For Pacifica Radio, December 31st, 2017.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, you guys welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the opinion editor of Antiwar.com.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 4,500 interviews now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org.
And you can follow me on Twitter, at Scott Horton Show.
All right, you guys, introducing Derek Davidson from Loeblog.
That's the great Jim Loeb's blog, Loeblog.
And he's formerly with the Rand Corporation and has a master's degree in Middle East Studies from the University of Chicago, writes great stuff over there at Loeblog.
And I think you guys know, many of you know, Jim Loeb is the single greatest chronicler of the neoconservative movement in America.
Well, and they have this article that they wrote together here, Clean Break 2.
Iran hawks decide to burn it all down.
That must have been Jim's title.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Derek?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Good old you and Jim, man.
I got to tell you what.
I saw this and I thought, man, who's going to write about this?
And I I sent a tweet to Jim Loeb.
Hey, Jim, look at this.
And then I looked at Loeblog and you guys had already written up a whole thing ready to go.
Yeah, he had already flagged it.
You guys are great.
OK, so quick on that stuff.
So Michael Makovsky, he is from JINSA, the men from JINSA.
That's a very important article by Jason Vest, everybody, if you go and read it.
So the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.
These are the guys who work so closely on police and military liaisons between the Americans and the Israelis to get our forces working together there, that kind of thing.
And the men from JINSA, they were a big part of the neoconservative group that lied us into Iraq or two, and including Michael Makovsky, who was a contract member of the Office of Special Plans under Douglas Feith and Abram Shulsky at the Pentagon who were in charge of digging through the CIA's trash and coming up with lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in 2002.
So but now he's the president and the CEO, CEO and executive director, I guess, of JINSA.
And he wrote this article for Fox News.
It's called One Way to Counter Iran's Aggression.
Change the map of the Middle East or burn it all down, as you and Jim call it.
So what is the deal here?
Derek, take it away.
So his argument was basically that we should break up Syria and Iraq and create new nations out of those territories in order to isolate the parts of those countries, literally geographically, I guess, where Iran has influence and carve off the parts where we could theoretically separate Iran from that influence.
It seems to be a bit of an excessive solution to a problem that I'm not sure exists or is any worse than it ever has been.
He mentions also doing this in Lebanon and Yemen, but he doesn't really get into details, although you can imagine, you know, just taking this project to every country in the Middle East and redrawing all the borders.
It would just be a cornucopia of fun times, I think.
Yeah.
Well, from their point of view, of course.
Sure.
So, well, now you call it the clean break, too, here.
So what was the clean break one, Derek?
So this is where Jim, as you said, is basically just like a walking encyclopedia of neoconservatism.
He talked to me about this 1996 report that was done by, I want to get the name right, was done by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, which is a Jerusalem based group.
It's not I don't think it exists anymore.
But it was a, you know, Israeli national security think tank type of place, and they worked in collaboration with a bunch of neocon outfits, including JINSA, to write this report, which is called A Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.
Some of the people you have already mentioned in this conversation, like Doug Fyfe, were involved in this.
David Wormser was the primary.
David Wormser was the main author.
And you can, all you guys, you can read this at Scott Horton.org.
Just type in A Clean Break and Scott Horton.org.
And there's a companion piece also, Coping with Crumbling States.
Interestingly, some of the people who were involved in writing the report later basically blamed it all on Wormser and disavowed the report because, I don't know, it was such a radical, ridiculous argument.
The main thrust of it was, you know, I mean, as was the case for all neocons in the 1990s, was how to make a case for invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein, which they argued would contain Syria and Iran, which, as we know, has not turned out to be the case.
They, I gather, wanted to replace Saddam with a restoration of the Hashemite monarchy, which just seems insane to me, even in the 1990s.
And then the argument was that this Hashemite, restored Hashemite Iraq, would serve along with Jordan, Israel and Turkey as a new axis in the Middle East to counter the malign influences.
I mean, the focus of the report seems to be on Syria, but Syria, you can read, I think, as a proxy for Iran.
Certainly today you could, but even back then, I think.
And so they wanted these four countries to serve as the new kind of axis of resistance, I guess.
And then it argued that from there, you could that could be the prelude to redrawing the map of the Middle East.
