02/01/16 – Jeff Stein – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton, it's my show, Scott Horton Show, live here from noon to two eastern time on the Liberty Radio Network on the weekdays.
Today's the first of February, so the day of the Iowa caucuses.
And well, half the ayes, I guess, are over on the Hillary versus Sanders race on the Democratic side.
And today, our old friend Jeff Stein from Newsweek, the spy talker, you can follow him on Twitter, has a great piece about the loner.
As he calls him on foreign policy, Sanders may disappoint devotees.
Welcome back to the show, Jeff.
How are you?
Thank you, Scott.
It's good to be here.
Good to talk to you again.
And hey, listen, before we get into Sanders, I'm sorry, I got to ask you this.
Your series, I guess it was two or maybe three articles that you wrote back a few years ago about Jane Harman and the NSA and Israeli influence peddling and so forth.
It doesn't seem to be at the Congressional Quarterly site or whatever it's called anymore.
I forgot what it is.
It's a derivative of some other site.
But anyway, I search high and low for that thing and I cannot find the text of those articles anymore.
And I was just wondering if they are posted somewhere at a personal site of yours or do you know if Common Dreams ever ripped them off or anything?
CQ has put up a total firewall around its products since I left there.
And you can just Google Jane Harman NSA and my name, Jeff Stein, and you'll find other blog sites and so on who have talked about it.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the thing.
You can even find the New York Times and the Washington Post confirming the story as well.
The originals, and I don't even remember why this is what's killing me, Jeff, and the reason I started with this is because the way I remember it, the follow-up blog post had some real firepower in it, but it's so many years ago now I don't remember what the follow-up blog post was anymore.
Yeah.
I just wish I had the whole thing of both, but I guess they're not anywhere.
Thank you.
All right.
Anyway, great stuff, though.
And, you know, well, historical, never be forgotten, even if it's only from the New York Times archives and in the minds of some of us.
That story will never go away.
Thank you.
But anyway, so let's get to your current work here, The Loner.
Bernie Sanders, why, he's further to the left than Hillary Clinton on things, and so he must be a peacenik, huh?
Yeah.
I think that's the idea.
I was interested, I began getting interested in Bernie Sanders' foreign policy quotient last summer when his campaign really started to get some traction, and I made some inquiries at his office, and they were just absolutely nonresponsive.
They would not name a single national security advisor on his Senate staff.
And as it turns out, there's good reason for that, because he doesn't have one.
He doesn't have.
He has a national security advisor in name only, who is actually his legislative aide, who has no apparent track record at all, zero in foreign policy.
So it's just sort of odd.
And then on Friday, when I began pressing them again this week, I would ping them regularly over the months, but as you know, I specialize in foreign and military policy, not politics.
I mean, hell to me is having to cover politics.
So I generally stay away from it, but I am interested in the national security side.
So I started pinging them again last week, and they finally coughed up a list to me, for me, which they also provided to Politico, and of a dozen people he had consulted with.
But he still doesn't have a foreign policy, a full-time foreign policy or national security aide.
He certainly doesn't have a Kissinger, if you will.
Well, and that's kind of smart, right?
Because who of any experience in D.C. is not radioactive for all their horrifying failures and thousands of dead bodies in their wake?
Well, that's a pretty good point.
In fact, one of the officials or former government, Pentagon official I talked to, who Bernie had consulted with, said, well, maybe that's a good thing, because then he doesn't have a cabal of foreign policy advisers, because he would be starting fresh and look at what the establishment got us into.
So that's a good point.
Yeah, I mean, seriously, like, he could pick either the guys that lost the Iraq war for Bush or the guys that lost the Afghan war for Obama, right?
No, but there are people around, like Andrew Bacevich, the former army colonel at Boston University.
Sure.
Who has written quite poignantly about U.S. policy in the Middle East and the mistakes that have been made and where we should go.
So that's the kind of guy you would expect to be involved with Senator Sanders, I should say.
And there are a few of those, you know, over at the National Interest.
Not everybody over there, but there are a few, you know, quite a few, really, you know.
You're right, nameable experts who are pretty damn sober when it comes to this stuff.
