Jim Lobe, a veteran journalist and founder of Lobelog.com, discusses the wacky, conspiratorial worldview of Trump’s national security adviser Michael T. Flynn; the relatively level-headed secretary of defense nominee James “Mad Dog” Mattis; and how a Trump administration will deal with the Middle East, Israel, Russia and China.
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All right, so introducing Jim Loeb, the semi-retired former Washington Bureau Chief of Interpret Service.
He still keeps his great blog Loeb Log at loeblog.com and has some very important stuff here that he's co-authored with Eli Clifton.
Well, and also he's just hosted Eli some of these he did by himself.
I guess some are co-authored.
Anyway, it's a whole series, five or six, seven-something stories all about Mike Flynn, the three-star Army General who has been named by Donald Trump to be his new advisor to the President for National Security Affairs, otherwise known as the National Security Advisor.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Jim?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
I appreciate you joining us today.
Very important stuff that you have here.
And well, should we start with Iraq and Afghanistan or should we skip that and go straight to his obsession with the Persians?
Well, you can go all the way back to his first deployment in Grenada, which he describes in his book and as far as I can tell, gets the history all wrong.
I mean, I became interested in this when I suddenly realized that Flynn had published a book in July with his co-author, Michael Ledeen.
And so I checked the book out of the library.
I didn't really want to pay for it.
And I was pretty shocked by what was in it, although I think most of it was written by Ledeen.
But you can start wherever you like.
Well, yeah, let's go to Grenada then.
What did he say about that?
Well, he was deployed there apparently as an intelligence officer, and he talked about, you know, what the American troops were doing there.
It's a very brief passage in the book, but he says, among other things, that Cuba was occupying most of the island, which is like crazy.
I mean, there were Cuban construction workers who were working on the airport at the time.
And some of them were to protect them.
There was a contingent, a very small contingent of Cuban military people, very small, like no more than a dozen.
And they had an encampment beside the airport.
And other than that, the only Cubans that were kind of present on the island were some doctors.
And I mean, to say that it was occupied was pretty remarkable.
And it said that, you know, that the medical students, the U.S. medical students who were there were being held against their will and were under threat constantly, which wasn't true, because nobody really was threatening them at the time.
They were left entirely alone during all of the violence, which preceded the U.S. invasion and during the U.S. invasion.
And there were just other just factual issues that were completely wrong.
Well, and that kind of goes, that's important, right?
Like, that's sort of his M.O., is he believes whatever he wants and repeats it?
Well, I mean, that was his reputation, apparently, at the Defense Intelligence Agency, that there were such things as plain facts, which I guess was a rather sarcastic way of referring to what kinds of things he believed and what he didn't believe.
And the book is just riddled with Flynn's facts that are just highly questionable, in terms of just history, and including recent history, or very recent history.
I mean, another example is, he says that the Iranians were behind the 1979 occupation of the Grand Mosque, or takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca.
I mean, and there's nobody who believes that the Iranians were behind that, that was kind of the first glimpse of radical Salafism or Wahhabism.
And it was entirely Sunni.
It's just things he tosses off like that.
Again, it may be that's Ladeen, who wrote virtually all of the book, although at various places in the book, you see very strange sentences that are more likely either Flynn's or Trump's, like there's some exclamation marks and one word sentence that seem to kind of echo Trump's rhetoric from time to time.
Like winning, he talks a lot about winning, and with an exclamation mark.
But it's just extraordinary to consider that this is the man who may be interpreting the globe to the President of the United States, who himself doesn't seem to be particularly curious about the state of the world.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so, I mean, we got to talk about Iraq, Afghanistan, and all that catches up.
But first of all, can you educate the audience a little bit as to who is this Michael Ladeen character?
Because after a lot of time has gone by since the start of the Iraq war, and when, you know, the most powerful of the neocon clique were really very public, and really, you know, were household names and TV characters.
Ladeen, it's been maybe 10 years or so since people have really seen him on a regular basis.
Yeah, well, I mean, Ladeen kind of fancies himself as an eminence.
So he wants to cultivate a certain mystique about him.
He doesn't really appear that often in public.
He likes to see himself as, you know, a latter day Machiavelli, who's one of his great heroes, maybe his greatest hero.
And, well, Ladeen is a very hardline neoconservative, and has become increasingly Islamophobic over the years, or at least consorts with Islamophobes.
