07/08/10 – Jeff Huber – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio, I'm Scott Horton.
Our next guest on the show is Jeff Huber, he writes for Antiwar.com, you can find the articles at original.antiwar.com slash Huber, the most recent is called Helmand in a Handbag, and now I gotta page down a little bit to get to the real full bio, oh yeah, his own blog is called Pen and Sword, and he's the author of the novel Bathtub Admirals, and if it's anything like his articles I'm sure it's hilarious, so if you like laughing while you read about war, go get Bathtub Admirals.
Welcome to the show Jeff, how are you?
Hey I'm great Scott, how are you?
I'm doing good.
Hey listen, I always really like reading your articles, you really are a talented writer and you put a sense of humor in topics that usually aren't very funny, and I appreciate that because I do nothing but read about war all day, it's nice to kind of get a little bit of a...
Making mirth of human misery and suffering.
Right, yes it's hilarious.
Tragedy, now that's funny.
What's a banana stand, you always talk about the banana stands.
Well a banana stand as opposed to a banana republic, a banana stand, when I use that I'm referring now to Iraq, or to Afghanistan and Pakistan, they're basically a South America banana republic transplanted into Central Asia, we're propping up, particularly in Afghanistan now, propping up incredibly a corrupt illegitimate government for the sake of trying to defeat an insurgency that is actually a lot more legitimate than the people we're propping up, and so that's where I come banana stands, we also have a, I don't use it very often, we have a banana rack, and there are a lot of people who would like to see us acquire a banana ran across the Gulf from it, but I'm not, I'm not as concerned anymore about the war mongrels managing to finesse their way into a real war with Iran, I'm not so concerned about that as I was a couple years ago, I don't, I think keeping the specter of that alive is, it's productive from their point of view for a couple reasons, not the least of which is keeps justification to, for funneling money into the Navy and Air Force who really aren't getting the kind of headline news that they'd like to be getting in, you know, Afghanistan and Iraq, but there's a purpose for them if it's like, well we might have to, that would be a Navy Air Force kind of war, not an occupation, but a big honking extended strike.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Gareth Porter was actually just on the show saying that the reason he thinks there won't be a war with Iran anytime soon is because Admiral Mullen doesn't want one because he's an admiral and he knows that it would be the US Navy that would take the brunt of the response right then and there, and he doesn't want that.
Yeah.
Well, I think that, yeah, this gets into some interesting warfare theory stuff.
If I were, if I were no kidding, just designing an operation to hit Iran, one of the first things I'd do would be to make sure that the US Navy got out of the Gulf before the first bomb hit, you know, Tehran or wherever, just because there's, that is extremely restricted water, which the US Navy is, the US Navy, I think it's still fair to say it was, it was designed primarily to fight what was really an inferior Soviet Navy in, in blue water, you know, big ocean, to stick it in there among a small space surrounded by a lot of shipping, a lot of, of, of air traffic, the vast majority of which is, is friendly or neutral and saying, okay, you basically have your hands tied behind your back now, go in and fight with, with a force that was basically just designed to harass you, you know, that we would, we would, we would probably get embarrassed, beaten?
No, I don't think so.
If we would ever decide we just wanted to, but we, that would be, that would be an awful walk because we would just have to blow so much stuff up to make it worth our while to actually attack Iran and deal with the political afterthought.
I just don't see, I just don't see it happening.
And there's another factor there.
You hear a lot of talk, the recent uproar about the Israelis.
There was some talk about from Ayatollah Khamenei.
I think he was just kind of talking out his hat about the Revolutionary Guards Navy was going to escort some relief ships up the Red Sea to Gaza and duke it out with the Israeli Navy and Israeli Navy deployed some star boats to the Red Sea and supposedly disarmed their, uh, their, uh, diesel submarines that carry nuclear missiles and blah, blah, blah.
It all gets pretty silly that this whole business of, of war between Israel and Iran, you know, they, they, they really, um, it's sort of like a war between two anthills on the opposite ends of the earth.
They really can't get at each other, that their navies can't really fight each other.
They don't really have the legs to go far enough to get to each other.
If you look at a map, their armies most certainly cannot.