I don't know, what about Paul Pilar?
Is he too radioactive for his Israel politics these days or not?
Yeah, you know, whenever you take any position outside of the conventional on Israel, you really get attacked.
Or I should say, if you take any position that is less than full-throated backing of Israel, you get attacked.
So Paul Pilar is in that position, he gets attacked a lot.
Yeah, you bring up the Institute for Policy Studies there, John Pfeffer and Phyllis Bennis and those guys, and they're pretty reliable, you know, they're experts, there's a whole stable of experts, I interview them all the time myself, and they're pretty peaceful on pretty much everything, too.
That would be a good place to go, maybe?
Well, he hasn't.
He has consulted with, which doesn't mean he agrees with him.
In fact, I quote in the beginning of my piece Ray Takei, who was a real hawk on Iran and the Iran nuclear negotiations, and he said he was very impressed with Senator Sanders for reaching out to him and soliciting his views and explaining why he was against the Iran negotiations.
He said it was a very good discussion, and that was consistent with everyone I talked to who Senator Sanders had reached out to.
He's a listener, he takes notes, he digests the information thoroughly, and he seemed, to all of these people, very well informed.
So I would say he's his own national security advisor.
But it is odd, as I point out later in the piece, you know, he's just not a senator anymore, he's a candidate for President of the United States.
And at this point, in a successful campaign, you begin to bring in people around you, if only for window dressing.
Because you have to start building networks and coalitions to win the presidency.
At least, that's traditionally been the case.
Other critics have pointed out, or observers have pointed out, that he's kind of a lone wolf on his domestic policies as well.
He's his own man, and we certainly know that about him.
He's his own man, and he does tend to build consensuses, and he's a listener, he's an including type of person.
Well, and his real voting record is, I'd say, a couple clicks to the right of his persona, anyway.
I mean, he voted against the Iraq War, but he at least mostly voted to fund it, right?
That kind of democratic positioning that we see so often.
So he's not quite Ron Paul on these things.
Even on Libya, he voted to condemn Gaddafi, but didn't vote for the one to remove him, or whatever.
Yeah, I don't think there was a vote to remove Gaddafi.
Well, I guess in the House there was a vote to authorize.
I don't know if they ever held it in the Senate, but they had one to deauthorize to make Obama stop, which failed, and they had another to authorize it, which also failed.
Or maybe Boehner didn't even let him go, and I forgot.
Well, these are complicated issues, you know, not just about the policy, they're about...
I'm sorry, we've got to stop here and take this break, but it's a good place to pick it up on the other side of this break.
It's the great Jeff Stein from Newsweek, SpyTalker on Twitter, and we're back right after this.
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Alright you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, it's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Jeff Stein from Newsweek, spy talker.
He's on the national security beat, not politics, but he's covering the national security angle on the Bernie Sanders campaign here.
And it is interesting to me that with his whole kind of grumpy old leftist persona that he doesn't make much of an issue out of peace.
Seems like it would fit with his overall, you know, branding as the left insurgent against Hillary in contrast to her, and that kind of thing.
And who cares whether he can really back it up.
But as you say in this article, Jeff, he really doesn't, when he could talk about this or that about ISIS, he'd rather just talk about the banks and stick to domestic policy.
And I guess that's what his audience would prefer to hear too, huh?
Yeah, I think so, absolutely.
I change the channel when people are responding to your main message of economic inequality, the big banks, Wall Street, and so on.
And you know, I'm not faulting him.
In my piece, my Newsweek piece, I don't fault him on his views on foreign policy.
I'm just saying, hey, look at this.
I mean, let's be frank about it.
The ISIS issue crosses all sorts of party and ideological lines.
Everyone, anyone that I know of, believes it is a scourge to one degree or another.
And it has to be dealt with in one way or another.
But most people agree that they disagree on the tools.
But everyone agrees that ISIS is not, you know, back in the day in Vietnam, the left kind of romanticized the Viet Cong and the Vietnamese struggle, the anti-colonial or anti-American struggle.
No one's doing that with ISIS.
ISIS is not held up by anybody as an organization or group that we can find a way to admire at all.
