For KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright, so this is Anti-War Radio, and I'm your host, Scott Horton.
Some of the stories we've been covering this week at AntiWar.com include the nuclear talks between Iran and the West, the military's admission of their mistreatment of Bradley Manning, the controversy in the Congress over military spending, massive bombings across Iraq, the release by Al Jazeera of what are being called the Palestine Papers, new government being formed in Lebanon, the conflict between Karzai and the parliament being seated in Kabul, Afghanistan, and, of course, riots and unrest and instability across the Middle East.
In the wake of the popular revolution in Tunisia last week, there have been at least massive protests, if not riots, in Jordan and in Yemen.
And this evening, all eyes are on Egypt, where for the past three days there have been massive demonstrations.
And tonight, the president, Hosni Mubarak, gave a speech announcing that he will replace his entire cabinet and the entire government under him, but not including himself.
Tomorrow, Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the IAEA and a democratic activist in Egypt, is under house arrest, while the National Democratic Party headquarters in Cairo has been burnt to the ground.
We turn now to Phil Giraldi.
He is a contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine and a regular columnist for Antiwar.com, as well as executive director of the Council for the National Interest Foundation.
And, of course, he also is a former CIA and DIA officer with experience in the Middle East.
Welcome to the show, Phil.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing great.
Really appreciate you joining us this evening.
What do you make of what's going on in Egypt?
Is this the end of the Mubarak regime?
I think it might be a bit premature to say that it's the end of the regime, but it's maybe, you know, what was the Churchill expression, the beginning of the end.
I think, obviously, it's clear now that Mubarak is not going to be able to sort of situate the government in the way that he wants, so his son will be his successor.
So I think that he being 82 years old and in poor health, certainly he would seem to be the last president of his family, at least at a minimum.
Well, now it was recently announced, I guess a few months back, that he was trying to groom his son to replace him, and that caused a lot of backlash among the population there.
But I wonder, did he and the military have a backup plan for who might be his replacement?
If the people would be unwilling to accept his son?
Well, there's no obvious succession here.
You're right, there was a backlash when it was announced that his son would probably be his successor, and the reason for that was that there was a lot of popular sentiment against continuing to have the presidency in one family.
Some of the other successors that are mentioned are, you know, head of the armed forces, head of the intelligence services, people like that.
But they would be choices that would have a lot of problems also in terms of popular support, and also in terms of international recognition, let's face it.
So there's no clear line of succession.
I would think that we're basically seeing a transition into another form of government, in the sense that we will see a more populous strain of government, and that it's going to be something that probably is along the lines of the Muslim Brotherhood or some organization like that that has Islamic roots and essentially already has an organization in place.
Well, you know, all this footage on CNN today of the massive protests across not just Cairo but Alexandria and many other cities in Egypt kind of begs the question of, yeah, but who's organized to replace the people if they throw them out?
Because it's certainly not the Muslim Brotherhood doing all this protesting, but as you say, they're the next big organized force besides the military and the government itself in that country.
And any of these, you know, Twitter revolutionaries or whatever CNN would call them out there in the street could find themselves kind of in the same situation as the young Iranians in 1979 who didn't really realize that they would be overthrowing one dictatorship for another.
Yeah, that's right.
The Twitters are not going to make the decision on who basically is the successor here.
And I think you have to recognize that there are only two power centers in the country that, excluding, of course, Mubarak's own party, which one would assume would be discredited by this whole process, but the only two power centers that would have any possibility of assuming control of the country would be the Muslim Brotherhood and would be the military.
The military, for obvious reasons, would want to play probably a subsidiary role, so that leaves you with the Muslim Brotherhood.
And the Muslim Brotherhood has organization that's already there.
It's already sitting in Parliament.
One third of the seats, I believe, in Parliament are Muslim Brotherhood seats in one way or another.
So it's got a presence.
It's got experience.
It's established.
The question is where would someone like Baradei fit in with this?
I'm not quite sure about that.
So in terms of the current crisis and all the people out in the streets, one of the headlines from Al Jazeera was that the military has been called out.
Do you know much about what their reaction has been or whether they're calling whose side they're on or whether they've picked any sides yet?
Well, I don't think it's possible to judge that at the moment.
The military, yes, indeed, has been called out.
There are apparently tanks on the streets in Cairo, in Alexandria, in Suez, and in Aswan, the four of the biggest cities.
So they're there to back up the police, basically.
They haven't taken any active role yet.
