For Pacifica Radio, November 15th, 2020.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Antiwar.com and I'm the author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You'll find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
Again, this month, celebrating 10 years on the air here on KPFK, 90.7 FM in LA, and happy to welcome back to the show, my good friend, the best reporter, Gareth Porter.
How are you, sir?
I'm fine, Scott.
Thanks a lot.
I'm glad to be back.
Very happy to have you here.
So, it's such interesting times here.
Looks like Donald Trump, 99% chance here.
Looks like he's got himself unelected after just four years.
And we did a little bit of review of his foreign policy, I guess, here in September to wrap up before the election.
But now, I still think it's worth a look back and then a look ahead to what we face under Biden.
So, I thought I could start out with, say whatever you will, about Donald Trump.
He did stop Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton from being the president for us in one year, which all of mankind owes him the deepest gratitude for that simple act.
And then that really came with so much potential, right?
Because he didn't just beat them.
He roundly denounced especially their foreign policies.
This is George Bush's brother here and Barack Obama's Secretary of State, and for that matter, Bill Clinton's wife, the people who ruined everything.
And so, a lot of people, okay, some people thought that maybe he was really going to undo it.
Gareth, but then what happened, man?
Well, I think we, I shouldn't say we, I think a lot of people were overly optimistic about Trump's ability and willingness to make fundamental changes in national security, quote unquote, policy, and really to make some major moves toward dismantling the empire, dismantling the national security state's most aggressive elements.
And I think they were wrong because of the simple fact that Donald Trump does not have the personal wherewithal in terms of his personality, in terms of his understanding, his psychology.
He's really not capable of carrying out that kind of fundamental change.
And secondly, to revert to, I'm sure this is a point that we talked about in the earlier discussion, although I don't remember specifically.
He was from the very beginning obligated to big roller financial interests who were extremely pro-Israeli to say the least, and who demanded, of course, that he carry out very far reaching policies that were moving in the other direction.
And we can get into that if you want, or just sort of leave it right there.
But I think that's a major part of the reason why from the very beginning, there was no chance that Donald Trump could really carry out that kind of change in American foreign and or military policy.
And on that, I mean, he simply chose people, he surrounded himself with people, again, in large part, because of that obligation to Sheldon Adelson and other big roller financial interests, financial providers, who were simply not going to do anything to move in the direction of some of the most important changes that he perhaps really wanted to carry out.
Yeah.
And, you know, I mean, he said over and over to that his Israeli policies, especially, were all just the most cynical calculations.
Yeah, I'm going to buy up some good Christian evangelical votes with this kind of stuff.
And this kind of thing is all very retail politics that he lost anyway.
Yes.
And you're right.
He he was he has a very cynical side, which is, I think, of the essence of his approach to his foreign policy, his national security policy during these four years.
Unfortunately, that really overwhelmed whatever interest he had.
I think he did have an interest in trying to make good on the promises that he made to his political base to to really change the the U.S. policy by ending the forever wars particularly and beginning to pull back from those policies that were constantly engaging the United States in more wars, essentially.
Yep.
And of course, the joke here is he's Donald Trump.
So forget Sheldon Adelson.
If he wanted to write a check for seventy five million dollars to the Republican National Committee to cover the Republicans in the midterm elections, he could have done that.
He didn't need the Israel lobby at all.
He could have covered it all from his own bank account.
I'm not sure about that, but I mean, he doesn't have 10 billion, like he said, but he has enough to pay the measly tens of millions that it costs to run the Republican congressional campaigns and so forth.
I mean, last time, just a couple months ago, Sheldon Adelson cut a check for seventy five million.
That's not that much to a billionaire.
You know, even if he were, he's extremely stingy as well.
Well, I mean, that's the other joke is he's seventy five.
So the chance is he's going to live another 10 years.
And that was in fact, this was the whole I mean, of course, don't get me wrong.
I'm not saying I believed in it, but this is just the you know, the shtick that he ran on was that he was already rich.
He'd already succeeded, that he was old enough to retire and that he was doing this all selflessly just for the country because he wanted to so bad.
Right.
And so if that was the case, why compromise so much for Israel?
Why not go ahead and pay your own way?
But of course, it's Donald Trump we're talking about.
Ironically, he's the only one who could have possibly pushed Jeb and Hillary aside and got in their place like that.
But he is what he is.
And that's all it'll ever be.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We got a bargain here that anybody who was hoping for the kind of changes that you and I want really would have miscalculated or did miscalculate by not taking in into account fully or sufficiently.
Let's put it that way.