So and basically, you know, breaking Syria up, which is, again, we're back to that now, I guess.
Right.
Well, and so this is the irony here for people who can keep track of this story as it's unfolded over 20, 25 years here, 22 years, I guess, since the clean break.
And and it's in there, it's and it's maybe it's emphasized more in coping with crumbling states, but it was Ahmed Chalabi who was blowing all this smoke up there about how the new supermajority Shiite ruled Iraq is going to be a friend to Israel and build the oil and water pipeline to Haifa and all this.
These neocon traitors for Israel are actually traitors for Iran because they're so stupid.
They're willing to let this guy tell them what they wanted to hear, even though if you go back to the end of the first Iraq war, why, after they encouraged the Shia to rise up and overthrow Saddam, why did they backstab them?
They changed their mind because they realized the Bata Brigade, the Dawah Party and the Supreme Islamic Council were coming from Iran to come and take over and lead the revolution.
They were about to undo the entire Reagan policy of backing Saddam to contain Iran.
So they changed their mind.
They left Saddam in to to, you know, slaughter the uprising by 100000 people and then rule over them.
And under the no fly zones, though, through the 90s.
And then they picked up under junior where they had left off under Bush senior.
And how in the world did they think that?
I mean, it's just amazing to me.
They thought that by importing the Iranian revolution into Iraq, that at the end of the day, they'll still prefer us to Iran.
And so we got a million dead people and they didn't accomplish that at all.
In fact, all they did was quite predictably install the Dawah Party and the Supreme Islamic Council in power in Baghdad.
And now the same individual men who did this, Michael Murkowski himself, literally a member of the Office of Special Plans who did this, are saying, oh, no, Iran's power and influence in the region has increased somehow.
And so now we need one, two, three, many Iraqis in order to fix the problem that we just created.
What fun, huh?
Yeah, well, it's I think that's a fairly succinct way to put it.
I mean, these guys broke the Middle East and they can't in response to the very predictable results of breaking the Middle East.
They want to break it again, I guess.
Man.
And they figure that we're suckers, you know, generally speaking, the Americans and they may be right about that.
You know, there's this powerful narrative about Iran and their their power and danger and influence there.
And there's no question that they had a malign influence in Iraq war, too.
But still, again, that was all America's fault.
So we're not in any position to complain about that, really.
But, you know, of course, Obama's policy in Syria was meant to weaken Iran.
And in fact, it only strengthened their position when it backfired into the creation of the Islamic State that we had to then again ally with Iran to fight against.
And so now they've increased their power and influence in Iraq.
And now they've got men on the ground, you know, working hand in hand with Hezbollah in Syria.
And so now these guys are just in a panic.
Everything that they've done has just completely blown up in their face, in all of our faces.
But so now their narrative is somebody's got to do something about the Ayatollah.
Will you expect us to quit now after everything we've done for Iran?
We can't leave it like this.
Right.
Yeah, it's I mean, you can't escape, you know, every time one of these people talks about the rise of Iran's, you know, malign influence over the Middle East, you can't escape the fact that it all started with the Iraq war.
I mean, it was that was it.
That's where the you know, if you had a policy of containing Iran, you broke it.
I mean, the policy was always double containment for a long time.
It was, you know, we we try to contain Saddam.
We know Saddam, you know, after at least after the Iran-Iraq war in Kuwait, we figured out that Saddam was a bad guy, but he was a counterweight to the Iranians.
So the idea was that you kind of keep them in contained in their own little internal conflict and containing each other and then deal with everything else.
But, you know, when you go in and take one of the two components of that plan out, you have to assume that the fallout is going to be that the other one is not contained anymore.
But these guys don't seem to have a plan for that.
Well, now they say, oh, no, a land bridge from Tehran through Iraq into Syria and Lebanon.
I like Max Abrams, who's actually kind of a neocon on some issues, but he's been good on Syria this whole time.
He says a land bridge.
Yeah.
Otherwise known as a road.
A road, right.
Exactly.
I'm about to take a land bridge from New York down to Connecticut for the holidays.
You know, the turnpike.
And they they they just make the same errors over and over again.
I mean, what Murkowski wants to do in Iraq is support an independent Kurdish state.
And then he kind of wipes his hands of the aftermath.
He says that we should support a federal Iraq for the rest of the country.
