12/15/15 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, you guys, welcome back.
Hey, there's an hour and a half long BBC interview of Shocker Aamer on the antiwar.com blog right now that I'm going to watch later this afternoon.
I want to make sure I mention that today.
He was in Guantanamo forever and ever, whatever.
He was the last Brit in Guantanamo.
Anyway, on to our next guest.
It's Phil Duraldi, former CIA and DIA officer, executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
That's the America First lobby in Washington, D.C.
And of course, regular writer for UNZ.com and the American Conservative Magazine.
How's it going, Phil?
Welcome back.
Yeah, I just got back from Moscow.
I didn't know if you knew that I was making a trip.
Oh, yeah.
You know what?
I read that somewhere, something.
I guess maybe you had mentioned it in an article or maybe in an email.
But yeah, no, I had forgotten, though.
So geez, let's talk about that first.
Go ahead.
It was just a vacation or you were over there meeting with Putin or what?
Actually, I did kind of meet with Putin.
Really?
Yeah, we were there at a conference sponsored by what used to be called Russia Today.
It's now RT International.
Their television network that's mostly in English.
And it's, you know, it's a very respectable network, except, of course, when they're having stories about Russia or Ukraine or something like that, there is definitely a bit of spin.
But apart from that, they have very good reporters and we, a bunch of us from the States were over there for a conference as speakers.
So it was kind of interesting.
And while I was there to connect with what we're going to be talking about today, everybody wanted to know about Turkey.
That's all I talked about.
Right.
And so your speech then was something along the lines of this article today at Unz.com?
A lot of it was.
My initial speech was basically the question in front of our panel.
Ray McGovern was on the panel.
I think you know him.
And the question before our panel was, can you protect privacy when it's being attacked by people who are pushing for national security and intrusion into communications and stuff like that?
And I basically argued, yeah, you could, but you would have to force the government to step back considerably from where it's at and reinstate a lot of the procedures that we used to have before the government could come and tap your phone.
And of course, that's not going to happen.
Right.
All right.
So now on the as far as meeting Putin, how'd that go?
Was he there?
They had a gala dinner and he appeared.
And so I, you know, I met him as much as anybody else met him, just kind of standing around gawking.
Yes.
And but Shevardnadze was there, Edward Shevardnadze, Gorbachev was there.
There were a whole lot of people that it was kind of surprising to see them.
It was it was quite an experience.
Oh, yeah.
Well, I accuse you of being a communist and a traitor.
How do you answer that?
That's OK.
You don't mind?
I don't mind anymore.
I've been called worse.
All right.
Well, so but now you you weren't there because you've turned on America.
Why were you there?
Well, I was there basically because it was it was an offer, you know, a paid offer to go over and and see Russia.
I've never been to Russia.
Moscow was a delightful city.
Any kind of recollection on the part of the American huddled masses that it was kind of a gray socialist place, completely wrong.
You'll probably find this one hard to believe, but there was a Christmas market in Red Square right across from Lenin's tomb.
And nobody was going to Lenin's tomb.
And there were a lot of people going into the Christmas market.
And, you know, it's kind of there were a lot of eye opening experiences just kind of being there.
Yeah, that's cool.
Yeah.
I'm trying to remember.
Oh, it was George Kennan in the in the interview in 1998 with Thomas Friedman in The New York Times who says, hey, listen, these aren't the communists enemies.
These are the guys who overthrew them for us.
I love these guys, dude.
They're the ones who destroyed communism.
And yet we act like, oh, no, the Russians still snap out of it.
You dummies.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And one of the interesting things, of course, was that all Russians now for now for some time have been learning English as part of the standard curriculum starting in first grade.
So almost everybody spoke English and, you know, and the food was good.
The hotel was nice.
The people were more pleasant.
And it was a lot to see, a lot to do with, you know, I mean, the taking going back on a vacation.
All right.
Well, so what about the danger?
We'll get back to Turkey and Turkey's obviously part of it.
But what about the danger of a real Cold War again with them?
Because they keep saying that this seems like mostly PR.
And obviously we have America pictified in Ukraine and America pictified in Syria.
And we have the Russian response, which is called aggression here in America.
Not that I'm necessarily justifying whatever Putin does or anything like that.
But I do remember what came first, the invasion of South Ossetia or the Russian invasion of it back in 08, unlike most in the media.
But anyway, so how bad is it really, Phil?
Some people say, hey, it's hadn't been this bad since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Never even mind the 80s Princeman ship.
Well, I think it depends on who you talk to.
But certainly all the Russians I met.
And let me say categorically, the Russians I met were much more aware of foreign policy issues and what's going on in the world than most Americans would be.
They were much more aware.
And they all asked me the same thing.
They said, why is it that the United States seems to hate us?
And why is it that your media can never say a good thing about us?
And you know, I had trouble answering those questions.
I mean, you come out with a lot of complicated crap about neocons and this, that and the other thing.
But it's kind of true.
We're creating an enemy where it's not necessary.
And we have no vital interests, actually, that would compel us to create an enemy.