The really fundamental personality and psychological weaknesses of Donald Trump that that made for an inability and unwillingness to make those kinds of changes, to put priority on them in the first place and then to really have the wherewithal to have the understanding to know what to do.
Secondly, and so that that combination really was deadly.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, he really has been a terrible hawk on all China issues and Russia issues, too, no matter all the propaganda about him being Vladimir Putin's puppet.
That was never true, no matter how many times you heard it on whatever radio stations you might have heard it on.
And in fact, he's been a horrible hawk.
He's brought two countries into NATO, expanded troops in Poland, done military parades just a couple of hundred yards from the Russian border in Estonia, sent arms to Ukraine, where Obama was afraid to rightfully and has lately been really trying to provoke the Russians by flying cruise missile equipped bombers in the Black and Baltic Seas and in that one sea, the Sea of Oshkosh, I think it's called off the Vladivostok on Russia's far east Pacific coast there and and testing, you know, going far beyond Obama's hawkishness, even though Obama did overthrow the government in Ukraine in 2014, which was pretty bad.
But do you have much to add to Trump's Russia policy here?
Well, I have I have only one basic problem with that extremely accurate depiction or description of what the Trump administration has actually done on Russia, which is extremely accurate.
And that is that we're talking about essentially the national security state's policy, not Donald Trump's personal policy.
I mean, let's begin with the point that, you know, that really is overarching here that what happened on Russian policy is, is a consequence in part of the fact that Donald Trump ran into the national security state's total resistance to any stance that would not accept the idea of a new Cold War with Russia.
And that happened, of course, at the very beginning of his administration.
By February of 2017, he was already subject to this, this very well organized, well orchestrated campaign that was determined to bring about a situation where he felt that he did not have any choice but to go along with the the policy that the national security state was determined to carry out.
And he even said that.
Right.
He even said that in some interviews.
Geez, I'm on so much pressure again on this Russia angle.
I better do something tough.
I forget exact words, but something along those lines.
Yeah, that's right.
And that was my first article on Russia.
It was precisely on that point that what was going on in February 2017, which is when I wrote it, was precisely that the national security state, including the CIA, of course, but supported by the Pentagon, were determined and had the wherewithal to create a political situation that would make it impossible for Trump to continue that policy.
And as you say, he was very quickly became aware of that and he backed off.
And it was such a complete backing off that basically the Pentagon had total freedom to carry out whatever sort of aggressive stance they decided on from that time on.
Yeah, it really is a great window into how power really works in this country.
Anyway, we could talk about China, but we're limited on time here.
And I know that your real speciality over these last few years has been Trump's absolutely horrible Iran policy, which is to say his Israel policy.
So if you want to talk about Palestine as well, that's also very important and major changes have been made in both of those areas here.
Yeah, well, this, of course, is a further extension or simply a reiteration of the point that we began with, which was that Trump essentially gave away his policy toward Iran to the pro-Israeli interests from the very beginning and followed the orders of the pro-Israeli people that he brought into the government, John Bolton in particular, and then Mike Pompeo as well, who were there precisely to carry out policies that were in the interests of Israel.
And that policy revolved around getting out of the nuclear deal, the JCPOA, which was Netanyahu's strict orders.
You know, this is precisely what he ordered the Trump administration and Trump personally to do.
And he backed that up with that horrible video thing that he did, enumerating slide after slide in which he depicted the alleged evidence that the Israelis had stolen out from under the Iranians nose in Tehran in this daring raid as the New York Times and everybody else in the media called it.
As you showed the time he was just recycling his own previous fraud of the smoking Iranian laptop, right?
Exactly right.
And that was a key reason why it's such a travesty the way it was covered by the media, which never even bothered to look at the actual pictures and ask themselves, have we seen this before?
And what does that mean?
You know, but come on, that sounds like a lot of trouble.
Charlie Savage's job is to pick up the phone and ask the CIA what to write.
That's it.
Indeed.
But that was followed then by a series of steps which involved demands on Iran for renegotiation, which of course were not sincere.
They were merely excuses for carrying out the far reaching sanctions against Iran that have ever been carried out by anybody, which essentially took the form of a third party sanctions against other countries, threatening them with sanctions if they didn't cut off their purchases of Iranian oil.
The most far reaching use of that tool by any U.S. government ever.
And this, of course, was a way of trying to bring Iran to its knees.
And that was indeed the the ultimate objective of this policy, whether it was for the purpose of regime change or simply to force them into a situation where they would have to accept a complete sort of subservience to U.S. policy is beside the point.
I don't know which it was, and it depends on which official you might have talked to at what time.
Right.
Well, that's an important point.
So they put they pulled out of the deal.
They reinstituted all these sanctions.
