All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Our next guest is Justin Elliott from Salon.com.
He's got a few good ones here worth talking about, I think.
What other dictators does the US support?
Also, meet Mubarak's American fan club and Les Gelb, squarely in the pro-Mubarak camp.
That's a lot of fun things to talk about.
Welcome to the show.
Hey, thanks for having me.
All right, so first of all, thanks for doing the heavy lifting for me.
I didn't want to have to go and get my Atlas and throw darts at it.
You went through and got a partial list going for us here, at least.
What other dictators, besides Hosni, torture you to death, Mubarak, does the United States support?
Well, yeah, I mean, emphasis on the partial list.
I started trying to, I mean, my original idea was to do a comprehensive list, but I abandoned that pretty quickly and just sort of settled on five.
It's a big old world over there, right?
A lot of torture dictatorships we support.
Yeah, I mean, you could limit it just to the Middle East if you wanted to, but I mean, there are some obvious ones right there in the region.
Saudi Arabia, obviously very closely allied to the United States.
A lot of your listeners probably know about the $60 billion arms deal that is still, I think, being worked out between the United States and Saudi Arabia.
It was announced late last year.
I think it hasn't actually been finalized yet, but the Saudi government has an abysmal human rights record.
Obviously, it's not democratic.
That hasn't stopped us from maintaining an alliance with them.
Jordan, Yemen, I mean, you can go down the list in the Middle East alone.
Yeah, well, virtually the entire Arabian Peninsula is one big puppet dictatorship.
I'm trying to think, are there any countries, we pretend they're all little nation states there, I guess, are there any countries on the Arabian Peninsula that are not under sway of the United States, or a single one?
Well, Iran, I'd say, would be one.
I guess that's not in the Arabian Peninsula.
Yeah, that's across the Gulf from there.
Across the Gulf.
That's a good question.
I mean, maybe some of the UAE or something.
I mean, I don't think they need our money.
Well, the new king of Kuwait calls himself an emir, so I think that's different, right?
Right, I mean, I was just reading that Qatar is the richest country per capita in the world.
I think that's where Al Jazeera is based.
And I don't know that they, I don't think they have a military, I don't think they really need anything from us, and they're incredibly wealthy.
All right, well, now I'm going to ask you to talk about a country people don't even know there's such a thing as, Turkmenistan.
Tell us about America's relationship with Turkmenistan, somewhere there, I guess, between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, right?
Right, I mean, I think the key fact about it, in the present anyways, is the fact that it shares, it has a border with Afghanistan, it's north of Afghanistan.
And with Russia.
Central Asia, exactly.
I mean, the other key fact about it is that they have some pretty large natural gas reserves, so it's been important for those two reasons, or at least it's seen as important for those two reasons.
It's been under dictatorship since it broke away from the Soviet Union in, I think, 1991.
And there was a president for life who ruled it for 20 years, and there was sort of a cult of personality, and the current president is actually a guy with a hard-to-pronounce name, Berdymukhamadov, who was the old president for life's dentist, actually.
That's how he got into the regime.
But there are no opposition parties, much like Egypt.
There's consistent reports of torture of any political opponents, and they just have an absolutely terrible human rights record.
But it's part of the northern supply network into Afghanistan that's become important for the U.S.
So you've seen the president of Turkmenistan meet with high-up U.S. officials like Hillary Clinton.
There was a meeting between this guy and Hillary Clinton in 2009, and actually, at that time, the State Department spokesman was asked if the issue of human rights came up in the meeting between the two of them, and the spokesman said, yeah, he thought it'd come up, but it wasn't really one of the major issues because there was limited time or something like that.
So, I mean, I think people just have to get away from the idea, if anyone has it, that human rights or democracy are really emphasized in U.S. foreign policy.
Yeah, that's just for the rubes back home.
Over there, they rather just pick a fight.
It seems like, you know, I was talking with this guy, Lawrence Pintak, who is an expert on the Muslim world and wrote this thing at foreignpolicy.com called the Al Jazeera Revolution, and he was saying that the whole clash of civilizations is just a self-fulfilling policy, and that we're really making enemies in the old world that we don't need to have at all, and it seems like, you know, when you talk about those stands, which are just always out of the news, Pakistan and Afghanistan you hear about, but nothing else that ends with stand that you ever hear discussed on TV in the United States, but it seems like we could be chasing our terror war right into those countries as we build bases there and support their dictators to keep those jihadists down.
It seems like we're in more danger of creating a situation where our military is going to say, you're right, we do have to leave Afghanistan so we can go to Turkmenistan instead.
