04/21/16 – Daniel McAdams – The Scott Horton Show

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Okay, introducing Dan McAdams.
Dan currently runs the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, and co-hosts the Liberty Report with Ron Paul every day on YouTube, and tons of great archives there, we often run it.
The show reruns on the blog at antiwar.com, as well as articles by Ron and Dan both, of course.
Anyway, welcome back to the show, how are you doing, Dan?
Hi, Scott, thanks for having me back.
Very happy to have you here.
I should have mentioned that for how many years you were Ron Paul's foreign policy advisor in his congressional office?
I think it was about 12 years, finally, yeah.
Yeah, there you go.
So when you guys watch those old speeches of Ron on the House floor, and you think, man, this guy knows what he's talking about.
Yeah, well, he's getting some pretty thorough briefings, okay?
Alright, so, man, there's so much to talk about, but we've got to, I guess, talk about the most dangerous thing in the world, America's conflict with Russia, and the most hilarious thing in the world, Ukrainian parliamentary procedures in politics.
What in the world is going on?
I read this article by, I found it on Twitter, it was by one of the Elliot Higgins hawks, saying, oh, egg on the face of all the idiots who ever said that the Nazis had anything to do with what was going on in Ukraine, and, oh, it's a Nazi junta, and this and that, when just look, they've got their first Jewish prime minister.
And so how do you like them apples?
And then, I open up the news today, that was yesterday, and then I open up the news today, and, well, go ahead and tell them, Dan.
Well, it turns out that stepping into the place of the first Jewish prime minister is, strangely enough, the founder of the, a speaker, I should say speaker of parliament, is the founder of the National Socialist Party of Ukraine.
So you have the prime minister is a prominent Jewish Ukrainian, and the speaker of the house is a Nazi.
So talk about a grand coalition.
Amazing.
And this guy, Andrew Pirubi, what are you telling me, that you've gone all politically correct, and he one time said some words that hurt your feelings?
Dan, what did he ever do to anybody?
Well, I ran into my safe space when I heard his name, but no, I mean, he founded the party, and he had a very prominent role in the uprising in the Maidan, and not only a prominent role as a political figure, but as a military and paramilitary figure.
He was very much involved in inciting the violence that was critical in the overthrow.
Remember, Scott, there were months of protests.
As long as they were peaceful, nothing happened.
It wasn't until that February when they really ratcheted up the violence that they were able to overthrow the government.
So he played a pivotal role in that, and has been involved in some of these neo-Nazi paramilitary groups all along.
And then they're the ones who waged the war against the so-called rebels in the East who refused to accept the new government.
Certainly they were among the most effective fighters.
They used the Ukrainian army to a large degree, but they were by and large conscripts.
And I think a lot of these guys, the first chance they could, they turned and ran.
The last thing they wanted to do was go shoot fellow Ukrainians in the East.
But these neo-Nazi militias, the Azov Brigade and all the other ones, they were among the most effective fighters, and they're still, I think, poised to ratchet it up as soon as necessary.
Well, you know, I remember it being amazing not long ago that this guy was even in the parliament at all.
And he was one of the guys who, I think, what about, say, half a year ago or so, was threatening, I guess, Yatsenuk and the President Poroshenko that, hey, listen, I overthrew the government last time.
You think I can't do it again?
Because he, I guess, has this militia of SA thugs that are still outside the state and at his beck and call, or at least he was bluffing so.
Well, Scott, you're being a little unfair.
I think these are just NGOs.
Oh, okay.
Very active NGOs with very colorful symbols, very heavy on the graphic design and their symbolism.
Yeah, yeah, they're humanitarian organizations.
Hey, they're working for the Democrats, Dan.
How can you complain?
Yeah, exactly.
But, no, you're right.
I overthrew them once, I can overthrow them again.
It's really the standing threat.
And we've seen that, you know, more often than not, the Ukrainian parliament looks more like a WWE event than it does actually a place where there is some serious thinking going on.