And I kept trying to explain that to them, saying, you know, it's kind of U.S. politics and everybody's wondering, what is Obama doing and why do you keep criticizing us no matter what we do?
And I said, you know, you've got a point.
It's the planes, man.
The planes and the ships, those big ticket items.
You know, you can fight insurgents all day for almost free compared to the cost of a real Cold War.
You know?
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, I mean, why would these clowns like John McCain, I come back and I listen to John McCain and I think this guy should be taken out and tied up somewhere.
Maybe we can arrange that.
I don't know.
But the fact is, you know, these people are out of their minds to be any thought of going back to the to a Cold War, which has as the bottom line nuclear obliteration for everybody.
Why?
What is wrong with these people?
I just say, you know, I don't get it.
Yeah, it's pretty far out of control.
It seems to me, Phil, maybe like they think maybe they even say this to the Russians out loud, but at least they think it's implied that, hey, you know, we're just bullshitting, right?
We're just making money here and whatever.
Like there's some kind of tax agreement to do brinksmanship on both sides.
But maybe the Russians don't really want to play with the Americans are like, hey, you make a great enemy for us.
And so tough, you know.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Putin is an old style nationalist.
And there were things that, you know, happened during this trip that that's just where I open is like, for example, on the back wall of the Kremlin, there's the Russian war memorial to the Second World War.
And there's, you know, the memorial memorializes twenty seven million people who were killed, Russians who were killed in the war.
And one of the American professors I was with, the guy from American University, he made a comment.
He says, you know, if you consider 9-11 to be one of the ultimate terrorist incidents or outrages ever, he said you would have to take a 9-11 every single day for nine years to realize the same numbers as the Russians who were killed in the Second World War.
And he said, if you don't if you can't figure out that that has a huge impact in how people think and how they view war and how they view all these other things, then you're not listening.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the thing, man, is Americans just can't look out of those eyes.
Americans don't take war seriously.
War is a movie.
War is not a real thing.
And and they certainly couldn't imagine somebody coming and wiping out 20 million Americans and what life would be like after that.
What our minds would be like after that, you know, is.
Yeah, exactly.
You put yourself in those shoes because this is a generation that's still kind of alive, you know, and they remember 27 million of them killed in a war.
And and the United States, of course, was, apart from the soldiers who actually fought it, was relatively untouched.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Margulies said about the Crimean Peninsula that the Russians lost hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of men fighting the Nazis for Crimea.
And you think they're going to give it up to the Azov battalion and the USA?
You're crazy.
You think the Texans love the Alamo?
You know.
All right.
Hold on one second.
We'll be right back with Phil Giraldi right after this.
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All right, Joe, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
Talking with Phil Giraldi.
Former CIA officer stationed in Turkey.
And now remind us, Phil, again about your career.
You were the station chief, not for the country, but for a major city there.
Right.
Yeah.
The station is always in the capital, which is Ankara.
And Istanbul was a base.
That's where I was.
Gotcha.
And by the way, do you ever publish that hilarious book about being a CIA agent in Turkey?
Because the thing is so good.
Well, I know you've read it.
I have.
No, I haven't had time, but I'm going to do it.
I mean, as soon as things kind of slow up a little bit, I hope I'm going to give it a final edit and probably do a self-publish.
OK, well, however you get it published, you should.
It's great.
Thanks.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, anyway, so, you know something about Turkey and on the show before you've sort of kind of defended the Erdogan regime in the sense that, hey, man, it's in this case, the secularists are against democracy because they're the minority.
If you have democracy, most of the population of Turkey are basically conservative, you know, would like a conservative Islamist government, not a extremist, radical, insane one necessarily, a bin Ladenite one, but an Islamist government.
And so they got one and it's been working pretty well.
They got a pretty good economy and this, that, the other thing.
But then it all comes to fall apart over Syria or I'm oversimplifying or what?
Well, I mean, you know, there's a lot of complications that play out here.
I mean, first of all, Erdogan has a distinct advantage in that the conservative, less I hate to say, less educated, more religious part of the population supports him for for his religiosity and his simplicity.
But, you know, there are about 45 percent of the Turks who don't fall in that category.
So it's a lot closer than than one thinks.
And it could eventually go another way.
But but, you know, Erdogan has basically been playing a lot of games.
I mean, he's a big part of his appeal and getting real or getting his party reelected with a majority last month was based on the fact that he he fear mongered relentlessly about the Kurds and in fact, basically started a kind of a civil war with them again.
And this was his major pitch in terms of why the voters needed the strong man, you know, the powerful man back in power.
And so anyway, he played that very, very hard.
And this shooting down the plane is all part of that, because the the fact is that Erdogan has no interest in opposing ISIS, none whatsoever.
But he has a great interest in in stomping down the Kurds.
And the reason for that is that if there were ever a Kurdish state to develop in that region, it would take a big hunk out of Syria, a big hunk out of Iraq, a big hunk out of Iran.
But it would take a huge hunk out of Turkey.
So this has been his primary foreign policy objective for a long time.
And his predecessors, let's not leave them out, too.
But he's a lot more ruthless, I think, in some ways than most of them were.
And he has been playing this card of pretending to fight ISIS while actually fighting the Kurds.