I would assume if you look at the history of these kinds of movements, you would probably think that the upper-level officers who have a lot more stake with the regime are probably quite prepared to do anything, including shooting protesters.
But probably the lower-level officers who are a lot closer to the people and a lot closer to the forces in the country that want change are probably reluctant to do that, and the soldiers themselves are probably extremely reluctant to do that.
So if you're going to unleash the soldiers on the demonstrators, I think you're going to have to use elite forces.
You're going to have to use special police units and that kind of thing, and that would be the only thing that the Mubarak administration will be able to use.
Do you think that's what Hillary Clinton is telling them to do?
Again, there have been mixed signals all week from Obama and from Clinton basically supporting the demonstrators and also supporting Mubarak.
The question for the U.S. government becomes the classic question.
It's always do we want stability or do we want a government that actually represents the will of the people?
The problem is when you have a government that represents the will of the people, it doesn't represent the will of the United States.
Yeah, those things don't seem to go together.
We see really and virtually every time there's been democracy in a Middle Eastern Muslim country, America undermines it, whether it's in Lebanon or in Algeria.
I guess they didn't really have a choice in Iraq.
Yeah, exactly.
We have basically Islamic government in Iraq, don't we?
And in the Gaza Strip.
Sure, and the Gaza Strip by a free election.
We're talking about what's going on in Lebanon right now.
We're attacking the government because it has ties to Hezbollah, but Hezbollah is a political party.
And now a coalition partner in the new government.
Exactly.
So where do you draw the line in terms of what's acceptable?
If everything has to be acceptable to the United States, well, then there's not going to be any change anywhere.
We're going to be looking for stability.
We'll install dictators.
We'll install martial law regimes and that kind of thing just to keep stability.
But the fact is that in the long run, this is a losing proposition.
Yeah, well, a lot of that seems to have to do with age as part of the demographics, right?
All across the Middle East you have sometimes even super majorities of the population are under 30 years old.
And it doesn't seem like they would be the type most likely to put up with a Mubarak or a King Abdullah type dictatorship.
Yeah, these are, as you said before, the Twitter generations.
And these people basically are not wedded to the government in any of these places.
I think in Iran it's something like 50 percent of the population is under the age of 18 or something.
And these populations don't accept this stuff anymore.
The question is to what extent is the government able to be coercive enough and repressive enough to keep this kind of under control?
And we're seeing now that maybe there are limits to that.
Yeah, well, and it's so obvious in the difference in the rhetoric of the administration and who knows exactly what they're up to in Tunisia in terms of maintaining stability there.
I'm sure it's a lot behind the scenes.
But in public they have very different words to express about what's going on in Egypt.
And I'm not sure if you saw this, but Philip Weiss at the Monda Weiss blog pointed to a clip from the State Department briefing where – I forget the name of the State Department meeting.
Crowley.
I'm sorry?
It was Crowley.
Yeah, yeah, Crowley.
And he explained that.
Well, it's all about Israel.
That's the difference is we have to maintain Egypt's relationship with Israel.
And to do that we need Hosni Mubarak.
So democracy is great and everything, but Israel is better.
That's exactly what he said.
He said that Mubarak was our candidate because basically he has made peace or he's kept peace with Israel and he's a friend to Israel.
Well, you know, that obviously is Washington looking through the optic of Israel policy or of Israeli interests in terms of defining its own policy.
And, of course, that's ridiculous.
You know, I've pointed out to people I've talked to that, you know, what essentially is the strategic value of Egypt to the United States.
And think real hard about it.
I can come up with one thing, the Suez Canal, which is whatever government comes in in Egypt is going to have a vested interest in keeping that going because it generates a ton of money.
But, you know, what is the U.S. strategic need or interest in whatever kind of government Egypt has except if you consider the Israel factor?
So the question answers itself.
Yeah, well, so are they panicking in D.C. and in Tel Aviv tonight?
I don't know if they are.
There's this kind of ambivalence about what goes on in Arab countries.
I think we've seen this before where the Israel lobby, the neoconservatives, and to a certain extent some of their associates in the U.S. government basically like to see Arab regimes that are unstable.
So, you know, I don't know.
I would think they're a little bit concerned about it.
I think the claims that a change of government in Egypt would automatically be anti-American and anti-Israeli, I don't think that's true.
I think the Muslim Brotherhood has been in parliament in Egypt for quite some time.
It's largely composed of people that we would regard as professional and middle class.
They're religious, sure, but the fact is that these are not people who are bomb throwers.
So I think a lot of these concerns are much overstated.