Although I have to confess, I do like seeing the fights break out, and I wish we had some in our Congress as well.
I kind of got to go with you there, too, you know.
It would spice it up and you could actually do pay-per-view, and we could maybe pay down some of the debt.
Yeah, and then we could have like a real good score of the ratio of those who talk tough versus, you know, and how tough they talk versus how tough they really are when it comes down to it, too.
I want to see Lindsey Graham in a fight.
Exactly.
Sorry, I didn't mean to take the words right out of your mouth there.
That's what we were all thinking.
Yeah, no, I think McCain would fight dirty, though.
I can imagine him biting and all sorts of...
Yeah.
Anyway, we're going too far on this fantasy.
Yeah, far too far.
All right, look, so let's talk about the desert ox, as Jeff Huber used to call him.
Ray Odierno, the general in charge of the Iraq surge, which worked, by the way, because I heard that said lots of times.
And he says, well, okay, never mind whether it works quite well enough, but what we need is another one of those.
Dan, what do you say to that?
Yeah, this is one of the most enduring myths about Iraq, and I'm no defender of Obama, but it's one of the ways the neocons will attack him almost in a dialectical way, that everything was fine until the feckless Obama pulled us out of Iraq.
We were on the verge of victory, and he managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Of course, nobody talks about the fact that he really had his hands tied because the U.S. President Bush tried to negotiate a new status of forces agreement that would grant blanket immunity to the Americans over there, no matter what they did.
And the Iraqi government, wisely enough, said, no, you can't have that.
We've got to negotiate this, and they weren't able to.
So that was only part of it.
But, you know, the surge and the awakening and all these things have entered into the national myth when, in fact, all they were was a Band-Aid on an open wound created by shock and awe, a very temporary Band-Aid.
Well, and as you say in here, too, it was a matter of basically the Sunnis being kicked out of the capital city and that just finally being accomplished, other than the very southwest of the city.
It's virtually and entirely Shiite city now.
Yeah, and paying them a lot of money to not attack us for a brief period of time.
Renting their compliance for a short period of time, that's no way to build a stable relationship.
It's bound to go to hell.
And this happened in the Balkans as well.
You come in and you have people that had lived together and had traded with each other.
They may not have loved each other despite the sectarian differences, but they were able to live together.
You come in and you come in with the notion of reordering societies that are so infinitely complex.
Human interaction is so complex.
When you come in and know nothing about a country and think that you'll reorder society, it shouldn't be a shock that these sorts of things happen, that you awaken these kinds of sectarian hatreds that people have been able to bury in the interest of commerce and getting along and just getting through your life.
Right, yeah.
In fact, Dan Sanchez has a great article about that right now that we ran at Antiwar.com that you're running on your site at the Ron Paul Institute about the information problem here.
One of the things he cites is a favorite of mine.
There's a great little anecdote about this where Paul Bremer, who knew nothing about the Arab world whatsoever, turned to his aide, who was probably just the daughter of a Republican donor somewhere who also had no expertise whatsoever, and said, so who is this Muqtada al-Sadr guy?
And she said, oh, yeah, no, he's just some minor cleric.
Don't worry about it.
And this is a guy who basically can just, with sign language, can compel hundreds of thousands of men to march whichever direction he wills, you know, and that was a major force to be reckoned with throughout that entire occupation.
And what are they going to do, look it up in the encyclopedia or something?
So they just shrug and forget it and fail.
You know, Scott, I've not talked about this before, but you really reminded me.
I went over to Switzerland, I think it was in 2005 or 2006, as part of a group with the American Swiss Foundation, and basically they're, quote, young leaders, and believe it or not, I was young once.
But one of the guys there that was participating in this conference was a kid of about maybe 23 or 24.
And he was so wet behind the ears, Scott, you would not believe.
This guy knew absolutely nothing about anything.
He had been some volunteer in George W. Bush's campaign.
You know, low level, nobody, no foreign affairs experience.