You know, he first kind of came to the world's attention back in 79, 80, when he apparently was working in some fashion with the Italian military intelligence.
He was particularly interested in Mussolini.
And, in fact, there are many references to Mussolini in Flynn's book, which I'm sure don't come from Flynn.
And he played a role in exposing the Billy Gate affair in Libya.
Soon after that, he became a big exponent.
Wait, wait, Billy Gate, that's Billy Carter?
Billy Carter in Libya, and Jimmy Carter's brother.
They basically set him up, right?
Or they just lied about him?
What was that?
Well, it was very strange.
And frankly, I don't even recall the details of that.
Unfortunately, there's no mention of it in the book.
But he played a role in publicizing that.
He wrote an article, I think it might have been in the New Republic, that exposed various aspects of the affair.
The sense was that Billy Carter had in some way been compromised in his dealings with Libya and Gaddafi in ways that were highly embarrassing to the President at that time.
But he then became known as a major exponent of the theory that was put together by Clare Sterling that the KGB was behind the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II.
And probably besides Sterling, he became the most prominent proponent of this theory, which has subsequently been called the Bulgarian Connection, which was to connect the Turkish perpetrator of the assassination attempt to the KGB.
And that has subsequently been shown to be a theory of complete fantasy.
And Ledeen has a history of being essentially a conspiracy theorist and fantasist, very much aligned with the hardline neoconservatives, like Richard Perle in particular.
And now if we go back to, say, 2003.
Yeah, well, yeah, let me let me ask you about Gaffney in a second, because I was actually going to just get to that was in the lying us into war with Iraq era.
He was very prominent at the American Enterprise Institute and the National Review, where he wrote this incredible series of articles called Faster, Please!
, where he said we need to turn the entire Middle East into a boiling cauldron.
But then after the Iraq war wasn't quite working out so well in, what was it, 2006 or so, he got purged from National Review and AEI.
And now he's been demoted to Gaffney level.
Is that how it works?
No, he meant he I think it was later than 2006.
I think it was probably more like about 2010, but I'm not sure exactly when.
I'd certainly defer to you on that.
Yeah, but he he moved he became he was the Freedom Scholar or something like that at the American Enterprise Institute.
And he moved over and retained that name at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which is where he remains.
That's his perch, has been his perch for some time.
I don't think he's been as active as he used to be, certainly doesn't seem to write as much, but he probably, you know, I don't know how well, actually, in the book, it seemed there's a reference to Ledeen's daughter, who had gone to Iraq in 2003.
She was one of the people who had no background whatsoever in the Middle East, but who they sent to democratize the Iraqis.
She and Flynn co-authored an article in a journal about some aspect of the Iraq war, if I recall correctly, in 2010.
So he must have been introduced to Flynn by 2010, perhaps earlier, and maybe Ledeen saw in Flynn a future military political figure who would be influential and attached himself to it.
I don't know, that's sheer speculation.
All right.
But your basic point, Ledeen has been a conspiracy monger and a false news proponent for decades, associated with the hardline neoconservative movement.
All right, now, so I think I kind of had this wrong, and you corrected me before, but I had sort of seen it almost like as a matter of social class within the very, very small neoconservative movement here.
We're talking less than 100 people or something right around there.
But that it sort of seemed like, say, you have Robert Kagan, who is, you know, for whatever it's worth, more of like a classy guy, in some sense, compared to somebody like Frank Gaffney, who's just a spitting, raving loon.
And it seemed like, to me, I thought, well, maybe the Kagans and the Wolfowitzes and the Ledeens don't quite hang around with scum like Gaffney as much.
But you're saying, yeah, no, they're all really pretty much one of the same.
Wolfowitz does hang out with Gaffney, they are.
It really is.
There really aren't those divisions that you might assume, even when they disagree about, say, the Arab Spring, this kind of thing.
This is where I'm kind of going with this.
And you can say whatever you want about all that.
But it seems like there's an irony here, Jim, where people like Robert Kagan says, hey, let's see what happens with the Arab Spring.
Because after all, we do want to see, ultimately, some self-government over there by the people of the Middle East and this and that kind of thing and see what happens in Egypt.
Whereas Gaffney said, no, the Muslim Brotherhood is Al Qaeda.