And their air forces just, just barely could, uh, Iran doesn't have nukes.
I don't think there's even, you know, the craziest war hawks are going to claim that they do.
Um, Israel does, but I think, I want to think that at the end of the day, the people who are, you know, in charge of whatever the Israeli equivalent is of a football or a soccer ball.
I don't know.
Um, no good.
And well, if they don't have any, they're already on thin enough ice with, uh, you know, what they, what they pulled in Lebanon and now with, with the Palestinians and Gaza for them to, to drop a nuke on Iran with no real reason would be, would be it.
So I did, I just, I'm not real concerned about Iran really fomenting war with them either.
A lot of this stuff is just a bogus talk to try to get them to agree to when I say them, but I'm trying to get Iran to knuckle under to, uh, the conditions that we still insist that they basically give up their right to, uh, make their own, um, uh, to refine their own uranium for energy purposes and they're never going to get that up.
So this is just a great game that keeps, keeps playing and playing and playing and justifies, you know, again, it goes back to, I always say justifies the Navy and Air Force budget and a lot of other stuff, uh, for, uh, I, you know, I, I, it's almost like a play cold war.
It is just a war that if it ever happens, it'll be because so many people got so, uh, lackadaisical about keeping an eye on what was really going on that, you know, they, they were just, it was careless about it.
But, Oh, well, thank goodness he said that.
Cause I was just going to say that makes me nothing but a puppet in that whole script.
If I've been sitting here trying to debunk the Iranian nuclear program all day, every day on the show and so forth, and, uh, in some sense, I'm just a tool of the war party, but you're saying, no, it's because of me that it hasn't spun out of control.
Thank goodness for that.
No, I think, I think that there are, there are enough sane voices who, who realized that, you know, uh, I, I got the biggest, well, I didn't get a big kick out of it.
I just shook my head, uh, before, uh, uh, banana stand, McChrystal, uh, did his, uh, you know, his final, uh, jackknife into the empty swimming pool, uh, with, uh, with Rolling Stone article, um, he was going out talking about, yeah, we have proof.
The Iranian, another one of these things are claiming the Iranians are, are, uh, arming or training, uh, militants in, in Afghanistan and offering not one shred of evidence to back it up.
Right.
So here's another, you know, it's just another example.
And you say they've been, I'm trying to think that this first came out when, uh, uh, who was it?
Was it Almay Khalilzad?
One of the original neocons, the one who thought he was going to be a, you know, viceroy of Iraq or whatever the heck it was.
Uh, still, I think he has some ambitions that he might be in charge of, uh, Pakistan someday, but um, anyway, he, uh, he was, uh, I think he was ambassador to Iraq at the time.
This is late 2006, this is about the time they're about to, uh, uh, give the back of their hand to the Iraq study group and say, no, we're going to do this search thing instead.
He came out and said, well, I'm going to offer you proof that all this stuff we've been saying about Iran is true.
And they had this big, uh, this big bogus looking thing put on a dog and pony show with, uh, basically they, they, they offered just this proof that there was, there wasn't proof at all.
They didn't prove anything.
And they have yet to prove any of these claims that they've made about what Iraq and Iran is up to.
And they've been saying the same thing about Afghanistan the whole time, only quieter.
Now, hold on right there.
We've got to go to break.
We'll be right back with Jeff, Jeff Huber, everybody right after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Liberty radio network, LRN.fm and, uh, chaos radio, austin.org talking with Jeff Huber.
He writes for us at antiwar.com original.antiwar.com slash Huber.
And he keeps the blog pen and sword.
He wrote the book bathtub admirals.
And now, uh, you know, you mentioned there, uh, about Khalil Zod that maybe wants to be the viceroy of Pakistan one day.
And, uh, certainly he was, uh, you know, the, uh, power behind Hamid Karzai there for quite a while in Afghanistan before he left to go run Iraq, as you were talking about.
Um, and I was wondering if, uh, if you think that, uh, well, do you remember when, um, Robert Kagan and Michael O'Hanlon wrote that thing in the fall of 2007 for the New York times saying that, you know, Pakistan is falling apart at the seams for some reason we can't figure out.have to invade and occupy Pakistan and seize their nuclear weapons.