And some of them said that what we're trying to do is force the Ayatollah to accept more concessions, limits on his missiles and get rid of the sunset provisions on some of the restrictions in the deal, that kind of thing.
Others said they said this, not just, you know, tea leaves, but some of the Trump administration officials said, possibly Pompeo, you straighten me out, that the purpose here is to truly undermine the stability of the entire country in order to force regime collapse.
Not so much, I don't think, a 53 style CIA coup or a color coded revolution, but just hopefully foment a real revolution from within.
Right.
By forcing such desperation on the part of the civilian population.
That's exactly right.
I mean, precisely so that the idea was that that the economy would be so wrecked that the political instability of the regime would be completely wiped out.
And that therefore, there would be a choice here between essentially accepting our demands and essentially accepting, as I put it, a situation of being under American hegemony, or essentially having an uprising by the people of Iran to put in a new regime.
And there were certainly hints by people like Pompeo that it was up to the Iranian people if they wanted to get rid of this regime, get a new regime that would be fine with us.
And there, you know, there'd be no problem with the United States having any further need to have sanctions against Iran.
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Now, but kind of both of those are BS, right?
Like they're really just trying to maintain the pre-2015 status quo of Cold War and prevent any kind of reproachment, because they knew that the Ayatollah is not going to come bend his knee, and they've got to be realistic enough to know, despite their statements to the contrary, that the Iranian regime is not going to fall based on a, especially on a 53 model or a 79 model, whichever, under pressure from the United States, the great Satan or whatever.
The Iranian society is never going to go along with, even if they wanted to overthrow their own government, they're not going to do it at a time when the Americans are urging them to.
You know what I mean?
Any more than we would overthrow our government for them.
Well, you're absolutely right about that final observation.
No question about that.
But I don't think that that means that the Pompeos and Boltons of the world are capable of discerning the truth, as opposed to having these illusions.
I think it's quite likely, if not certain, that those people really believed in their analysis.
And don't forget that we know that the Bush administration, you know, Vice President Dick Cheney and his advisors, who were at the heart of their policy toward Iran, did, in fact, hope and believe that they could get regime change ultimately by putting pressure on Iran and that this was because they believed that the population was ready to do something like that.
I mean, in fact, in 2009, when, you know, American NGOs helped support that Green Revolution for that guy Mousavi, he was, you know, a pet of the Ayatollah anyway, right?
Like he wasn't going to represent much change.
He was to the left of Ahmadinejad or something, but he didn't represent a real regime change anyway.
They don't even know what horses they're betting on.
No, they really don't.
They have no understanding whatever.
I mean, these are people who thought that the student uprising in the late 1990s was the sign that they were ready.
So anything after that, you know, in the early 2000s.
Yeah, they believe that that the the Iranian people were prepared.
They really wanted.
And the real important point here, right, is these sanctions are very real.
And there's stories, again, of people can't get basic medicines and this kind of thing.
Tell him, Gareth, what's going on over there right now?
Well, there's no doubt that this is having a very serious impact on the Iranian population.
But you know what?
I mean, the the most outrageous idea that that the United States can manipulate the the opinion of the people of Iran so that, you know, by by carrying out these sanctions to get them to to support the American policy and oppose the policy of the regime there is has turned out to be absolutely wrong, because what actually happened was, according to opinion surveys done by Americans, not by Iranians, the the population became much more supportive, of course, of the policy of the regime toward the whole issue of negotiating with the United States and the JCPOA and the whole cluster of issues surrounding that.
Well, that's right.
I mean, our drab old think tankers have a term for this.
It's called the rally around the flag effect.
It's the reason why governments always act as though they're victims, whether they really are or not.
You know, absolutely.
Yeah, that that's precisely the case.
And American officials have have simply been wrong over and over again from one administration to another ever since the Clinton administration.
Well, you can even go back earlier than that.
But beginning with the Clinton administration, they have continued to embrace a completely absolutely wrong set of notions about what was happening in Iran and what the United States could and should do about it.
All right.
Now, I was going to ask you all about what we're facing with the Biden, Flournoy, Rice administration coming up here, which is just terrifying.
But instead, we don't have enough time for that.
And I do want to give you a chance to talk about Israel, Palestine.
And I'll start with the end here, which is that for all his sucking up to Benjamin Netanyahu and Sheldon Adelson for all their support politically and all Adelson's financial support and all that, he lost the House two years ago and now he lost the presidency anyway.
But anyway, so how bad did Donald Trump screw the Palestinians, Gareth?
Well, I mean, I think this this latest perverse policy of essentially supporting the the Israeli deal, you know, the first of all, of course, basically giving the Israelis the right to essentially determine the new outlines of the state, essentially giving the political support of the administration, not legal support to essentially wiping out Palestinian national rights completely.