And because he was such a conspiracy nut and because he hates Muslims so bad, he hates anything with the name Islam or Muslim in it, he actually was good on Libya and good on Syria and said, we should not be overthrowing these secular dictatorships on behalf of the veterans of Al Qaeda in Iraq, which is exactly what I've been saying.
But for different reasons, you know, it was with his thing.
It was basically anybody but a mirrored sunglasses colonel is too Muslim and therefore must be stopped at all costs.
But so I wonder what you think of that, you know, if you notice the irony in that and how maybe that bleeds over into Flynn a little bit where he didn't want to overthrow Assad, I don't think.
Well, I think there are serious splits within the neoconservative movement.
I think Kagan, in particular, believes in the in the democracy rhetoric that they've used over the last 20 years or so.
And they are open to working with Islamic parties, like the Muslim Brotherhood, on the one hand, on the other hand, you I mean, the Gaffney's and the Ledeen's of the world, and the pearls, for that matter, are very Islamophobic.
And they think anything that's, as you said, that it has Islam in it, in the name is to be distrusted.
And Flynn very much follows the Flynn and Ledeen very much follow the Gaffney view.
I mean, they, on the one hand, at one point, in the book, Flynn extols, you know, the American mission in winning freedom and democracy for all.
And that should be our mission around the world.
But within a couple of paragraphs, he's saying that President el-Sisi in Egypt is like the greatest, you know, right leader in the in the in the Arab world and beyond.
And we should do we should support him in whatever way we can.
I mean, yeah, he I mean, he's very Islamophobic and orientation, he being Flynn, there's no question of that.
And he very much believes in the kind of thing that that Gaffney has been.
That's why he gets along with these guys.
He already agrees with them, basically.
I think so.
You know, what really bothers me about Flynn, the one that's really sticking in my craw about this guy is when he says that, oh, no, this was Mattis.
I'm sorry.
But same difference where because he said it's about Benghazi that blaming the even while he was at D.I.
A., he tried to blame Benghazi on Iran.
And this goes with Mattis saying that, yeah, do you ever notice that ISIS never attacks Iran?
Oh, maybe that's because Iran attacks and kills ISIS all day, every day for the last two and a half years.
What is this guy talking about?
The Quds Force fights ISIS in Syria and in Iraq.
And yet these guys like they don't even want to see the most simple divisions, the most obvious divisions in the Middle East.
They're blind to they would rather pretend that that the Islamic State and the Islamic Republic are the same thing because Islamic and look out, radical Islam.
Like we're supposed to dumb down our analysis so low.
But the problem here is that I mean, these guys are three and four star generals.
So I have to really question whether they're actually that stupid, you know, or whether they're even that incentivized to be that stupid.
They've got to be able to at least tell the difference between who's fighting who on the ground.
Right.
Well, I mean, I think there is there is an important difference between Mattis, who generally seems somewhat grounded in reality and Flynn, who doesn't seem to who to me doesn't seem grounded in anything approaching reality or just about I mean, Flynn might have been great and probably was great at hunting down al Qaeda and ISIS leaders, which I think is a very, you know, kind of tactical thing.
I think Mattis is much more of a strategic thinker, but Mattis has Mattis really has it in for Iran.
And he tends to run for many things.
Although not the Benghazi attack.
I don't know.
I mean, it's been speculated that that originated with the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing where the Marines, so many Marines were killed and Mattis is a Marine.
So I guess he takes that very personally.
And undoubtedly, you know, Iran, Shia militia in Iran, you know, in Iraq, rather, at various times that were supported by Iran, you know, killed, you know, a number of American soldiers, including Marines.
And he probably takes that quite personally.
It's clear he's got a real grudge against Soleimani, the Qods Force commander, at least in a talk he gave in Washington last April that that comes through very much.
But at the same time, I think Mattis is a much more generally speaking, it's much more sophisticated figure.
I don't think he's particularly Islamophobic.
I think he realizes that if we attack, I mean, he says things like, I think we have to support Al-Sisi, but he doesn't say it was kind of the enthusiasm that Flynn shows in this book, you know, that Sisi is a great hero or anything like that.
I mean, aside from his fixation on Iran, I think Mattis is probably about the best we could hope for.
He supports, for example, the nuclear agreement with Iran, which Flynn doesn't, and thinks we should basically tear up.
So there are distinctions to be made, both in terms of intelligence and grounding in reality, as well as Islamophobia between the two men.