I kind of wonder, and maybe this goes in the same category of crazy as an attack on Iran, but I kind of wonder whether the Americans, uh, have a plan actually to destroy Pakistan so much that they have the excuse to invade it and seize those nukes, the Islamic bomb that they're all so terrified of, which after all, Adam bombs are pretty dangerous.
Yeah.
Well, let me, let's see.
I got a couple of that stimulated a lot of neurons there.
First of all, uh, in terms of atomic bombs being dangerous, yes.
Whether or not Pakistan's atomic bombs are dangerous.
I'm not sure.
And let me tell you a little story about that.
Have a good friend or not a friend, uh, who, uh, at one time, uh, worked for me, uh, uh, and she, uh, this person is a, uh, became a public affairs officer and, uh, is now, uh, you know, uh, basically a journalist type, uh, on active duty.
And in the course of her duties, uh, she spends, she spends a lot of time, has spent a lot of time out there in central Asian, at least she spent a day at Islamabad international airport.
Okay.
This is the big airport.
The, you know, this is not some Ricky Tiki Tavi place out in the middle of nowhere in the mountains.
This is, this is it, you know?
So she is in there and she winds up having to wait around all day for a late flight.
And she's describing the scene and you essentially have people over there, you know, smoking, eating, uh, you know, chickens, you know, sheep, animals running around, uh, in, in the airport.
And I said, once an hour, a janitor comes out to clean and he has a broom and the broom doesn't even have a stick.
The broom is simply, it's like a broom head attached to a rope.
And he just swats at the dirt with this thing and he just swats it underneath the rows of chairs.
And you know who comes behind him and screams up under the chairs?
Nobody.
Okay.
So, and this is a country that's got nuclear weapons that we're real concerned about.
So I'm, I always try to put those things into perspective.
Does that mean you shouldn't worry about them?
No.
The last I looked, uh, it doesn't even look like they're assembled.
I would say that, that, you know, if, if terrorists were to get their hands on them, uh, what they most likely be able to do with them is kill themselves of radiation poisoning from handling them.
Uh, I, I suspect that there's no way in heck you could even get them to blow up, but you know, so that's, that's, that's one thing to keep in mind about Pakistan.
Um, it's sort of like worrying about, you know, we go back to this thing of Iran, what are they actually capable of doing?
Not a whole heck of a lot.
Um, so, so there's that now I have, however, seen a number of things, uh, indicating that, uh, the Kagan's, you know, Bob Kagan's and, and the rest of these, you know, the rest of that, that part of the, uh, you know, Pavlov's dogs of war, uh, that pack, uh, are, are starting to try to make the case for, uh, invading Pakistan.
That's one of them.
There's this whole business of, uh, I can't think of the kids, the New York bombers name.
Can you kind of get a kid's name?
Faisal Shahzad.
Yeah.
The kid who locked himself out of both of both his bombing car and the getaway car, and then had to be let into his apartment.
And, uh, you know, they, they finally caught him in the airplane just before he was about to leave back to Pakistan.
And he said, uh, he said, I've been expecting you.
I, I, I thought he would have said, what took you so long?
Because I mean, this kid was leaving breadcrumbs.
I mean, the size of boulders behind him, you know, why it took him that long to catch up with him.
I'm not sure because it was the FBI.
Those guys are worthless, man.
Anyway.
Uh, but I think your point was something about blowback or something, maybe.
Yeah.
So, uh, now we have, he's being charged.
He, he, he pleads guilty to everything.
Right.
Including, uh, uh, attempting to use weapons of mass destruction and weapons of mass destruction, good God, he, he had, he basically had fire.
He had, he had fireworks and ammonia and stuff that, that he couldn't even get to go off.
Even if he would have gotten them to go off, these are not weapons of mass destruction.
And he pleaded guilty to that charge.
Why did they even bring it against him?
Um, he, he sang for him like a canary.
Um, he, he sat down without even consulting his lawyer and saying, yes, I am guilty of everything.
And I would plead guilty tomorrow.
If you, you know, we're, we're, we're using this guy to make a case.