And he was over there with his chest out and so proud.
He had some amazingly high-level job in the Iraq reconstruction team, and the guy probably made this girl look like a genius.
It was unbelievable how little this guy knew, yet how much power he had to remake Iraq.
Talk about a fiasco.
Yeah, to unmake it anyway, yeah, exactly.
Well, and so now what's interesting about the Iraq war, in fact, though, is as we were discussing there about the sectarian cleansing and all that, is that this war was, contrary to the interests of what the American empire was really seeking to do at the time, but it was, I think to a great degree, it was in the interest of the majority.
So power there was already quite distorted with the 20% minority Sunni-led Baathist dictatorship pretty much lording it over the 60% Shiites and the other 20% Kurds.
So once the war was more or less over, if the surge, quote, worked at all, it worked to help the Baath brigade finish kicking all the Sunnis out of Shiastan and then basically cutting them loose and leaving them high and dry.
Well, at the same time, as you were mentioning, the parliament told the Americans, told George Bush, take a hike.
We don't really need your help anymore.
You helped us win the war.
Now you can leave.
You still lost it.
You just won it for us.
Bye.
Which makes sense because they had neighbors that they wanted to trade with in Iran.
A lot of them were exiled in Iran during Saddam's rule, so it shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone.
But add to that volatile mix, Scott, all of the, as you say, the Baathist political leaders, but then all of the members of Saddam's army, all of a sudden, they who had enjoyed all of the perks in society were now disenfranchised and were supposed to be shocked that they went over and helped these young jihadists put together ISIS.
It should be a no-brainer that they're not going to sit around in their retirement and grow tomatoes.
Right.
Well, and so the thing is, too, like if you want to do the counterfactual, you know, what do you think it would have taken for Bush to insist in 08 or for Obama in 2011 to say, like, no, we're just not leaving because, damn it, we liberated you and you're going to give us at least a couple dozen bases.
Would they have, I mean, I don't know.
It seemed like Maliki was pretty damn insistent.
But did they have options?
I guess it said by the Republicans that Obama didn't really try and that he could have renegotiated the Status of Forces Agreement and then everything would have been great or something.
Well, I think they tried to and successfully tried to overthrow Maliki, but they didn't get what they wanted after that either.
But I think they would have had to keep – they had to have the fig leaf that we gave them democracy.
The problem was we gave them democracy and they made a decision that we didn't like.
I should say that Washington didn't like because you and I had nothing to do with it, Scott.
They made a decision that Washington didn't like.
Hey, damn it, we gave you this democracy.
You're supposed to do what we say.
So they could have – to cover that, to have that fig leaf, they could have had some sort of a palace coup and brought in a more compliant leader.
And I think they tried to, but they weren't successful.
So other than that, I can't imagine what they could have done.
Well, as you mentioned, a lot of the leadership here are guys who spent 30 years in Iran ever since the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War and were very tied to the Iranians the whole time.
And they were the ones with the agenda to – well, they were some of the ones with an agenda to break up Iraq, to keep Shia's stand, but to eschew, I guess, the fool's errand of trying to dominate the Sunni areas like Fallujah, Ramadi, and Mosul, cut them loose and let them burn in the desert.
Who cares what happens to them?
They got all the oil – most of the oil is down in the south near Basra or up in Kurdistan with their allies, the Kurds.
And America the whole time sided and picked these most Iranian-tied factions over people like Sadr, who wanted a multi-sectarian, nationalist, Arab-Iraqi state.
And they could have worked with him.
They did nothing but marginalize him and support the people who were most backed by Iran.
I still really don't know the explanation for that other than, you know, he's white trash and these guys are, you know, wearing nice suits or whatever.
Yeah, I wonder if it didn't play into the plan, though, of the neocons and also the Netanyahuites to, you know, if you back the Iranians there, you know that you're going to split the country up.
Which I think was the neocon plan all along, which is the same neocon plan for Syria, which is to do whatever you can to undermine the idea of a united, strong state, which could be viewed as a threat by Israel, by the neocons in the U.S.