And personally, I mean, I believe that Flynn will not last long.
I think he's just too attenuated from reality.
And I think if Tillerson gets in, and Mattis gets in, which I don't think will be controversial, I think they will be conspiring against Flynn to get him out of there and get his deputy, KT McFarlane, out of there.
Because I don't think either of them think that Islamophobia is a very good idea.
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Now, you know, what's interesting is, um, well, so you think that'll really be the, the, the point of contention rather than say, Russia would be his, his, uh, take on being unable to distinguish Al-Qaeda from Hezbollah.
I mean, it's amazing that we're talking about the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the guy who was the head of intelligence for JSOC in the Iraq war and in the Afghan war.
Well, I can take it for the JSOC part, because again, I think as a kind of a hunter, he's probably very, very good.
Uh, I don't know that the record really shows that.
I think he killed a lot of innocent people.
He's good at killing people, but not necessarily the right ones.
I don't know.
I mean, he, he established a, I guess a very good, you know, um, uh, reputation in that respect while he was in Iraq and later in Afghanistan.
I, I, I do not have a clue as to how somebody like that could have become the head of the DIA.
That, that to me is really shocking.
And, uh, and maybe it does bespeak a serious, serious problem within the armed forces.
I just don't know enough about that world.
Um, but, um, but now the national security advisor, and according to the times of the post yesterday, you know, is the person who takes the, the, the, the brief of the intelligence briefings each day, and then, and then passes along what he thinks is important to, to, um, to Trump that, that terror, that prospect terrifies me.
And I'm sure it has the same effect on people like Madison Tillerson and Bob Gates and Condi Rice who recommended Tillerson and, um, and so on.
Um, as for Russia, I, yeah, I, there are serious contradictions in how these people approach Russia.
Yeah.
I mean, I, I think that would be a real shame if this is actually the only guy in there who agrees with Trump about Russia and the rest of these guys, you know, are certainly, I think Mattis is much more conventional in his view.
It's a strange time.
Flynn doesn't like Russia at all.
Um, I was just going over the book yesterday and Flynn says, you know, there are areas of where Russia and we can, can agree and even cooperate, but I don't trust Putin at all.
And I think Putin is an enemy and he, and will always be an enemy.
And he includes Putin in what he refers to as the kind of enemy alliance, uh, terrorist alliance, uh, that's a raid against the United States, which of which according to his view, Iran is absolutely the centerpiece and which also includes Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela, China, Syria, anyone who's independent from the American empire in any way.
Well, I think there are other countries that are quite independent of the American empire, but somehow he had over the, they escaped his notice.
He's very, very, that Bolivia presents a great threat to the United States.
Right.
I'm sure there's some countries in Africa he's never heard of, or they'd have been on the list too.
Yeah.
I mean, it's remarkable that this guy also that he was head of the DIA and almost virtually his entire career has been spent in the Middle East.
I mean, I mean, at least at his, at senior levels in the military.
I mean, he shows no, um, virtually no knowledge of Asia at all.
I mean, he, he says China and North Korea are part of the alliance.
And he points out that North Korea has cooperated in some ways, uh, in, in missile and nuclear stuff with Iran.
But, and he accuses China of a couple of things, uh, but also supporting Iran without any real supporting evidence.
And that's basically all he says about China, although he includes it in the list of enemies who are all cooperating against the United States in the, and who wished to destroy our way of life, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah.
Well, anybody dumb enough to be listening to Michael Ledeen, much less co-authoring a book with him in the middle of the 20 teens.
I mean, that just goes to show you right there that he probably doesn't have any idea of the history of 2002 and three and Ledeen and the neocons and all of that.
I mean, I'll give you an example.
I have a passage right in front of me from the book in which he says that as a matter of fact, the Iranian revolutionary guards, which were originally created by hominy as his own personal Praetorian guard, and subsequently used for crucial tasks of domestic repression and foreign terrorism were trained and organized in the early 1970s by Yasser Arafat's Sunni Fatah.
I mean, that's just hallucinatory because how do you train the revolutionary guards in 1970 when the revolution takes place in 1979 and the revolutionary guards were never really formed until a few months after the revolution?
I mean, there's a 10 year space you have to account for.
You and your details.
I mean, it is true that some members of the revolutionary guard had been trained in Lebanon in the early 70s, but at that time they were not the revolutionary guards because the revolutionary guards did not exist.