Oh, and also his claims of being, uh, of, of having been trained to make his bombs and do all this stuff in Pakistan.
Uh, well, first of all, the kid's loco, you know, so we're going to take this.
And it's disturbing to me because we're essentially using the justice department and the court systems to make it, this is, we're using this to make a case, uh, again, uh, for going to war against, uh, Pakistan.
It's part of that whole thing.
And I just, I just go, boy, this is based on, on, on the, on the, uh, on the testimony and then the statements of a kid who's got clearly has a serious personality disorder.
You know, I mean, he's, he's probably, he's got about as many screw loses that screws loses the panty bomber did before him, you know?
So, um, I, I, you know, I, I think that, yes, but it's, it's one of those things that it's always in the background.
Those guys are always working on the next excuse to go to the next war.
And if we don't do it, uh, you know, uh, planning, uh, visions of mushroom clouds in our heads, uh, going back, you know, it's like the whole Condi rice thing back before, uh, we, we invaded Iraq.
If we don't do this, who knows the next city that goes up in a mushroom cloud will be your city.
Yeah.
Well, and the whole, uh, you know, um, catastrophic success theory of foreign policy is not too hard to behold here.
You know, all you do is just bomb a bunch of people and you create the next crisis so that then that's the excuse for the next war it's, you know, an unbroken chain going back, you know, to our great grandparents, this is how they do it.
So if, um, you know, and I would say about that kid, uh, Shahzad, he was pretty lucid when he explained, you know, I don't buy the whole, uh, you know, Pakistani Taliban trained him any more than you.
It seems like if they had, he would have been able to blow up a propane tank or something, you know, but, um, but, uh, he was pretty lucid when he said, Hey, you kill women and children in my home country.
And that's why I did this.
And you know, so much the better.
Great.
We'll just say that he was trained by the Pakistani Taliban and then now more excuse for more war here.
We're making enemies out of, I think our best friends in central Asia, right?
Our best friends in central Asia.
I mean, the people of Pakistan are nice folks, man.
I've known plenty of Pakistanis.
They don't have, um, you know, they're very, uh, they're like Sufi Muslims, right?
They're not all like the crazy kind at all.
They're very, they're the most Westernized country in that part of the world, or they were.
Yeah.
Oh, I, I, I, I'm very much, uh, I mean, I, I don't, I, I think, I, I think almost most of those people would be just fine with us if we, if we're leaving the heck alone.
And again, I, it boils down to, we're out there trying to prevent something that they can't do anyway.
Yeah, they don't have the capability.
They have the capability to sneak in here and dribs and drabs.
And apparently if that kid in fact was trained by, you know, whichever terror group we're, we're, you know, what do we, I mean, what we're, we're used, we're intoning Al Qaeda, Taliban, whoever we are, uh, you know, overall, you know, evil doer group, uh, if, if, if in fact they did teach him, if they actually taught him to make that bomb and send them here, I think that we should, we should all give a sigh of relief because that's how incompetent they are, you know, well, that was their big, that was their big shot.
And, and really, you know, you keep in mind that, uh, the nine 11 plot, the number of people in the number of agencies who were asleep at the switch for so long and just couldn't be shaken awake to saying, Hey, Hey, Hey, there are some serious signals here that something's amiss and you guys need to cooperate and do something.
And it was just no big deal because, you know, guess what?
Nobody was getting promoted because, uh, uh, they were doing great strides in anti-terror work.
And, uh, nobody was getting promoted because they shared information with rival agencies.
Yeah.
Well, you know, someone was just saying in the chat room in regards to the Faisal Shahzad thing that that was the story was that, yeah, well, unfortunately there was a disconnect between Homeland Security, the FBI and the cops that day.
Yeah.
Really?
Huh?
Great job.
Why?
I thought the Patriot act fixed all that.
Maybe it just, I don't know.
Yeah.
Well, I gave up my fourth amendment anyway.
It's probably because he listened to some grandma's dirty phone conversation to pick up on, uh, you know, the old point four.
I don't know.
All right.
We're gone.
Thanks Jeff.
Bye bye.
Jeff Huber, everybody.
Antiwar.com.