So even if the Muslim Brotherhood ends up deciding who the next president of Egypt is, that doesn't necessarily mean an end to Jimmy Carter's peace deal?
Right.
I think the issue is here.
It depends on how the U.S. reacts to these situations.
I think that we are often our own worst enemy.
I think if you go back even as far as the 1950s, was Fidel Castro really that bad a guy before we kind of went after him?
You look at Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Would Hezbollah have possibly pursued a different course and everything if the United States had not been so hostile?
I think when we go after these regimes and we say that they're unacceptable, that's when they turn the corner and become unacceptable.
Well, and when we support them, we have some of the same and some different problems.
In this case, I'm thinking of the story of Ayman al-Zawahiri, at least as told in The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, where he was basically a low-level nobody.
He knew a guy who knew a guy who was in on the assassination of Anwar Sadat and was rounded up in a roundup of the Muslim Brotherhood by what immediately became the Mubarak government at the time and was tortured.
And it was only after Ayman al-Zawahiri was tortured that he decided to devote his life to terrorism and then became, I forget the original founder, very influential within Islamic Jihad, a movement that he eventually merged with Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda.
And he's now Ayman al-Zawahiri, the deadly enemy of the United States, only because he was tortured at the hands of an American puppet dictatorship in the first place.
In fact, the same could be said for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was tortured by the American puppet dictatorship in Jordan.
Yeah, I think that you see this pattern emerging over and over again.
I mean, we have either our surrogates or we do it directly, and we turn these people into enemies.
I think a lot of them are, you know, I hate to say it, I mean, the expression is kind of an old-fashioned one, but they're nationalists.
And they may have broader agendas, but, you know, we take these people and we turn them into monsters.
And then we wonder, how did that happen?
I mean, why did this occur?
It happens over and over again, and I hope like hell that it doesn't really happen in the case of Egypt.
You know, that we're going to be encouraging what we refer to as democratic forces, even if they're not.
And then we're going to turn on them at a certain point, because we have other fish to fry.
And I think that's the pattern we see again and again.
And I think the sounds we're hearing out of Hillary Clinton suggest that that's precisely what's going to happen.
Well, and I'm dreading what it's going to say at the Weekly Standard and Commentary Magazine and all the neoconservative think tanks in D.C. if the Muslim Brotherhood eventually does come to greater power in Egypt over this crisis, because that's just ready-made for their talking points.
Islamofascism, just like Laurent Miroek said back in 2002, right?
Egypt is the prize.
Yeah, well, what they're going to want to do is – I mean, yeah, this confirms their basic point, which is that the whole Islamic world is Islamofascism.
And that's how they're going to play it and how they're going to go after it.
And if there are people in the administration that are listening to this stuff and actually believing it, then we're in for another – I mean, how many of these cycles do we have to go through where we're taking on these regimes and everything like that for no reason whatsoever and winding up in a much deeper hole than we started out in?
Well, and it seems like just that attitude has already changed, right?
The peak of the empire was during George W. Bush.
It's all downhill from here.
And Iran is steadily gaining influence in the region, mostly due to America's invasion of Iraq.
But Turkey is coming into more and more prominence, even in just hosting negotiations between various sides of various disputes around the region.
The Iraqis certainly don't need us anymore.
Who does need us in the region other than the King of Kuwait and the Kings Abdullah there in Saudi Arabia and Jordan?
Yeah, but I wish somebody would explain all that to Obama.
I mean, I guess you saw the State of the Union address on Tuesday.
Well, unfortunately, I read it.
I can't stand to watch those things anymore.
Yeah, I was forced to watch it.
It was the only time I've ever seen one, because the American Conservative Magazine wanted a quick response.
And so I watched it, and I was astonished about how ridiculous the whole thing was.
But one of the things that really was ridiculous was Obama's assertion that we're standing tall again.
He didn't use the expression indispensable nation, but it was something like that.
And, you know, Evan, who's he kidding?
I think my comment in the American Conservative was, what was he drinking or how much did he drink before he made that comment?
I mean, it was just so ridiculous, and so much of the performance was so ridiculous.
Do these people have any connection with reality?
Well, I don't know.
I mean, I guess not.
I saw in the Washington Post Mark Thiessen, the notorious torture advocate, praising exactly that part of the State of the Union address.
See, Obama here identifies America's historic mission to liberate the world.
There it is, complete bipartisan consensus for world empire unending.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, I'm afraid this is ingrained in the system at the moment.
And I was quite refreshing for Rand Paul to say yesterday that he's in favor of cutting all foreign aid, including aid for Israel.