They simply volunteered after returning to Iran to join the revolutionary guards when it was created.
70s, 80s, come on, Jim, you and your nitpicking.
Which decade we're talking about here?
I know, but then you have to say, I mean, Michael Ledeen shouldn't be making mistakes like that.
I mean, it's just...
That's true because everybody, and I think, you know, Dan McAdams from the Ron Paul Institute, who's a severe critic of the neocons, actually on Twitter not long ago stuck up for Ledeen in distinguishing him from somebody like Max Boot, who he says is, and I agree, is just some kind of bottom feeder or whatever.
But Ledeen actually has class.
You know, Ledeen actually is a very well-educated guy from, you know, sort of a higher strata of society, handles himself well.
I'm not sure if you remember, my wife Larissa Alexandrovna interviewed him extensively back about 10 years ago, and she says the same thing about him, too.
He's a very charming man, a very intelligent man, not just some weirdo.
Well, he speaks a foreign language.
He speaks Italian.
I mean, yeah, but he writes and says things that are just completely outlandish.
Yeah, but I'm just kind of backing up your point that he knows better.
He must know better than to make a simple mistake like that, because he's not Frank Gaffney, who's simply howling at the moon and pretending that he was in the Reagan administration when he really wasn't and whatever.
He was in the Reagan administration.
Well, it was never confirmed.
No, he was a deputy assistant secretary under Richard Pearl.
It wasn't for very long.
Well, Gordon Prather says that he was never confirmed and never really held that office.
Well, and despite many years of study, Ledeen never got his PhD thesis.
Or he never got his PhD, I should say.
Which, by the way, I should mention to the audience here, I should have mentioned at the beginning, if you go to IPSnews.net and search for neoconservatism, you'll find the neoconservatism archive, which literally includes 25 years or 30 years worth of Jim Loeb articles about the neocon movement.
And this guy is the expert of the experts.
And in fact, if you want a 30-minute version, you type in Jim Loeb neoconservatives in YouTube, and you'll see his great speech that he gave at the Israel Influence Summit there held by Grant Smith last year called Neoconservatism in a Nutshell.
That is just an excellent explanation that you could email to your uncle or whoever you want.
It's really good stuff.
It's only 18 minutes.
Oh, okay.
There you go.
Hey, and boy, do you fit a lot in that 18 minutes, too.
It's a really great speech.
Hey, let me ask you this, and I know it's silly, but I'm really interested in it.
Prophet Muhammad and the Quran are incompatible with modernity, says Flynn.
That's an Eli Clifton article at yoursiteloeblog.com.
And for all the hype about radical Islamists or, no, it's just al-Qaeda that, you know, the George W. Bush position or the Obama position versus the more kind of outlandish Trumpian position, does anyone in D.C., because this is getting out in popular culture more and more, but does anyone in D.C., Jim, ever admit that, come on, we all know that this is because George H. W. Bush bombed the hell out of Iraq, and he kept the troops in Saudi Arabia, and then so did Bill Clinton for another decade.
He and George W. Bush, they kept the troops occupying the holy land of Mecca, Medina, in order to bomb and blockade Iraq through the 1990s.
That's why al-Qaeda went to war with us.
It wasn't because they hate that we don't believe the same religion as them.
It's because George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton killed them.
Doesn't anyone ever admit that that's true, that history existed before 9-11?
I don't think we're good at history.
I don't think the American culture has much patience for history.
But, I mean, like on Twitter, people were joking.
They were saying, well, this Russia invades the Middle East, and then a radical Islamist commits an act of terrorism against Russia.
Oh, it must be because they hate the Russians for their freedom.
Right?
Like, that's stupid.
We all, all us non-government employees out here in the world, we know that's stupid.
We remember that Bill Clinton bombed these people.
At least anybody who's ever heard the blowback theory before, they accept it because it's just so obvious.
But I'm asking about the people who have power.
What about them?
Do they ever admit this?
Very rarely.
Because that's really too bad, because then we're still at where we were 15 years ago, which is they must hate them because their religion makes them hate goodness and innocence.
Well, that's very much where these guys are.
It's crazy.
It's so dumb that it's almost unbelievable that it's still the consensus and that nobody, I guess it's just rude to say this is all Bill Clinton's fault.