So, you know, Bernie and Hillary.
And unfortunately, if you can't find anybody who loves them, you can't find anybody who opposes war against them.
That's kind of what you're saying there, right?
Yeah.
We can't just be anti-interventionists unless we're Maoists.
Well, the thing here is, and this is just my opinion, is at least the Democrats seem to be thoughtful about it and talk about it in thoughtful ways and recognize that we're now engaged in a decades-long struggle with what is amounting to be a revolution in the Middle East.
I think it would be more appropriate now to call ISIS a revolutionary force upending the status quo.
It's sort of a fiery chapter of the Arab Spring.
And this fire is consuming, you know, these regimes, all these Arab regimes.
So the Democrats seem to recognize that as a group, whereas the Republicans just talk about, you know, carpet bombing and stuff like this as if you can, you know, quickly end ISIS through some sort of violent bombing campaign, ultra-violent bombing campaign.
But, you know, I must say that Sanders' idea of creating a NATO-like organization, which would include Russia and include the Arab states, to coalesce and take on ISIS is just, in the opinion of most people who look at this stuff seriously, it's just not, it's a non-starter.
I mean, these Arab regimes that he would engage, have engaged with boots on the ground in Syria would include Saudi Arabia and Jordan and so on.
Well, they don't have armies.
This is something that doesn't seem to get wide currency.
They don't have armies.
Their military forces are really for domestic control.
They're really police forces to keep down internal dissent.
They just don't have armies that can go in and fight in Syria, even if they had a desire to do so.
And as we know, as your listeners I'm sure know, there are important elements in Saudi Arabia who are backing ISIS, or groups aligned with ISIS.
So this is a very, very complicated picture that doesn't lend itself to easy solutions.
I mean, nobody has a good solution.
It's the problem.
Yeah, it does kind of seem silly for him to say, like, yeah, we need to forge an alliance between Iran and Saudi Arabia to go take on the Islamic State.
And basically what he's doing is just punting.
He's pulling a Donald Trump.
He's figuring out a sentence that he can say to fill the time before he changes the subject again, and then that's it.
That's right.
But we shouldn't be too glib about this, and I'm not saying you're being glib, but I think there is a lot of glib talk out there about this very, very serious problem of ISIS.
And, boy, if you've got a solution, that's great.
I mean, this makes Vietnam look so simple.
Well, and listen, everybody, Jeff can say that because you were in Vietnam.
What were you in Vietnam again?
I was in military intelligence.
That's what I thought, armed intelligence, right?
And that was really simple, you know, either stay in and keep fighting or get out.
And there were some Cold War, you know, big power ramifications to that.
But that looked so simple.
The tragic irony of Vietnam is that Vietnam was never important to the national security of the United States, but the Middle East is.
Well, you know, it won't be today, but at some point you and I should argue about this, and I think I could convince you otherwise that we really don't need to be engaged over there whatsoever.
But anyway, let's move on to more about Bernie Sanders and your great article here.
Can you talk about the F-35 and what it has to do with Bernie Sanders and Vermont here?
Well, as far as I can suss it out, his position is that, yeah, this program has been a mess.
You know, it's called the jet that ate the Pentagon for its just monster cost overruns.
It's still not really working right.
And but his position is like, okay, might as well stick with it now.
And then he adds a really classic congressional member of Congress' attitude toward any military project.
What's in it for me?
And what's in it for him in Vermont?
They have an Air Force base in Vermont, which has the Vermont National Guard.
People may not know that these National Guard fighter units rotate in and out of the war zones.
So at any one time you might have the Vermont National Guard, the Virginia National Air Guard, flying sorties in Syria and Iraq.
And so Bernie looks at these as this is a job multiplier for him.
So he would like the F-35 based to at least get some of them into the Vermont National Guard.
And that would, you know, create jobs in Vermont.
That's just a classic congressional view.
And it's one reason that the Pentagon spent, you know, spreads out its spending all over the 50 states or virtually 50 states so that Congress, members of Congress are very reluctant to vote against any military program that might lose jobs in his or her district.
That's just the way it's always been.
It's called the Iron Triangle.
