05/09/16 – Daniel McAdams – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing the great Dan McAdams.
For many years, he was Ron Paul's foreign policy advisor in his congressional office, and he now runs the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity at ronpaulinstitute.org.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Dan?
Hi, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
Very happy to have you here and very happy to learn a whole bunch of new things here reading your article about Hungary.
And it reminded me of something that I just barely know about you.
I don't know if we've ever really discussed this, but you actually used to live in Eastern Europe, what we now, I guess, could call Eastern America or the eastern fringes of America's empire in Europe there.
You lived there for many years and worked there.
Am I right?
In Hungary, you lived?
Yeah.
I lived in Hungary for almost seven years back in the 1990s.
So tell us all about that because you were working on something or another there, huh?
Yeah.
I went over to get away from my thesis for my master's because I hated it.
So I escaped.
I got a job over there.
And I worked, I was the editorial page editor of the Budapest Sun, which was at the time the biggest English language newspaper in Central Europe.
But I also worked with the British Helsinki Group, which was a group monitoring the very early days of regime change in the 90s when the U.S. first started meddling in the affairs of these countries after the end of communism.
So we did a lot of human rights monitoring and election monitoring and things like that.
So I got a good handle of things going on the ground in Central and Eastern Europe.
Yeah.
Well, it certainly served you well, as we've seen over the last few years in your writings and obviously your briefings to Dr. Paul.
Not that I don't mean to sell him short at all.
I mean, obviously, he does a lot of his own reading too.
Yeah, for sure.
But you're certainly part of the reason he always knows what he's talking about so well.
So now, in this case, you've written this article about Colleen Bell, and she is, as you say here, the ambassador to Hungary.
And she went and gave a speech to their parliament where, am I understanding you right, she basically sided with the minority in parliament against, or I don't know if they're the minority in the parliament or not, but the party out of power against the party in, they have a president or prime minister there, how the hell is that?
They have a prime minister.
Oh, they do have a prime minister.
Okay.
So she went and sided with the minority against the majority and their prime minister on what all now?
Well, you know, Hungary's, I mean, Washington has had a problem with the people who rule Hungary, the Fidesz government.
It's a center-right party, and they've been sort of pro-US and pro-NATO, but they've also been very independent-minded, and Viktor Orban is the prime minister of Hungary, and he's been very annoyed at Brussels' refugee policy, immigration policy, because he doesn't feel that Brussels has the right to tell Hungary how many people they have to take on, how many people they have to pay for coming to Hungary.
He thinks that should be an issue of national sovereignty.
So he's, you know, he's not, he's not won a lot of kudos among the, among the elites in Brussels or in Washington, because although he's gone along with a lot of the sanctions against Russia, he also maintains pretty good relations with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
You know, they've met each other a couple of times.
I think he went over to Moscow and Putin was over in the U.S., Putin was over in Budapest, and you know, they've done some, they've done some deals together.
Russia's going to be upgrading the, the Hungarian nuclear reactor, it was built by the Soviets and the Russians are going to upgrade it a little bit, and a few other things like that.
So you know, they have some business relations, and the U.S., of course, would rather see everyone, you know, follow the, the isolation of Russia that, you know, that, that Washington's policy is.
So they're, they're a little, they've been a little annoyed at Orban for quite some time.
And yeah, it's funny too, well, we just finished talking with Brad Hoff about what's going on in Syria here, and, and ended it on the joke as, you know, they put it in the New York Times in that write-up of Ben Rhodes about how, you know, if only we had invaded the country and overthrown Assad back in 2012, everything would have been just fine.
Everybody knows that.
And I guess, I mean, here's Obama's ambassador, she can't quite put it that way, but she's certainly blaming the side that America has sided against there, I guess, for resisting all this time.
Yeah, it's, it's, it's absurd if you, I mean, it's so illogical, anybody with a brain, maybe she thinks the Hungarians are too stupid, I don't know what it is, but she conflates the two, Assad and ISIS, you know, essentially, and here's, these are her words, as long as Assad is there, he remains the most powerful magnet for foreign fighters and recruits to ISIS.
Well, how come that wasn't the case before the U.S. decided on regime change for Syria?
How come he didn't have a problem with this before 2011, when the U.S. ramped up his regime change?
The whole idea that he serves as a magnet for the people who are trying to overthrow him, as if somehow it's, it's a symbiosis, is absurd.
You know, anyone, anyone who's been following it knows that he's been fighting ISIS, he's been fighting Al-Qaeda, which the U.S. has backed, and the Russians gave them some assistance because they asked for it.
So it's really, it's really absurd for the ambassador to rewrite history like this and basically tell the Hungarians, look, you guys got to get on board with this.
You've got to, you know, you're our great partners and we've got to deal with taking down Assad, you know, and as to your point about, you know, this whole ridiculous notion that if they had just invaded in the first part, well, here's one word for them, Libya.
You know, I mean, what do they, what do they think Syria would be like?
You know, it would be a Libya, probably worse than Libya, actually.