I mean, I don't know.
I like blaming stuff on Bill Clinton.
What's so hard about that?
You know, I don't get it.
But anyway, one more, one more.
Flynn, end US support for Israel-Palestine peace process.
Can you tell me about that?
That's from the book.
I don't remember that passage from the book, but I mean, it's pretty clear from the ambassadorial appointment that was just announced that Trump has no particular interest in two-state solution.
Now, maybe it may be that Tillerson and Mattis, who has among other things said that if Israel keeps going in the same direction, it'll be an apartheid state, which is a magic word.
We'll get to Trump on this and we'll rein in the ambassador-designate.
But we don't know yet.
Again, it's hard to say because Trump changes his mind so much.
It's very difficult to figure out what he's thinking at any given moment.
And I think it depends on who he spoke to last.
And right now, Flynn's got his ear, but I suspect that will not last very long.
You know, I was reading at the Forward that the Israel lobby's in a panic over Rex Tillerson, and not because, you know, he's got a lot of money.
He's got a lot of money.
He's got a lot The Israel lobby's in a panic over Rex Tillerson, and not because he ever said anything bad about Israel or anything, or at least not that they had noticed at that point anyway in the articles that I read, or two of them two days in a row, but just that he's an oil man, which means, oh no, what if he doesn't put Israel first?
Panic.
I wonder whether you think that that's really going to be a thing.
I don't know.
I mean, look, the people who supported his nomination and who planted the idea and then watered it in Trump's fertile brain were Bob Gates, Condi Rice, James Baker, who's really has been anathema to the Israel lobby for, you know, since the early 90s, and Steve Hadley.
And all of these people have shown a lack of confidence in the Israeli leadership, political leadership.
Just barely though, right?
I mean, Gates, Rice, and Hadley, did they ever stand up to the Israelis about anything at all?
Yeah, I mean, you have Condi getting very angry about the perpetuation of Israel's foray into Lebanon in 2006, prolonging the war, and ultimately basically said, you got to stop, you got to withdraw.
In other words, so Baker's no outlier in that group.
You think they all pretty much have a consensus that...
No, I mean, I think Baker's on one end of that spectrum.
I think they present a spectrum, but you know, I mean, Bob Gates has made very little secret of his own, kind of discussed with Bibi Netanyahu.
I mean, he hasn't done it publicly so much, it's been more just known around town.
And he's the guy who originally planted the idea, and then somehow they got Baker to talk with Trump, which is interesting in and of itself.
And so, again, I think what we could call the Republican realists are mounting a big effort to influence Trump.
And Tillerson was their idea.
And I think that worries the Israel lobby, because they were hoping for someone who was very much in their camp, like Joe Lieberman, for example.
I think a big test will be who's chosen this Deputy Secretary of State.
It was rumored that Tillerson was part of a package deal in which Bolton, that is John Bolton, would become Deputy Secretary, and that would please the lobby a lot, even though Bolton himself is not a classic neoconservative, but very, very sympathetic to Israel.
I mean, more than sympathetic.
But Bolton hasn't been nominated yet.
And if instead you get someone like Richard Haass, that I think would be very telling as to the degree of influence that the realist, so-called realist faction within the Republican Party might be able to exert on Trump.
Hey y'all, Scott Horton here.
Are you a libertarian and or a peacenik?
Live in North America?
If you want, you can hire me to come and give a speech to your group.
I'm good on the terror war and intervention, civil liberty stuff, blaming Woodrow Wilson for everything bad in the world, Iran, central banking, political realignment, and well, you know, everything.
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Now that's interesting because I mean, there's certainly less worse than the neocons, but they're probably, they're pretty much just status quo.
But you know, I wonder about this.
I talked with Yakov Hersh and he was saying, Hey, there's a huge conflict coming here, whether you see it or not, that no matter how big Trump's ego is, Netanyahu's is bigger.
And Netanyahu is going to talk to Trump the same way he talks to Obama, like he's giving orders to his butler.
And that Trump is just going to not stand for that.
And on the other hand, if Trump's, even his first instinct is to let Israel do whatever they want, let's move the embassy to Jerusalem and, and let them do whatever they want.
Well, whatever they want is war.
They're going to bomb Gaza, they're going to bomb Lebanon, they're going to go who knows do who knows what to the people of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
And that's going to create huge reactions in the rest of the states in the Middle East.
