throw them up against the wall just to prove you mean business to everybody else, and that kind of thing.
But I wonder, I mean, they know that they can't fight Russia, right, but they are willing to get into a semi-minor, if I dare call it that, proxy war with them in Ukraine there for a little while, and then there have been some indications that the Americans would really, I guess strong indications, the Americans would really prefer to ratchet that conflict back up rather than the peace that was negotiated by the Germans, the French, and the Russians there, because they keep sending at least Humvees and I don't know what else, and along with troops to train the National Guard over there, which we all know is made up of the right sector and Svoboda and Azov Nazis, and I wonder, you say that the neocons are crazy and I know that they're stupid, I mean, if you read Robert Kagan from, or Bill Kristol from back a few years ago, that's all you need to know about what these guys don't know, but they do know that the Russians have, you know, A-bombs and H-bombs and that they're not going to, you know, tolerate too much more of this conflict right on their border, right?
Do you think that there is a line there?
I mean, you mentioned Georgia where the Russians intervened and it seemed like they made their point at least to George W. Bush, said, all right, well, forget it then, sorry.
Yeah, you know, the Russians look on us as being entirely, well, it used to be disingenuous, now it's just hypocritical.
There was a foreign ministry statement that Lavrov let out earlier this week, which said, look, you justified your anti-ballistic missile system in Europe because of the Iranian threat, right?
Right.
I wish everyone laughed about when Bush said that, but then we're supposed to take it seriously when Obama did.
But anyway.
Now it looks like there ain't going to be no Iranian threat.
And now you say, oh, yes, but the Iranians are doing missiles.
Well, if they have no nuclear warheads or weapons of mass destruction warheads, missiles are, you know, just like a piece of artillery.
So what is it really all about here?
You know, what is it really all about here?
And what it's all really all about, of course, is Russia.
But so transparent has U.S. policy become not only on Iran, but on this whole missile defense thing.
Let's face it, the missile defense projects have been the biggest corporate welfare systems ever in the history of mankind.
Billions and billions and billions of dollars.
Peace is really bad for business.
War is really good for business.
And I keep thinking back right after 9-11, I was looking for a silver lining, Scott.
I said, well, at least now, Carl Levin, who has been putting the brakes on this ballistic missile system, at least he'll see that that's not what we need to defend against anymore.
Then he'll put more money into other things.
And guess what?
Within three days, he approved, he lifted all his objections to the billions that would be appropriated for a ballistic missile system, because these guys are bought.
And they're going to get reelected to the extent that they authorize or appropriate this money for the, you know, for the contractors and so forth.
It's that bad.
The Russians know it's that bad.
And so they can't really rely on sensible people.
They have to they have to hedge against the crazies.
And that is a very tentative situation, because if there is a missile defense system implemented in the Black Sea and around Europe, well, then you have a situation where the Russians can't be sure that their deterrent is still good.
So what do they do?
They resort back to what was prevalent in the early 70s and 60s, launch on warning, which means you see a missile go up, you can't, you can't be sure what it is.
And so to protect your own, your own country or your own missiles, you fire them off.
That is a situation that has not been so labile, so dangerous since the ABM Treaty was signed in 1972.
I happened to be in Moscow at the time.
That was an incredible achievement.
And it did keep the deterrence.
It did keep the peace up until George Bush decided that he wanted to jettison it.
And since then, it's been really a different strategic equation.
Well, you have Carl Gershman, I believe is his name, from the National Endowment for Democracy, right as the Maiden protests were starting up in the fall of 2013, wrote a piece in The Washington Post that ends with, and, you know, if Putin doesn't like it, maybe there'll be a color revolution in Russia and we'll finally just take care of him and that kind of thing.
And so, and, you know, I guess that's a recognition that we can't have a war with him, but then do they think they can actually do some kind of Ukraine style coup d'etat there without a fight, without a real fight inside Russia?
I mean, I don't know just how effective the FSB is compared to the old KGB, but it seems like they'd probably be able to prevent an American backed coup in Moscow, right?
I think so.
You know, I mean, let's face it, Putin is enjoying 80% approval ratings.
Now people say, yeah, but he's a dictator.
Well, all right.
If you want to want to stop him from being a dictator, what you do is not what we're doing.
In other words, the threat from abroad, legitimate as it is seen to be in Russia, just straight in his position makes him even, even more able to do the restrictions that he does on free speech and other things.
So if that's your real worry, knock it off, take the billions away from the National Endowment for Democracy and stop Gershwin from saying, you know, okay, am I done today?
Red Square tomorrow, we're going to, we're going to have regime change right where it's going to hurt, right in the Kremlin.
That's nonsense, but it's, it's noxious.
It's dangerous nonsense because if I'm a Russian listening to that, I'm going to be concerned.
And now as far as the, the anti-missile missiles that they're putting in, Obama did suspend the, the, the radars in the Czech Republic and the missiles in Poland, right?
At least for now.
Well, yeah, that's only the first, first part of the story.
My old friend, Bobby Gates, you know, he was very dismissive of the polls in the Czechs because they didn't know it was good for them.
They didn't realize that this, uh, this missile defense was good for them.
And so what he said, and what he says in his book is that he decided, well, put them on ships.
Yeah, that's it.
Put them on ships.
We get in the Black Sea, we get in the Baltic, put them on ships and that'll do it.
And somebody says, well, won't that worry the Russians?
And Gates said very flippantly, quote, I've never stayed up night worrying about how the Russians look at what we do, period, end quote.
So all right.
That's okay for Bobby Gates, uh, if he, if he wants to have that attitude, it's not okay for the rest of us because to the degree the Russians feel threatened and they do, you know, and they do, look what we did in Kiev, right on their doorstep.
Could we do it again?
Could we try to do it again?
Well, I don't think it's going to come anytime soon, but certainly the Gershmans and the others of this world seem to have a hold on Obama and the more sensible people in our government, if indeed Obama deserves that appellation right now.
And so, you know, it's not for naught that these people call crazies, all right?
They are crazy.
And if I were a Soviet planner and I looked at what they're trying to do and then certain encircling the Soviet Union, just like Russia just said they used to do the Soviet Union.
Well, you know, I will worry.
I will worry what the real designs are.
And with very, very sophisticated weaponry such as we keep developing, I would be worried very much.
All right, Ray, thanks very much for coming back on the show.
I sure appreciate it.
Well, my pleasure.
All right, so that's the great Ray McGovern.
He's at ConsortiumNews.com.
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