But that federal Iraq is going to go to war with the Kurds because, I mean, they almost went to war with the Kurds over Kirkuk just a few weeks ago.
I mean, this isn't even like ancient history.
Right.
In October, there's going to be there would be a civil war in that case.
And what's left of Iraq after the United States shepherds the creation of this independent Kurdish state, what's left of Iraq would naturally gravitate closer to Iran.
Well, speaking of which, you know, all the Israeli agitation for independent Kurdistan dating back to the beginning of the Iraq war.
Right.
Remember the Seymour Hersh article Plan B?
Sure.
So, I mean, there's obviously the question of Kirkuk.
And I guess the plan would be that.
Well, what?
America and Israel would help build up the Peshmerga, that they're so strong that they can just rule Kirkuk and that Baghdad won't even try it.
They won't even think about trying to take Kirkuk and it'll just be easy or what?
Right.
I mean, if you're going to attempt something like this, the time to do it, not that I think it would have ever been a good idea, but the time to do it would have been when the Kurds actually controlled Kirkuk.
They don't anymore.
And the issue, I mean, I mean, if you want to follow this out and progress, you know, follow the progression, even though it's insane at so many steps along the way.
But the progression to get to a Kurdistan, a Kurdish state that doesn't have Kirkuk, there's almost no chance that that state would be a viable, viable state economically.
I mean, the oil fields and the pipeline in Kirkuk are basically half, I think, or were half of Kurdistan's annual revenue.
And if you take that away, what do they have left?
They don't really have enough left to sustain an independent state.
Yeah.
Well, we saw the absolute freak out in Baghdad and Tehran and I'm not sure where else if the I guess I don't really know what Erdogan's reaction was.
But anyway, certainly Iran and the Baghdad government put a freak out on this referendum.
Erdogan and Turkey in general have had good relations with the Barzanis for some time.
Now, what was their reaction to the referendum?
They were very, very opposed to that.
I mean, it was a real it really changed the relationship there.
Yeah.
And we can see how there was real independence.
Iran presumably would go to war, too.
I mean, and you have and this goes back.
I don't know what the CIA is doing now, but 10 years ago, we know that CIA was backing the PJAC group there as well as Jandala against Iran.
And so and PJAC being basically the Iranian faction of the PKK.
Right.
Right.
And, you know, I don't know if it was maybe this was a CIA story, but I read at least one piece that said that the Iranian Kurdish population had a huge and favorable reaction to the vote for independence in Kurdistan and that that was why the Tehran government freaked out was because they saw a real challenge to their authority there.
Do you know if that's right or not?
I mean, yeah, that's certainly part of it.
Part I mean, part of it was they saw an opening to exploit to improve relations with Baghdad.
But, you know, and they may now benefit from that because there's talk of running a new pipeline from Kirkuk through Iranian territory instead of through Turkish territory, which it has traditionally done.
But, yeah, I mean, certainly for Iran and for Turkey, the bulk, I would say, of their opposition to the referendum was that these countries have their own Kurdish populations and, you know, unhappy Kurdish minority populations, and they don't want to get any funny ideas, basically.
I'm glad you guys pointed this out, too.
I wasn't sure if maybe I had read this wrong or something.
I was in a real hurry when I read Mikovsky's piece.
But then you guys have the block quote.
He really did cite Yugoslavia as the model for the breakup of the Middle East.
Huh?
Yeah, right.
He said artificial states have been divided or loosened before with some success, such as the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.
So, yeah, that's that's it.
Some success.
Yeah, well, sometimes these neocons mean what they say, huh?
Isn't that interesting?
Well, yeah, so I guess back to the real deal here, I think that dumbass in chief up there is really susceptible to this narrative that, yeah, forget Al-Qaeda, forget the Saudis, forget the people who, you know, killed thousands of Americans in the United States and in Iraq War Two.
Israel says Iran is the enemy.
Are we going to just surrender the Middle East to the mullahs, to Israel's archenemy that's determined to destroy them with hydrogen bombs at their first opportunity, which could be any day now?
And and it just seems like as stupid as everything I just said is that, you know, it's certainly a powerful narrative and it's not one that anyone in the White House is contradicting for the most part.
So, yeah, I mean, I don't know.