And Trump's going to learn really quick that he can't just let Israel do whatever they want, because that's going to create instability.
And it's going to make everybody else really angry.
And it's going to affect all the rest of the decisions he's going to make.
And so here comes the clash of the titans.
What do you think of that?
Oh, I think I think I think Netanyahu will be sufficiently briefed to flatter Trump.
And in order to get his way.
So I don't agree.
I don't think I don't think Netanyahu is going to talk down to Trump.
I think it's he's going to be the sycophant.
Because he knows that's the way the best way to influence him.
I mean, BB is not stupid, by any stretch of the imagination.
I think he has bad ideas.
And I don't, you know, it's my personal opinion sitting here that he does not have Israel's best interests in mind.
Or I mean, I'm sure he thinks he does.
But I don't see in the long run where he does.
I mean, you know, if they move the embassy to Jerusalem, there will be a regional response.
I'm quite sure of that.
So they didn't even have to go to war.
And BB will ask that the embassy be moved.
They've been wanting that for forever.
And we'll see.
We'll see, you know, whether Trump vows to or agrees with BB and is influenced by his ambassador designate, Mr. Friedman, assuming Friedman gets confirmed, or whether he's influenced by this realist faction, which would strongly oppose that idea.
Yeah, well, you know, I guess, in the air, I mean, I don't think Trump is grounded anywhere.
Right?
Yeah.
No, anything about really important to him is that he'd be the center of attention.
Right.
And even if that means there's a war somewhere where people get killed, I don't think that really has an impact on him.
I think that's a very abstract and distant notion to him.
I think that the issue is whether he's seen as the actor, you know, in making things happen, you know, or in, you know, in capturing the global spotlight.
Well, let me ask you this.
If Trump gives, you know, more or less the Council on Foreign Relations types, I mean, less Max Boot, but you know what I mean?
The older establishment realist types, yeah, Haas and them, if he gives them the kind of dominant positions or whatever, are they even powerful enough to get their way on something like, you know, giving up the West Bank or something like that, assuming that they really want to do that?
Because back when George W. Bush had more political capital than anyone ever, basically, after the greatest failure ever happened on his watch, I'm not exactly sure how that works, but he had a 90 something percent approval rating and his secretary of state, Colin Powell, more or less, you can fill me in, but I think said, now's our chance to settle this Israel-Palestine thing, which is a huge cause of terrorism against us, boss.
And they started to do it, but then, no, the neocons, the Israel lobby, the Tom DeLay and the born again Christians or whoever it was, stopped them.
And Colin Powell, the most powerful secretary of state under the most powerful president ever, were stopped in their tracks from pursuing this issue back in 2002 and three, right?
Well, I don't think he was the most powerful secretary of state.
Well, no, I guess not relative to the administration.
9-11, I think.
Because he didn't have a plan that appealed to Bush and the neocons and Cheney and Rumsfeld all had a plan.
And it was a plan that appealed to Bush.
And at that point, the state department star fell quite far.
So I think he had lost influence after 9-11.
And I think what you're referring to during the period of the second intifada and Powell being sent to Israel to try to persuade Sharon to stop the repression, he was completely undercut by Cheney.
So that's kind of what happened.
So it wasn't really the lobby, it was just Cheney.
It was the vice president, really, who stopped him.
I get it.
So that is different.
Yeah, because Bush was still, you know, I mean, Cheney was still extremely influential.
He didn't really lose influence until around 2000, late 2004, 2005, when it was very clear that Iraq was not what they thought it was.
So then would it be fair to say then that if Trump and his secretary of state and his secretary of defense decide they want to go ahead and pursue a two-state thing, that they'll be able to and that the lobby in DC wouldn't be able to stop him?
Well, I think it depends how committed they were to it.
But I don't think that's likely.
I don't think that's a likely scenario.
Because again, I mean, to some extent, that may depend on what Obama does between now and the time he leaves, if he does anything.
I mean, if there's a UN Security Council resolution that basically says, this is really something that the global community has to take on, and the United States can't do it by itself, can't force the solution, can't, will not continue to protect Israel from a certain degree of ostracism based on its policies in the West Bank and Gaza, and its settlement policies.
If he does something like that, I mean, the realists in the administration, someone like Tillerson, may see that as an opportunity to push Trump in a certain direction.