Yeah, well, I mean, of course, because look at all the different ethnic and religious factions that stand for good beheading at the hands of the Islamic State or the Al-Nusra Front were they to rule Syria.
No such populations really exist in Libya other than the blacks of Tawarga.
So there's one, one big mass ethnic cleansing there, but mostly a stop after that.
Thank goodness.
But can you imagine, seriously, if the, if they had successfully debothified the government and abolished the army in Syria, the way they'd done in Iraq, what life would be like in Damascus right now?
Exactly.
I mean, you don't have to, you don't have to believe that Assad is a wonderful, fantastic Democrat to root for him to have a victory over ISIS and Al-Qaeda.
You know, these groups represent the, you know, the worst in civilization and he may not represent the best, but good Lord, you know, it's at least women can walk around dressed in Western wear and not be, you know, beheadings left and right.
It's just absurd.
Well, and the thing is too, and I'm glad I forgot to say this for a long time so I don't get too repetitive, but you know, one of the leading groups that they called the moderates, the John McCain went and met with the Northern Storm Brigade.
As soon as that story came out, I put it in Google and there they already were on the record telling Time Magazine, oh yeah, I'm a veteran of Iraq war too.
Fought with Zarqawi against the Americans there.
These were the mythical moderates from the get-go, Dan.
Not that I'm telling you anything you didn't warn me back then, but damn, man, it's completely undeniable.
I know every time I say it, it sounds like ridiculous hyperbole, but I don't even have to refer to past New York Times articles where I can just refer to the news every day.
Just look, it's in the news every day.
There's America criticizing Assad for bombing Al-Qaeda.
It's not like their agenda isn't showing or something.
Yes, Scott, I mean, you can even see it in the press briefings of the State Department.
You know, there is a lot of lies and obfuscation, but if you just read the press briefings, both Mark Toner and Admiral Kirby, they both admit that these groups, the so-called moderates, are quote, intermingled with Nusra Front.
Well, what the hell does that mean?
Intermingled?
They fought together, they live together, you know, they're together.
How are they any different?
Who are these mythical moderates?
You know, they'll put on their moderate clothes when the U.S. is delivering weapons to them and then they go right on hand over to Al-Qaeda.
It's so absurd, it's so ridiculous that anyone can see through this.
All right, so now in terms of the Hungarians, now they're members of NATO, right?
Yeah, NATO and the EU, both, exactly.
But have they participated in the war in Afghanistan, for example, or any of the terror war?
They have, but I think, you know, it's a small country that's only a little over 10 million, so I think their participation, as far as I know, has not been anything super significant.
Mostly just suffering the blowback from it.
Yeah, exactly, and losing business from, you know, enforcing all these sanctions against Russia and all this sort of thing, so yeah, they take the brunt of it, you're right.
Yeah.
All right, and so now, you know, regardless of anybody's opinion about whichever country's immigration policy or, you know, refugee policy, it's certainly, under any fair reading of, you know, I don't know, decency or something, none of America's business whatsoever, whether the Hungarians allow the refugees from America's wars into their tiny little country.
You know, in America, there's always at least the excuse that we got room, you know, Hungary doesn't necessarily have room, and I don't know, maybe they do, but it's certainly not my fight to dictate to them who they gotta let in, but apparently nobody ever conveyed that to Ambassador Bell there, huh?
Yeah, and it's the whole issue that Washington's foreign policy, and I know you agree with me on this, Scott, I mean, we've created these refugees with our foreign policy, we've upended their societies, we've destroyed their economies, and these people are, many of them, you know, no fault of their own, are trying to find a decent place to live, and here we are bullying these countries like Hungary that have not really been a part of it, certainly not an enthusiastic part of this whole regime change nonsense, we're telling them, hey, you gotta take in these refugees, she told, Ambassador Bell told the Hungarians that you've gotta follow this EU-Turkey agreement, and that actually is against Hungarian law, the Hungarian parliament said they've rejected this forced migrant policy, and they're gonna turn it, they're gonna put it to referendum in Hungary to see what the Hungarian people want, so if you believe in sovereignty, then you have to say, you know, that the Hungarians should have the right to determine what their refugee policy should be.
And now, is this how it always works, too, where the ambassadors, the American ambassadors go to the various Eastern European parliaments and just completely harangue the Russians on their behalf or something, like the way she does here, where, well, she's implying, as I think you got it pretty straight here, who could argue, that what she's saying here is that Russia better get out of Crimea, which is a hell of a challenge from the well of somebody else's Senate.
Yeah, well, you know, Russia had Crimea a lot longer than the U.S. had California, so it's pretty rich for her to go over and tell the Hungarians what they should tell the Russians to do with regard to Crimea.
We know that they held a referendum, the people wanted to rejoin, and as I pointed out in the article, you know, it's only been about 20 years that Crimea was part of an independent Ukraine.
So it's not, they've certainly been a part of Russia a heck of a lot longer than that.
So the whole idea is nonsense that she would do this.