So if that was the case, perversely, it made sense, even though you hate the Iranians, to promote them in order to explode the idea of a unified Iraqi state.
Who knows?
Yeah, well, and of course, they could still assume that, hey, we're still the ones, Iran may be next door, but we're still the ones with all the troops here.
And so at the end of the day, what we say is what's going to go.
It just didn't turn out that way.
Yeah, that's certainly a good case to be made for that.
And then, you know, I was just talking with Patrick Coburn and joking about how America right now is supporting the Ba'ath Brigade in Iraq, but the Ba'ath Brigade is fighting with Hezbollah and Syria and Russia against the CIA-backed jihadists in Syria, which is separate from the American CIA-backed jihadists in Syria fighting against the Pentagon-backed Kurdish army that's fighting also against the Islamic State.
What's amazing is how much information deficit there is for the American people.
I mean, I wonder what percentage of the average American would understand what you just said, which is so fundamentally important.
I wonder how many of them have ever even heard that said in their mainstream news media.
Yeah, no, none.
I mean, and that's a big thing of mine is that in Iraq War II, now they talk about it a little bit, but they don't really show you a map and try to really help you get your head around it.
But in Iraq War II, they never admitted that this is a Sunni-Shia thing, and we pick the Shia side for better or worse, and here's where the lines are, and here's who the faction leaders are.
Here's Hakeem and here's Sadr.
They never did that, and so it was always just America's on the side of the Iraqi people against the terrorists who would deny them their democracy, and this kind of elementary school-level nonsense that made it so that Americans just basically never had any idea unless they were determined to read everything that Bob Dreyfuss wrote or whatever.
They just weren't going to know who was who over there.
Yeah, it was the White Hats versus the Black Hats, absolutely, and the eyes glaze over if you try to go into more of it.
Yeah, unfortunately.
Well, I'm working on a book right now, and that's the goal, is to try to get all of the most important points in there but make it easy enough for people to understand it on the first try.
That's the task.
Yeah, we can't wait to see it.
It's going to be a big one.
Well, believe me, you're going to get a review copy before everybody else does.
That's great.
You'll have to come on the show as well.
You know, I should really shut my mouth about it because all I've done is written a very rough draft of the introduction and Chapter 1 so far, so I'm way too far ahead of myself in even talking about it.
Yeah, but that's the hard part.
You just fill in the blank, have a couple cups of coffee, and you're done.
Yeah, well, I'm going to go brew a pot right now.
Oh, yeah, and one more thing I wanted to ask you about, Dan, real quick here, was about the 28 pages, which are getting a lot of coverage now, about Prince Bandar and other forces inside the Saudi government and their role in bankrolling and perhaps more in the September 11th attack.
And I actually didn't get a chance to watch this yet, but I know you and Ron did a Liberty Report special about this and the Saudis' response that apparently Obama immediately caved to, or I don't know which came first, but the Saudis said that we will dump the dollar if you guys allow, and this isn't even the 28 pages, this is if Congress passes a law or if the President signs this law that's going through Congress now that would legalize American civilian lawsuits against Saudi Arabia for their role in the September 11th attacks?
Yeah, this is a pretty targeted bill that was bipartisan.
It was Cornyn from Texas, the Republican, and Schumer from New York.
That's pretty far apart if you think about it ideologically.
But what it would do, and from what I understand, it's fairly narrow on if there is a terrorist attack on U.S. soil where U.S. citizens are killed and there is foreign government sponsorship, this whole sovereign immunity thing, which was, I think, granted in the mid-'70s by the U.S.
This goes out the window and people can sue, and of course that causes panic because the 28 pages may provide that evidence that would allow families of the 9-11 victims to sue.
That's a speculation.
And the Saudis, as you know, freaked out and said, we're going to dump three-quarters of a trillion dollars onto the market if you do that.
And then Obama said right afterward, I'll veto that bill.