But it's pretty clear that the parties themselves, Israel and Palestine, and the Palestinian Authority are not prepared to talk seriously about anything.
And I don't think the Republican realists, as much as they'd like to see a two-state solution, are prepared to say it's the responsibility of the UN Security Council as a whole, or a new P5 plus one, such as that which negotiated the Iran deal.
In other words, to take responsibility from the United States as Israel's exclusive protector, and as the Middle East hegemon, who can essentially retain the power to tell people what to do.
I don't think Republican realists kind of want to give up that power, the sense of US hegemony.
So in other words, another eight years of the Obama years, status quo, and no change, basically.
Well, I mean, to some extent, it'll be hostage to events on the ground, and we can't predict what events will take place on the ground.
I mean, what if, you know, in Saudi Arabia, there is actually a regime change of some kind?
I mean, that will throw many things up into the air.
Or what if a war is provoked somehow between the United States and Iran?
I mean, these are huge events that will shake the entire region, and that may force the United States to adjust, or to adapt, or to take a whole new look at the region.
We can't really forecast at this point.
Well, it seems like the customary attacks on Gaza every couple of years or so, the way they've been doing that, just in political terms, that model is getting old.
They've got to figure out something else to do other than mowing the lawn, or whatever they call it.
Well, I don't know.
I mean, why is it necessary?
In their view, it's kind of worked so far.
Yeah.
I guess, in my mind, maybe they don't realize this yet, but in my mind, because of Facebook live streaming, and because of Twitter, and that's what, in the 2014 war, that was the first time that the average schmuck American had a chance to look at unfiltered pictures out of the Gaza Strip.
And then the polls swung by 15 points or something, compared to the attack before.
Yeah, but then they swung back.
I shouldn't be too optimistic.
You may be.
Yeah, I go back and forth.
But yeah, no, I mean, that's a hell of a status quo, to just keep for just a decade or more, to just keep Gaza under complete siege.
I mean, the rest of the world, the rest of the governments of the world are complaining more than ever before about the situation.
That's true.
But I mean, you know, Israel has occupied the West Bank for 50 years, and had control over Gaza for 50 years now.
That's a long time.
And, you know, if there was any hope of another actor coming in and really exerting influence on the situation, being willing to even alienate the US leadership, it would have been Europe.
And look at the state of Europe now.
It would have been the EU.
And, you know, now, you know, we have Brexit.
We have the Dutch may vote in Geert Wilders in three months, who says that Netherlands should should leave the EU.
I mean, the Netherlands who have, you know, political uncertainty in Italy following the referendum.
I mean, Europe is not in a unified mode, to say the least.
So you've got a one very important actor, Israel's most important trading partner by far, is that can't really seem to formulate a consistent policy in which it's that its constituents, constituent parts are willing to enforce.
So I think, you know, if, if I were Israeli, and I've lived for 50 years with occupying everything, I would say, well, why not another 50 years?
What's to prevent it?
I mean, I think that's a short sighted view.
But, you know, I, you know, I think they probably become more resistant to to a major change than they probably were 10 years ago, or 15 years ago.
Yeah, I mean, that's, that's my sense of it.
But I may be wrong, because I don't live there.
And I haven't visited there since 1971.
So I'm out of date.
All right, well, listen, I'll let you go.
I kept you way over time here, Jim.
But I sure do appreciate you doing my show again.
Okay.
Thanks very much.
Sure.
Talk to you some other time.
Yeah, he will.
I promise.
Okay.
I promise everybody, Jim Loeb, he'll be back.
The great Jim Loeb, former Washington Bureau Chief for Interpret services, IPS news.net.
And now he keeps the Loeb blog like your earlobe lobelog.com.
And there's a this really important series here for you to look at by Jim and by Eli Clifton, both on Mike Flynn, the new National Security Advisor, and all the crazy things that Michael Ledeen has taught him to think.
So please check that out at lobelog.com.
And again, go to YouTube and search Jim Loeb, neocons nutshell, and you'll see a great speech there and go to interpress service and search for the neoconservatism archives.
And I swear you'll find like 30 years worth of incredible articles all about the neocon movement.
He is, I don't know, as far as I know, the very best expert outside of the neocon movement on the neocon movement that you can find.
All right.
And that's the Scott Horton Show.
Thanks very much, everybody.
Merry Christmas to you and all that.
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