You know, it's certainly a powerful narrative and it's not one that anyone in the White House is contradicting for this guy.
It's certainly what everybody on Fox and Friends in the morning thinks.
And so what danger do you really think we're in of actually getting into a war with Iran over this nonsense?
I mean, I guess I'll add one more thing.
They keep talking more and more about how they're going to find a way to ruin Obama's nuclear deal here.
Right.
Yeah, he's I mean, he's got a couple of deadlines in mid-January where he could basically, if he wants to, and he said that he would if Congress didn't act to amend it, which it didn't, he could basically, you know, walk out of the nuclear deal, he could trash the nuclear deal unilaterally.
I mean, I think it's it's interesting that to the degree to which he campaigned in the Republican primary, especially when he was going after Jeb Bush against neoconservatism, basically.
I mean, he didn't he never framed it that way and he wouldn't have known what the hell you were talking about, probably if you said something to him.
But, you know, he pretended to have opposed the Iraq war and he railed against George W. Bush's foreign policy.
The most influential think tank in D.C. right now, I think you could pretty much conclude is the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which is a straight line neoconservative institution.
But he's following their playbook on Iran, more or less to the letter.
So, yeah, I mean, we're we're in a situation now where you have neoconservative influence once again on the rise with a president who's even less equipped than Bush was to at some point, you know, say, hold on a second, we got to put on the brakes here, which he kind of did in his second term when people were when these same people were really pushing for confrontation with Iran.
I mean, Bush kind of pulled back a little bit, but Trump is dumb enough to just go down this road because he doesn't I mean, he has no frame to to oppose them.
I think there's some difference of opinion there in terms of his generals.
I mean, Mattis is particularly and has talked about, you know, being very opposed to Iran going all the way back to the Beirut barracks bombing, which was, I think, a formative event for him.
But then you've got McMaster.
I don't know if he has any influence anymore, if Trump listens to him at all.
But he's been arguing to stay in the the nuclear deal.
And Tillerson, who we know doesn't have any influence anymore because he called Trump a moron.
You know, he's been arguing to stay in the nuclear deal.
But on the other hand, you have the Michael Flynn faction still at the National Security Council.
And, you know, that that crew and the FDD guys who are, you know, seem to have somehow gained considerable influence in the in this administration who are arguing, you know, to to to scrap it.
Yeah, well, and so here's my thing, though, about the nuclear deal is they were never making nukes in the first place.
And so the whole thing is a hoax.
And they didn't even need a nuclear deal.
They already had a nuclear deal, the nonproliferation treaty.
And Iran's been within it all along.
They've been within their safeguards agreement all along.
The entire issue is a hoax.
So even if America drops out of the treaty and I guess puts sanctions on them or whatever, the Iranians still don't really have an incentive that I can see to break their deal with the rest of the U.N. Security Council that they've signed here, since after all, they're not really sacrificing anything other than, you know, they built up so many centrifuges that they could afford to sacrifice two thirds of them and still have enough to do their business.
And so who cares?
So I wonder whether even if they broke the deal, if you think that necessarily would be a crisis, the Iranians could just shrug it off and be like, well, screw you.
We weren't making nuclear bombs anyway.
We told you that.
Yeah, I mean, it depends if he does break the deal, it depends on how he does it.
There are certain sanctions that the United States could restore where, you know, it would be the United States walking away from the deal, but everybody else could maintain it.
Russia, China, the Europeans and the Iranians could maintain it.
But there are the more powerful sanctions are secondary sanctions which apply to everybody.
So it would be the United States basically cutting any company or country that does business with Iran off from the global financial network.
And that if we restore those kind of sanctions, I mean, that that's a very hard thing for hard thing for anybody to kind of bear just to do business with Iran.
So I would expect that that would have a serious impact on whether the rest of the world was, you know, going to try to make a go of it with Iran without the United States.
You know, in terms of what the Iranians would do, I think you're right.
There's no evidence that they were actively pursuing nuclear weapons or that they have been for at least 10 or 15 years.
And the question, I mean, there are questions as to whether they were ever pursuing them.
It would just be, I would expect that they would go back to a large scale uranium enrichment program.
They would advance their research on centrifuge design and things like that, which would give them the hardliners in the United States more excuse to kind of whip up the war fever to say, you know, look, they're developing all this stuff.