The Pentagon, Congress and the defense industries, military industries.
Right.
And never mind, as Hazlitt would say, the unseen, all the jobs that are being destroyed as all the wealth that could have created them is being diverted instead into the ridiculous F-35.
And it just so happened that this morning I read a great piece by Jonathan Marshall at Consortium News about just what a turkey the F-35 is.
I mean, you just couldn't overstate it's worthless.
And in any real battle with the Chinese or the Russians, it's going to lose.
Simple as that.
The Chinese stole their plans for the F-35.
So that they know what not to do.
No, they built their own.
Does it does catch on fire on the runway and you can't fly it in the rain or.
I don't know.
In the cold or.
China is not an open society.
So we don't know if they're having the same problems.
I mean, we are developed.
They've got prototypes out and they're testing them and they're in the air.
And you're saying they look like F-35s like they're based.
They are.
They're based on Chinese espionage is very, very active here in the United States.
And they've stolen a lot of defense military secrets.
They're very good at economic espionage.
And you're saying this time the Israelis didn't give it to them.
Sorry, I just.
The Israelis are good at espionage also.
And we are good at espionage also, but not as good in China, I think, as the Chinese are here.
Anyway, the people who are experts on this say that the latest Chinese fighter bomber is a virtual copy of the American F-35.
It was developed based on stolen American blueprints.
Yeah.
So maybe they'll go broke.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
It seems to be the policy.
You know, there's a great interview with the guy.
I forget his name, Jeff, but he's a guy who designed the F-16 and the F-15.
And even tells a little anecdote about the only reason they made the F-16 was because some of the engineers went rogue and secretly made it without the bosses knowing so that they could make a jet that was actually worth the money and useful.
But then he is the one explaining about the F-35.
And he says it only has one purpose, and that is to transfer money from the American taxpayer to Lockheed.
It is not good for any other thing.
It could be beaten by.
And this was before the leak from war to war is boring and all of that.
This is a couple of years ago.
He's saying the F-16 could take the F-35 on any trial and, you know, in any situation.
And it, of course, was engineered by this guy back in 1972 or whatever it was.
Yeah, well, it's really hard to write hurt on these programs.
And in the unlikely event that Bernie Sanders is elected president of the United States, he'll find that the view from the Oval Office is very different from the view in Capitol Hill or the campaign trail.
Yeah.
And these are like military programs are like these living organisms that have a monster lifespan and are very, very hard to get control over, very, very hard.
It's not easy at all.
And neither is the confrontation with ISIS going to be easy.
It's going to be very, very difficult.
And even if the bombastic Republicans take the White House, they're going to find that the reality, they're going to sit down with people at the Pentagon and so on, and most of whom are going to say this ain't as easy as you think it is.
Yeah.
So there's going to be a big reality check.
I think Senator Sanders really understands how difficult this is.
And he's very thoughtful about it to a degree, but it's not his issue.
Military and national security, foreign policy was not Bill Clinton's issue either, and it wasn't Obama's issue either.
They don't – none of them have passion about foreign policy, and none of them came into office having a passion or much knowledge about foreign policy.
I've talked to campaign foreign policy advisors to Clinton, and they said, you know, it was really hard to get him to focus on foreign policy.
He just didn't care about it that much.
And, you know, I think we've seen some results of not knowing much or caring much about foreign policy in the Obama administration.
Then again, God help us that they really have a plan, you know, like what happened in the Bush years where they said, we know what to do, and it was the ruination of any chance we had for peace in this century apparently.
Yeah, well, there were a lot of Democrats who went along with that, let's not forget.
Yeah, of course, including our current secretary of state, our former one, Sanders competition, the vice president.
Oh, yeah.
No doubt.
All right, listen, I've kept you over time here.
Thanks very much for coming back on the show, Jeff.
Thank you, Scott.
Really appreciate it.
Nice talking to you.
Bye-bye.
All right, y'all, that's Jeff Stein.
He's over at Newsweek.
This one is Bernie Sanders' foreign policy may disappoint devotees, and you can follow him on Twitter at SpyTalker.
Hey, you own a business?
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See if we can make a little bit of money.
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