But yeah, I mean, it is, it would be customary, I think, for an ambassador to address, and it actually was not the full parliament, but it was the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Hungarian parliament.
And you would expect in the course of diplomacy that you would do this, but it wouldn't be this kind of a hectoring speech.
And you know, Bell certainly does not come from a foreign affairs background.
As I point out in the article, she's a producer for soap operas on television, but she happens to be a big donor for Obama.
So she got this as a little prize for raising a bunch of money.
That's fine.
That's how it works.
But the whole point is then that she is simply reading a speech that was prepared for her at the State Department.
These are the people who are pushing U.S. foreign policy.
They write a speech to her.
And it certainly is not what you'd expect from a country that you call a partner to go there and lecture them on what their policy toward Russia should be, what their policy on immigration should be, what their policy in Syria should be.
It's just, you know, it's going to leave a bad taste in people's mouth.
They don't like being lectured by any foreign country.
It's just natural.
We feel the same way.
Yeah.
Well, of course, you know, Doug Banda has this great piece.
You may have seen it in the American Conservative magazine where he talks about the whole selling point of the European Union is to normalize and liberalize trade, not to regulate everything to death.
And, you know, they sell NATO and EU expansion as just sort of this natural course of history's winds blowing or whatever the hell it is.
But these are pretty contradictory concepts.
If you're a Hungarian and you're you thought you were joining up with these other countries so that it would make it easier to trade things across borders.
And in fact, you've now signed up for the American empire, their various wars and their sanctions regimes, which, you know, quite conflict with the idea of freer and freer trade between these people.
And also you're in NATO, so you have the pressure to buy American weapons.
You know, the whole NATO membership thing really is nothing but a coup for the military industrial complex here in the US to sell a bunch of weapons overseas that are really aren't needed.
I remember it was hilarious.
It was back when I was living there that Hungary was being pushed into buying these F-18s, which of course they cost a pretty penny.
But the joke is Hungary is such a small country, but by the time these F-18s actually got up to speed, they would be outside of Hungarian airspace.
The country's too small to even run these things.
But you can bet the McDonnell Douglas was down there and they threw a lot of money around trying to get him to buy these dumplings.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the thing that everybody kind of knows, but hardly anyone ever really writes about in any real substantive way.
But it's as simple as two plus two when you look at the role and career of Lockheed's Bruce Jackson in really, I guess, coming up with the idea and subsidizing the creation of the Committee for NATO Expansion and then the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.
God knows what else he's doing since then or the others like him.
But there are various watchdog groups that show, that catalog through IRS records and et cetera, who finances the various think tanks from AEI to JINSA to WINEP and whatever.
And there's your Northrop Grumman, and there's your Lockheed, and there's your General Dynamics and your guilty parties.
You know, the national interest or, you know, what's good for Main Street, USA, you know, somewhere in small town Texas ain't got a damn thing to do with it.
They never even ask about that.
It's just like you say, it's all about the big ticket sales of weapons like the F-18 that cost so many millions of dollars apiece.
You know what's the commission on something like that?
Probably more than our salary for 20 years.
Yeah.
My whole lifetime.
But, you know, I remember I was there when also when Lockheed Mart was trying to sell the F-16 to the Hungarians, they were all competing, and you would not believe Scott the kind of money they put out.
And I was a journalist at the time, and they put us all in buses and they drove us down to an airbase down there and they put on incredible lunches with all kinds of fancy food and everything.
It was just a song and dance to get good press about the F-16, which they wanted to sell Hungary.
And this is actually, at the time, the party that's currently in power was in power back then, too.
And Viktor Orban, the prime minister, was prime minister then.
And he irritated and infuriated Lockheed Martin and the others because they bought the Griffins, the Swedish planes.
And that was really when the U.S. first soured on Viktor Orban.
That's when they got mad at him because he didn't buy our junky planes.
Now, so has the NED and USAID and the boys all stepped up for effort since then?
I think they've tried to do things in Hungary off and on.
The U.S. has certainly been supportive of the current opposition now, but it is, to a degree, a bit like Russia, the ruling party in Hungary.
They did have a two-thirds majority when they were first elected in 2010, but now they still have a very, very solid majority.
It's a very popular political party.
And I think partly because people like having a leader who will stand up for us and stand for Washington.
But the opposition is very weak and very difficult to compete with the ruling party in those terms.
So they're not very successful at trying to do a revolution, or at least not yet.
Well, that's good, Elise.
All right, well, listen, man, we're kind of losing Skype again, so we better go ahead and cut it short here.
I really do appreciate you writing about this stuff that I know nothing about and helping fill me in here.
And I know the audience appreciates as well.
Everybody, it's the great Dan McAdams at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
That's ronpaulinstitute.org.
And we're rerunning this one today on antiwar.com as well.
It's called U.S. Ambassador to Hungary, Overthrow Assad, Let in the Refugees, and Fight Russia or Else.
Thanks again, Dan.
Thank you, Scott.
Thanks, y'all.
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