I think Wolf Blitzer had a cardiac arrest at that point.
Yeah, I was actually surprised and pleased to see him say that.
Part of $500 billion in cuts, that's at least one Tea Party politician who apparently is putting his money where his mouth is as far as spending goes.
And, of course, being willing to take on the military from inside the Republican Party is something.
So I'm going to try to keep my eye on him and see if I can forgive him for some of the terrible things he said during the campaign for the Senate.
You should have him on your show.
Yeah, maybe I should have him back.
Yep.
Yep.
But yeah, I mean, you're right, because they said immediately, Wolf Blitzer says, yeah, but what about Israel?
And he said, no, Israel, too.
That's it.
We just can't afford it anymore.
Let Israel buy and sell things and save their money and defend themselves.
Yep.
And that would be Egypt, too.
The whole thing is that we've been in a position now in the last ten years, and even before that, of course, where basically we're either bribing people or we're threatening people to get them to go along with our policies.
And this has got to stop, because apart from anything else, it doesn't work.
Well, you know, one of the things that's most important about Egypt over the past decade has been the extraordinary rendition.
And at Antiwar.com, Jason Ditz has a piece about some new WikiLeaks that were just put out today in regards to Egypt.
And some of them discuss the widespread torture inside that country.
And that seems to always just sort of lurk in the background of discussion about the dictatorship there, the widespread torture.
But it reminds me of what I always heard about what caused the Iranian revolution in 1979, that everybody had at least a brother or a cousin who'd been tortured by the SAVAK secret police there.
And so when it came time to overthrow the government, pretty much every household was for it across the country.
And that's the kind of thing that doesn't just apply, I guess, to Egypt, but to other countries in the Middle East, but especially to Egypt, right?
There's secret police there?
Yeah, Egypt has had a secret police and kind of counterintelligence, counterterrorism police, you know, operating for a long time.
And depending on how you define what the problem is, and they've been very intrusive in terms of how they act and so on and so forth.
And anyone who knows anything about Egypt knows that.
Even when I was, back when I was a CIA officer, Egypt was a place that people talked about a lot as being a, you know, when intelligence officers talk about denied areas, areas that have such a heavy police presence that they're difficult to work in, that they're kind of a hostile environment.
And Egypt was right up there on the list.
Well, and of course, in the Bush years, they were one of the first places, I guess, that the CIA resorted to exporting people for torture in what's euphemistically called extraordinary rendition program, right?
Yeah, there's been a long tradition of CIA dumping people in Egypt, even back into the 1980s, to my knowledge.
And that's because they, basically, that's kind of the kind of state they operate, where, you know, you have these restrictive police structures and everything like that, where you can exploit that.
Well, now, in the way they tell the story, anyway, they did renditions before, but if they exported somebody to Egypt to be tortured, it would have been an Egyptian that maybe they captured somewhere else, and they're basically just sending him home.
That's what they tell us.
When you say you know about people being sent to Egypt to be tortured, going back to the 80s, are you talking about people from, could be anywhere in the world?
Yeah, I'm definitely talking about people from anywhere in the world, that people that the agency would pick up that were, of course, they would be Arabs.
Because they basically would be picked up, sent there for interrogation, and if these people turned out to be acceptable in one way or another, they would be resettled in Egypt.
Yeah, that was a normal procedure.
So it's understandable, I guess, why you would have, with the precedent being set in Tunisia, people, not just in Egypt, but really across the Middle East, I guess, especially in Egypt, saying to themselves, hey, so actually we can do this, huh?
There was nothing specific.
Nobody set themselves on fire.
Well, actually, there was a copycat set himself on fire in Egypt, but that wasn't what sparked this.
What sparked this was just the example next door, and it seems like all across the Middle East, over every breakfast table, the conversation has got to be, well, hey, maybe we don't have to put up with this anymore.
And we've seen that there have been demonstrations in Jordan and in Yemen, but I haven't heard a word about what's going on in Saudi Arabia.
Have there been any protests there, or do you think this portends anything for the future of that state?
Well, there haven't been any protests that I know of in Saudi Arabia, but some Saudi Arabians have been making comments to the effect that we better be prepared for this and we better start talking with people that want a reasonable level of change in our own country because this is coming.
So the shockwave is spreading throughout the whole region.
I don't think there's any question about that.
All right.
Now, so I don't know if you saw Romando's piece, Justin Romando's piece today on antiwar.com, but it was somewhat along the lines of what you wrote in your last article as well regarding the suicide of the United States and the anti-government, anti-status quo wave of protests that right now we're focusing on the Middle East, but we've already seen in Greece.