I don't know if it was a direct correlation with what the Saudis said or whether or not the interventionists are the ones really having the panic attack because the last thing they want to do is have other countries also pass such a law that would allow them to sue Washington for the blown-up hospitals, for the thousands of collateral damage, for the destroyed sewer systems in other countries, for all these drone attacks.
I think that's the real thing they're worried about coming out of this.
So at this point it's a standoff.
What's Congress going to do?
It's very interesting to watch.
Yeah, it's really amazing.
And just to put it again back into a little bit of context here, you know, the leader, I don't know the leader, the very prominent 9-11 widow of the Jersey Girls is what they call themselves, Kristen Breitweiser, wrote a thing in the New York Times, of course the most prominent newspaper, an editorial in there, where she talked about the levels of obstruction and how even before Obama had come out threatening to veto this thing, he had done everything he could when the case even went to the Supreme Court.
The Obama government petitioned and argued in the Supreme Court to prevent 9-11 widows from pursuing civil lawsuits.
And meanwhile, and I don't know who's really behind these other suits, Dan, you may know more about these than me, but meanwhile the New York courts, at least the federal courts in New York, have allowed all these lawsuits against Iran even for 9-11.
For 9-11.
Not just for Beirut, which they actually kind of were involved in back in 1983, but for 9-11, which they had absolutely nothing to do with whatsoever.
So they don't have sovereign immunity.
They can even be held liable for it when we know they didn't do it, and yet we have this level of our own government, the executive branch, obstructing American civilians, survivors of that attack, or the widows and family member survivors of that attack, and probably I guess literal survivors as well, from suing a government that we know enough to know that, for example, Prince Bandar, the ambassador at the time, his wife was sending checks to the hijacker pilots living in San Diego.
So that doesn't explain everything about it, but it's a fact.
And it's certainly enough to bring a lawsuit about, would seem to provide standing to me and to any honest observer, right?
And so, I don't know, to me, obviously there's a lot to cover up here, and they don't want to damage relations with the Saudi government, and who knows, they don't want to start peeling whatever onions about who knew what when and start people blaming each other and what.
But, again, just on the face of it, forget all that other context.
Here are grieving 9-11 widows, and the President of the United States is obstructing their lawsuit against people who we know had at least a little something to do with it in some context.
And that just by itself is incredible.
Imagine being the PR firm that's going to try to spin that into something positive.
I mean, I guess the Republicans don't want to make a big deal about it, and all the Democrat supporters want to just look the other way, you know, for partisan reasons.
It's like Patrick Coburn was saying about, he wishes people were more mad about this when we're talking about the war in Yemen, and all the horrible back-and-forth policies and all this stuff.
And, of course, the answer is because of partisanship.
You know, if it was Mitt Romney or John McCain doing what Obama is doing to Yemen, at least you'd have tens of millions of Americans pretending to care about it, which would be good enough, right?
That wouldn't be good enough, but it would be better than what we've got now, which is crickets, you know?
We'd have our old anti-war coalition back, you know.
It was the glory days during Bush.
We had a lot of the progressive left with us, and sadly a lot of them have fallen by the wayside.
Yeah, and then the Republicans, even though it's Obama doing it, Republican rank-and-file types, they like violence enough that they don't want to give him credit for what he's doing, so they ignore it.
Yeah, the whole problem is he didn't kill enough.
You know, that wimp, he didn't nuke the place.
So, yeah, forget that.
All right, well, and so we're stuck in the middle with you, Dan.
I appreciate you coming back on the show, dude.
You're great.
Great.
Thanks, Scott.
Take care.
All right, see you.
That is the great Dan McAdams, everybody, running the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
That's RonPaulInstitute.org, and check out his great piece on Enemies Everywhere, The U.S. War on the World, Deadly Myths, Iraq Surge, General Calls for Surge 2.0, Saudi 9-11 Blackmail, We'll Dump the Dollar, and more and more like that, the RonPaulInstitute.org.
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