Right, I mean, I think that's the thing about it.
I think you never know where there's going to be some kind of backlash, either in the short term or something brewing up in the long term.
I mean, one interesting thing that I'm sure, again, a lot of your listeners are familiar with is, I mean, you can trace 9-11 back to Egypt.
I mean, some of the ideology of al-Qaeda involves anger at the United States for supporting the dictatorial regime in Egypt for so long.
I mean, that's only one part of it, but I think that's a good example of sort of the consequences that these sorts of stands can have.
I mean, who knows where the next sort of popular movement's going to be.
If something like what's happening in Egypt broke out in Turkmenistan or Uzbekistan, which is a pretty similar situation next door, you know, I'm assuming a lot of those protesters would not be happy with the United States sort of supporting the dictators of those countries for so many years.
Well, and many of them could be getting pretty desperate pretty quickly here, talking this week.
Right, right, right.
I'm sure all of these folks that we're talking about are watching what's happening in Egypt really closely.
I mean, a good example of that actually is, you know, you probably heard the president of Yemen, who I think's been in office for 30 years or something like that, Salah is his name, you know, announced that he wasn't going to run again in 2013, so I've seen, and it was pretty clearly in response to the protest in Egypt, but I've seen speculation that, you know, that's sort of just a gambit by him, and maybe a year from now or six months from now when things cool down or when 2013 comes around, he'll change his mind.
There was some, I mean, Yemen actually is another good example.
There were some interesting documents about Yemen in the WikiLeaks cables that were released, and you had David Petraeus meeting with the president of Yemen talking about what military hardware they were going to give him because of, you know, the U.S. campaign against alleged terrorists there, and I think that's another example of where we are making alliance with these dictator types is for countries where we have counterterrorism interests, or at least that's the concept.
Hey, that's the most important point of the century so far, right?
I mean, in the case of Yemen, I can't help but point out, and maybe there's a correlation where I can't prove exact causation, but it was on Christmas 2009 was this attempted attack by a guy who was put on a plane in Yemen to start his journey, tried to blow up a plane over Detroit, failed spectacularly, but still, and that was after weeks of bombing by American drones in Yemen that they lied about and said it was, you know, like, it's okay if we just give drones to the Yemeni government to bomb their own people with, but, you know, there was direct blowback right then and there.
Same for Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber, and as you say, same for Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was tortured by the Egyptian government before he was ever a terrorist that attacked us, and, you know, same for Zarqawi, too.
The government turned him from a two-bit rapist into an insurgent, and, you know, I don't know why this argument hasn't been won yet, but anyway, we'll be right back after this.
All right, everybody, welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I got this stream going from Al Jazeera English still, and it looks to me like the revolution is on.
I don't know if the secret police on Camelback with their swords headed back this way or what, but it looks to me like this thing is far from over.
We're talking dictators with Justin Elliott from Salon.com, and I was wondering, in the case of this specific dictator that America supports, Justin, Hosni Mubarak, could you please introduce my audience to the Hosni Mubarak fan club?
Sure.
Yeah, I've been collecting examples of pundits in America and a few politicians who have not only been critical of the, you know, the pro-democracy protesters in some cases, but also even have gone so far as to basically come out on the side of Mubarak.
One you mentioned earlier, Les Gelb, former New York Times columnist, and he's currently the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.
He's been pretty consistent in writing about this and being quoted about it in the last week or so.
He said that, you know, the administration should stand by Mubarak because, he said, this is a quote, most certainly most Arab governments friendly to Washington need to make reforms, but to do so at a moment of weakness, to be seen as bending to mobs, however peaceful and moderate they look now, could open up the floodgates.
And then today he was quoted in the Times' lead story on Egypt saying, the worry on Mubarak's part is that if he says yes to this, which is referring to stepping down, there will be more demands.
He's not dealing with a legal entity, but a mob.
How did he know there won't be more demands tomorrow?
So, I mean, the thing that struck me about that quote today was it's just basically echoing and parroting what Mubarak himself said yesterday in an interview with ABC, in which he said, yeah, sure, I want to step down, but I can't, because there will be more chaos.
And Les Gelber in the Times today is saying the exact same thing.
And I thought most people were sort of laughing about that Mubarak line yesterday, because it's ridiculous on its face in a number of ways, but he seems to be buying it.
Right.
Baghdad Bob is a joke, but we're all supposed to take Shepard Smith seriously.
Right.
That double standard.
Another good one, I think.