This is this is the worst policy that's been followed by any administration since the beginning of this issue.
I mean, that's the simple that's the simple fact.
So, I mean, the point being really, then, that I really don't know what to make of it, because it goes the arguments go in so many directions.
But I guess the bottom line is the two state solution is canceled.
But it's not like equal rights for the Palestinians under Israeli control under occupation are in the offing in on any kind of time horizon.
Anyway, it's not even part of anyone's plan.
And so they can't have independence like they literally can not not just may not they can not have independence now because of how completely carved up the West Bank is and all the Israeli expanded control there.
But they also can't have citizenship either ever.
Well, all I want to say is it's a one state solution, but it's the the Zionist state solution as a permanent reality.
I mean, that's that's the effect of it.
I mean, that's the intended effect.
And, you know, certainly it is extremely disappointing, to say the least, to anyone who supports the Palestinians national rights and for the Palestinians themselves.
Yeah.
You know, the last one and the very worst one, the worst thing Donald Trump ever did in his whole life, the worst thing the American government has done since Iraq war two, or maybe Obama's support for al Qaeda in Syria would be Obama and now Trump's support for al Qaeda in Yemen.
And of course, that's the Saudi led coalition, as they call it, Trump leading from behind, but supporting the Saudi UAE al Qaeda war against the Houthis there, and sometimes against the southern socialist movement there, too.
But, you know, minimum a quarter million people are dead.
And I bet you it's three times that.
Right.
And of course, this is a policy that, again, reflects not just on the Trump administration, but on the national security state itself and its devotion to its sort of permanent interests, which have to do with alliances with regimes, which will give them military bases.
That was the reason for, in my view, in my analysis, that's why the Obama administration began that policy of supporting the Saudi UAE offensive, the air offensive against Yemen.
And despite the fact that it knew what the consequences were for horrible deaths and injuries of civilians, to the point where, you know, some of their own State Department officials, the legal people were warning that, you know, the United States officials were liable to have legal accountability for those war crimes that were taking place in Yemen.
Right.
Which just goes to show how they're accusing themselves.
They know exactly how guilty they are.
Hand me their own document and give me a grand jury and I'll take care of it for you.
Now, here at the very end, Gareth, just very quickly, is it really right that there's some reason for optimism under a lame duck, Donald Trump, unelected presidency here in the last 10 weeks?
Well, I know Doug McGregor pretty well.
I mean, I can't say he's a really close friend or anything like that, but I've known him for 14 years and have spoken with him many times and know his thinking and his determination well enough to say that this is somebody who is really a formidable opponent for those people remaining in the Trump administration who want to continue to carry on the war in Afghanistan despite the Trump obvious desire to have it end.
If there's anybody who can end that war, it's Doug McGregor.
And I have hopes that he can do something about it.
Yeah.
And now he has been appointed special advisor to the brand new secretary of defense.
And they really fired and they fired some and the rest resigned.
But there's kind of been a purge of the entire civilian leadership.
The deputy secretary of defense for policy and a handful of others there.
And so clocks ticking.
And you know what?
In terms of Douglas McGregor and people might have seen him on TV in his position here, assuming Trump has really given him the president's authority to make things happen here, this will really be an exciting experiment to watch, right?
The irresistible force.
This sorry to use the same word twice, this force of nature, Colonel McGregor, the great hero of the tank battle of Iraq, War One and everything up against the entire national security state.
But with the president telling him to do what he's doing, and that's kind of a boy, it's like hot and cold coming together to make a tornado.
It sounds like we have never seen a situation like this, I dare say.
And after a president who's been not the time has run out on his two terms, but who's been unelected after one.
And so is like an extra super lame duck, you know, kind of deal, right?
I mean, there's going to be resistance.
We know that.
And so, you know, how this fight plays out is going to be really fascinating.
And, you know, much of it will be behind the scenes.
And we won't know until it's over what happened.
But but it's really a story that's going to be quite fabulous to ultimately to learn the truth about.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, we're definitely going to keep our eye on all your stuff, writing mostly at the Gray Zone Project.
It's the heroic Gareth Porter.
Thank you, sir, for your time.
Appreciate it.
Thanks so much, Scott.
All right, you guys.
And that's it for antiwar radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of antiwar dot com, where we republish everything that man writes.
And I am the author of Fool's Errand Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You can find my full interview archive more than 5400 of them now.
Going back to 2003 at Scott Horton dot org and a YouTube dot com slash Scott Horton show.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to nine on KPFK 90.7 FM. See you next week.