And we will see here something that I guess has gone unremarked upon really so far in this conversation but has been mentioned in the media here and there is the skyrocketing price of commodities, meaning food staples, most importantly, and that's what's behind a lot of this unrest.
And it seems like as we go to the mat for the dictatorship in Egypt and the right-wing nationalists in Israel, that mat is basically the same thing we're looking at in Egypt here, the possibility of massive unrest, skyrocketing prices, and the typical governmental reactions to a loss of control, overreactions.
Yeah, yeah.
I think that what Justin I think was saying was that essentially we can see the same kinds of pressures working in Europe and the United States that we're seeing in the Middle East.
Now, of course, the playing field is a lot different.
In the Middle East, you have huge masses of people that are basically unemployed or underemployed.
In the United States and Europe, it's still a minority.
But we see the whole situation trending that way.
I must admit, I sometimes find while Justin's articles are always very well-balanced, some of the commentary that come afterward, there was somebody was saying, yeah, I welcome the collapse of the U.S. economy because when there's no Social Security and so on and so forth, there'll be riots in the streets, which will be something we've been waiting for.
But that kind of stuff is ridiculous.
I mean, there will literally be people starving in the streets in the United States and that kind of thing if we have that kind of collapse.
So we have to basically try to manage this situation in a way that the U.S. government finally wakes up to the fact that it's these foreign entanglements that basically are bankrupting us.
It's not Social Security necessarily, and it's not Medicare, and it's not other things.
But it's essentially that we're an empire that is living way beyond its means.
Yeah, you never want things, especially on that large of a scale, to get worse so that then they can get better.
In fact, Raimondo once told me about an old saying of the German socialists in the 1930s, which was, well, first Hitler, then us.
And, of course, they got their way, kind of, after the worst war absolutely imaginable by a human mind, probably worse than anything anyone could have ever imagined.
And then, you know, occupation of half the country by the USSR.
So not necessarily progress from their point of view.
That's right.
Yeah, you unleash Pandora.
You open Pandora's box and something comes out.
And that's exactly what's scary about all this kind of stuff.
Because, you know, I don't get any impression or any sense that people in Washington, and I'm talking about the Obamas as much as the Bushes, have any perception of just how bad it is on the ground level in the United States.
You know, they look at unemployment figures and stuff like that.
They don't realize that a lot of people are underemployed, that a lot of people have gone from a job where they're making $60,000 to where they're making $12,000.
You know, they're not quite grasping this and the fact that people are losing their health insurance.
You know, it's just this country is going into a terrible hole.
And we have politicians that, as I saw on Tuesday night on television, they're standing up and they're applauding each other.
And these people have, you know, have resources and have health insurance and money and everything that the average citizen will never have.
And, you know, it kind of makes you like a Bolshevik.
You want to take these people out and put them up against a wall and shoot them.
Yeah, well, they don't seem to have really any comprehension of the fire that they're playing with.
But it seems to me, just watching TV, it reminds me of when I was a kid and the Soviet Union started falling apart.
And really, this thing could get out of hand real quick.
There are a lot of countries with a lot of American-backed dictatorships that really don't have the power to face down their own people.
If their people decided that the precedent was set and they could really have their way, what's stopping another Soviet-style collapse, a velvet revolution across the world against American hegemony?
I don't think there's anything stopping it.
I think the one thing that George Bush achieved, if anything, was he made the whole world hate us.
And I think that the fact is that there are a lot of countries and a lot of people that are kind of looking over their shoulders and just waiting for the opportunity to get even.
Well, as was previously established, if the establishment in this country has their way, the empire will be the last thing they give up.
They'll take away everybody's Social Security and all the highway funds and every last food stamp before they give up the empire.
It's going to have to be the American people who insist on a different policy.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I think that's what people like you and me and Justin are around for, basically, to get this narrative out that essentially this whole thing is wrong.
And if we don't do the right things in the next, I would say, in the next couple of years, we are going to be in for serious trouble.
All right, everybody.
That's Phil Giraldi.
He's executive director of the Council for the National Interest Foundation, contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine and regular columnist for Antiwar.com.
That's original.antiwar.com/Giraldi.
Thanks very much for your time, Phil.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, everybody.
And this has been Antiwar Radio for today.
Thanks very much for tuning in.
We're here every Friday from 630 to 7 Pacific Time here on 90.7 FM in Los Angeles.
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