Wait a minute, I wanted to chime in on one thing here, and I don't know if you want to agree with this or not or let it go or what, but it seems to me relevant that Les Gelb, you know, his first appearance in history that I know about is he worked with Dan Ellsberg on the Pentagon Papers.
And he's been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and I think was its president for a very long time.
And I wouldn't necessarily say, you know, necessarily, you know, try to conclude who he's speaking for in saying that.
But just to say he's a very mainstream establishment foreign policy guy.
He is not a Frank Gaffney lunatic from, you know, the dregs of couldn't get into the American Enterprise Institute.
No, I mean, I completely agree.
He's the mainstream of the mainstream.
I mean, I think I don't know about the.
I mean, it's certainly true that he's been in CFR for a long time, but I think it mainly can just be explained by his ideology.
I mean, a friend of mine, when looking at these quotes today, sort of joked to me that basically the view that Les Gelb is putting forward here is that it is one of imperial imperial anxiety, which is he's worried that Egypt is going to be able to have its own independent foreign policy.
And that's bad for the United States.
And I think that I think that does capture sort of his perspective on this.
I don't know if you guys got a screen capture of this over at salon dot com today, but The Washington Post headline last night was how to the people in the Mideast.
What's going on in Egypt proves America's irrelevance.
And now they've changed that to a much softer language about how.
Oh, yeah, here we go.
Now it's a mid-air protest.
U.S. influence has waned.
But they're.
Don't panic, please, because the panic could be that, you know, across the Middle East, they might just decide to all pull Tunisia.
Why not?
What are we going to do?
It's a carpet bomb in a submission, which we can't really do.
I hope.
Right.
I mean, I hadn't seen that piece in The Post, but that is a segue into one of the others.
And this is, I think, my favorite, which is Richard Cohen, the The Washington Post columnist.
I think he's been a columnist at The Washington Post for about for about as long as Mubarak has been president of Egypt.
He wrote a column a few days ago in the sort of lead paragraph.
He said, again, quote, The dream of a democratic Egypt is sure to produce a nightmare.
He said, sure to, as if this is whatever is going on is just certain to end in disaster.
And he ends the column saying that America needs to be on the right side of human rights, but it also needs to be on the right side of history.
And this time the two may not be the same.
So, I mean, that's just like it seems to me he's making an argument that's explicitly anti-democratic.
And, I mean, this is this is that column ran, I think, only three or four days into the protest.
And he was already declaring that it was that it was certain to end in disaster.
I think there's a few categories of where these people are coming from.
I think there are the less guilty types who are worried about, you know, American influence in the Middle East.
There are people who are primarily concerned with Israel and worried about what this is going to do to Israel.
Mike Huckabee was actually in Israel.
I think it was his 15th trip there when this started.
And he was speaking, I think, before a committee at the Knesset and said that the protests, quote, threaten the world.
He's back in the States now and been going around on Fox sort of criticizing Obama for not being friendly enough to Mubarak and his response to it.
And then another big category of people sort of coming out on Mubarak's side are people who are talking about the threat of the Muslim Brotherhood.
I think that's been a major threat.
And that's where sort of the Frank Gaffney's of the world come into it.
There's a congressman from Michigan, Thaddeus McCotter, who put out an extremely strong statement a few days ago saying that, again, quote, freedom's radicalized enemies are subverting Egypt and our other allies, and America must stand with her ally, Egypt.
As though it's being invaded by Sudan or something.
We've got to protect it from itself.
Exactly.
I mean, the statement was really pretty incoherent.
But he's talking about, he's making this comparison to or the analogy to Iran in 1979 and saying that, I mean, this is basically the Glenn Beck argument that what's going on is going to be somehow the beginning of some sort of Islamic dominance of the world.
And that's basically what Thaddeus McCotter is signing on to.
I mean, so there's a handful of these people, but they're still mostly on the margins, I would say.
Yeah.
Well, let's hope they stay there.
I don't know.
It seems like when Les Gelb writes some nonsense like that, a lot of people want to sign on to it and say, oh, OK, here's a reasonable guy who's saying what I'm saying.
Yeah, and Michael O'Hanlon supports the Iraq war, that kind of thing.
Only Nixon can go to China.
Only a Democrat can tell you it's the right thing to invade Iraq or whatever.
All right.
Well, anyway, I'm sorry I talked to you all the way up against the wall.
But everybody, please go check out Justin Elliott.
He's got great work in the war room over there at Salon.com.
Thanks very much for your time.
Thanks a lot.