This is obviously getting them closer to a bomb.
We have to do something.
And that's the danger, really, I think, is that you'll just get put on this path of escalation to a war.
That's a much greater danger to me than the notion that the Iranians would suddenly decide to build a bomb.
So then the only thing we have going for us, I assume, has got to be right that the European firms in the UK, France, and Germany especially, that any interest that they now have with Iran, now that the sanctions have been lifted temporarily, that hopefully, crossing my fingers here, they're screaming, please don't do this for their own investment capital reasons.
Yeah, I mean, one of the reasons I think Congress didn't do anything after Trump decertified the agreement in October is that they were lobbied pretty heavily by European diplomats to not take any action that would risk the nuclear deal.
And part of that is because, as you say, a lot of European firms have started to engage with Iran.
They have business interests there.
Part of it is also, you know, these guys think it's a good deal.
They don't want to break it because they see what would happen.
I mean, they see the inexorable march to war that would probably follow if the deal was really scrapped.
Well, you know, I wonder, you mentioned Tillerson, I wonder how powerful oil is now.
I remember Greg Palast saying back in, I don't know, 10 years ago, let's say, that we're not going to attack Iran.
You know why?
Because the UK, British Petroleum, just put however many billion dollars in investment in new projects in Iran, and the UK doesn't bomb British Petroleum's investments.
You know, this is not the way it's going.
It's not really too difficult to read between these tea leaves.
Now, on the other hand, the UK wasn't really in the driver's seat at that point.
And the question of whether Olmert was going to be able to convince Bush that let's do this or whether Cheney was going to be able to rig some false flag attack in order to launch this war.
Those were real questions at the time, I think.
And yet Palast did have a good point, right, that, you know, when we have these multinational firms with these huge investments, that's really the best way to prevent war, in effect.
You know?
It is.
I mean, I think with Trump, you have to appeal to him on that basis.
I don't think you could convince him not to go to war by telling him that Britain and France don't want to go to war.
I don't think he's going to care based on how he's treated the Europe so far in his presidency.
But yeah, you might be able to appeal to him on the basis of...
Although, you know, there were people who thought that that was going to save the nuclear deal, and it doesn't seem to have done that.
They thought that the appeal to his, you know, sense of American companies could get into this market and do business in Iran and make money, you know, they thought that that would kind of turn him on a little bit.
And it doesn't seem to have done that.
And in fact, he's talking about, or his administration is, you know, talking about doing, you know, taking steps to close off the Boeing aircraft deal with Iran, which was a huge deal, billions of dollars, I think, to supply Iran air with new planes.
And it's the one major deal that has involved an American firm doing business with Iran that came about after the sanctions were lifted.
And it doesn't look like it's going to survive, such as this administration's hostility to Iran.
What we need is Navy officers over there providing spare parts for their old F-14 Tomcats.
There you go, yeah.
Yeah, see, we got to get the arms industrialists on the military.
Get the military, yeah, get them.
Yeah, you guys get to sell a lot of weapons to the Pentagon in the name of the Iranian threat, but I got an idea.
How about selling a bunch of weapons to Iran in the name of the US threat, and then hopefully that way there'll be too many Americans there providing care and feeding and maintenance on Iran's military, then we can't bomb them.
They'll be our de facto allies, because they'll be allies of Lockheed.
All right, I'll let you go.
Thank you so much for coming on my show, Derek.
You're great, man.
Thanks, Scott.
Take care.
All right, you guys, that is Derek Davidson.
He's writing with the great Jim Loeb over at lobelog.com, like your earlobe, lobelog.com.
And hey, listen, this is such an important article.
You got to read this, and you got to read the one that it's about, too.
It's called Clean Break Two.
Iran hawks decide to burn it all down.
And I did get us a little bit off topic in that interview, but you got to go and check this out.
And the article that it's about is Michael Makovsky at Fox News.
You can find it at flipboard.com as well.
One way to counter Iran's aggression, change the map of the Middle East.
You have to look at this, okay?
Go look at it.
All right, Sean, that's it for Anti-War Radio for this morning.
Thanks very much for listening.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm the author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the opinion editor of antiwar.com.
You can find my full interview archive at scotthorton.org, and you can follow me on Twitter, at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, and Happy New Year.