He has soldiers right now in northern Iraq near Mosul, which, of course, Kurdish region and the Iraqi government is trying to get him to get them out of there.
But he won't leave.
So this is this is what drives him.
Man.
All right.
So here's the thing, though.
It's it's his support for the jihadists against Assad that has set the Syrian Kurds free in the first place.
Right.
They were under the domination of Damascus before.
Yeah, there are a lot of ironies in how this plays out.
But but, you know, the way he sees it now is he he says with with actually some correctness that Assad, when Assad started to get a little bit desperate in terms of what was going on, he he started he started to support PKK and other Kurdish groups that have undertaken terrorist acts inside Turkey.
So there is a little kind of rationale to that.
But but essentially, if you look at everything that goes on there from the Turkish point of view and realize that it basically is from a Kurdish point of view, then you kind of understand how everything plays out, what all their concerns are.
But here's the thing, though, is I still don't understand all their concerns.
You know, our previous guest, Peter Van Buren, was also saying that, you know, I mean, I'm paraphrasing both the all wrong, but anyway, close enough that, you know, yeah, the Kurds want independence.
But hey, I thought that the Turkish well, first of all, the Iraqi Kurdish factions, the Barzani and Talabani factions, they get along with the Erdogan government.
They don't seem to want to have a war or a big problem with with him.
He bombs the PKK in Iraqi Kurdistan from time to time, has for years the Turkish government, but not, you know, apparently gets along with Barzani and Talabani.
And then Ocalan, the guy who's sitting in prison there, he had a peace deal and and had had a, you know, basically there was a terrible civil war in the 1990s, but they had they've had peace in Turkey between the Kurds and, you know, I guess enough autonomy under the deal that they don't feel like seceding and having a war over it anymore.
So you're saying he's he's, you know, turning the situation into one of war just for his own gain.
But then he's creating for himself a real problem of possible Kurdish secession in the future.
And somewhere he's going to have to have to have a real war against him, not just bomb him, but the 1990s again.
Well, I would not agree, actually, that that that the Kurds in Iraq get along with Erdogan quite well.
They don't.
In fact, Erdogan was was aiding and assisting civil terrorist groups when the Kurds were trying to retake some areas along the border between the two countries, Syria and and Turkey.
And and it was Erdogan who broke the truce with Ocalan and essentially started up the civil war again.
He was the one that did it.
So and then and then there's been some real sort of kind of shady things going on.
You might recall just before the last election in Turkey, there was a horrific bombing of a parade in or a rally in Ankara that killed over 100 people, mostly Kurds.
And it was blamed on ISIS.
But I will tell you that it was actually carried out by the Turkish intelligence service.
So, you know, there's a lot of weird things going on.
But basically, his focus is on, you know, let's keep the Kurds.
All right.
He probably likes the Kurds as long as they're under his foot.
And but don't have any illusions about him kind of thinking Kurds are OK.
He doesn't.
Yeah.
But I guess what I was trying to get at.
Well, now I need to ask you a follow up about how you know that and that kind of thing.
So I can quote you better later.
But also, I guess all I was really trying to get at is it seems like he's creating a situation where he is almost seems like he wants to push.
As you said, he's starting this up again.
He wants to push all the Kurds together just so you have a bigger, worse war against him or what?
Well, no, he wants to keep them separated.
And basically, he wants to use groups like ISIS as as an instrument and keeping them separated.
Because who is ISIS been attacking?
And they're attacking the Kurds.
He's a Democrat because he doesn't seem very good at his job.
You mean Democrat in the sense of Hillary Clinton or a member of the party?
He sounds like a terrible president.
I mean, look at what he's done.
It's complete.
You know, he was a pretty good prime minister, actually.
I mean, he's been around for a long time.
And probably the first six or seven years of his tenure, he did a lot of good things, actually.
He he even liberalized, you know, allowing the Kurds to use their language in a limited way, which was not possible in Turkey before and to have some Kurdish instruction in the schools.
And and, you know, he did a lot of that, admittedly, because he wanted to get into the European Union and he had to do that.
But nevertheless, he did a lot of good things.
The economy really went up very well in Turkey.
If you go to Istanbul now and you had been there 15 years ago, you wouldn't believe the changes.
And but, you know, the guy has become addicted to power.
And you know what that brings.
I mean, you know, we've had we've had certainly our share of presidents by about year seven or eight when they think they're God.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so tell me how it is that, you know, that you would say so definitively that the Turkish government did that so-called ISIS bombing there.
I have friends in high places.
Let's leave it at that.
All right.
Well, that's how they do it in the news, in The New York Times.
They say the CIA source said so that's pretty damn good, I guess.
All right.
Actually, my actually my friends are Turks who who who know a lot more about what's going on than the CIA does.
I'll take your word for it over the guys that still work there for sure.
Phil, thanks very much, man.
Appreciate it.
OK, Scott.
All right.
Bye bye.
All right, Joe.
That's a great Phil Giraldi.
He is at UNZ.com, UNZ, UNZ.com and the American Conservative Magazine and is executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
We'll be right back.
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