For Pacifica Radio, April 18th, 2021.
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 new book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,500 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right.
And one quick programming note for you guys, before we get to today's interview.
Every year, the Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs and the Institute for Research, Middle Eastern Policy, put on what's generally known as the Anti-Israel Lobby Conference in Washington, DC.
Usually it happens the week before the annual AIPAC conference, but since AIPAC is canceled this year, instead they have scheduled it to coincide with the J Street Liberal Zionist Lobby Conference.
And it's called End U.S.
Support for Israeli Apartheid.
It's in two parts.
They did the first part yesterday, and I will be participating in session two on next Saturday, April the 24th.
And that is at IsraelApartheidCon.org.
And I think you have to use the W's there.
I'm not sure why.www.
IsraelApartheidCon.org.
And I will be discussing Israel's role in America's war on terrorism and the threat of war with Iran.
So again, that is the End U.S.
Support for Israeli Apartheid Conference, sponsored by the Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs and the Institute for Research, Middle Eastern Policy, that's next Saturday, April the 24th, streaming online at www.
IsraelApartheidCon.org.
All right, you guys on the line.
I've got Ray McGovern.
He used to be a CIA analyst.
In fact, he was the head of the Soviet Division back when, and he briefed Reagan and Bush Sr. in the Bush years.
And this whole century, he has been really the co-founder and leader of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which is a bunch of retired spooks and so forth, who like to write essays about why our presidents should not do the things that they're doing.
And you can find him regularly at ConsortiumNews.com and at AntiWar.com.
And of course, at RayMcGovern.com, his own website.
We can find all of his video interviews and all of those things as well, too.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you, sir?
I'm doing okay.
Great.
Happy to have you here.
And what a great one you have for AntiWar.com here.
Biden and Blinken blink on Ukraine.
Oh, I don't even know what you're talking about yet, but I just like that headline a lot.
I could feel the weight lift right off of my shoulders there.
So, um, the government in Kiev has been threatening to, I guess, restart the war in the East, and then at least according to the American media, based on government sources, the Russians are building up their forces on the other side of the line there in case, and this could all, oh, and Biden and Blinken have been passing out war guarantees and saying, yeah, no matter what, we will back you up.
Oh, unwavering.
You have the quote here, but then you say that, yeah, no, not really.
Biden's backing down.
Please say that.
Well, it's a very interesting set of events here.
It started on March 24th, uh, in, in, in real time, the, uh, president of Ukraine, Zelensky announced that the Ukraine was going to take back Crimea, and it was going to go and clean out the Eastern provinces there of, uh, Donetsk and Luhansk.
And, uh, you know, the Russians better understand that this is going to happen.
Well, uh, it didn't take a political scientist to realize that was a declaration of war or tantamount to a declaration of war on Russia.
Russia's not going to stand for that.
And, uh, you know, it was quite a, quite an amazing sort of thing because the Ukrainians started talking about using armed force to do this.
Now, all this time, uh, they've been egged on by the quote, unwavering end quote, support of the likes of president Biden, uh, secretary of state, Blinken, uh, secretary general of the, uh, you, uh, the, of NATO.
Um, uh, what's his name?
It, uh, whatever it is.
And, uh, you know, they're all saying unwavering.
And then all of a sudden, uh, the Russians deploy, now get this, two armies and three airborne combined divisions to the Western border.
That's a lot of people.
Uh, people are estimating that it may be 80,000, a hundred thousand troops.
And all of a sudden Biden got religion.
Now, Biden famously called Putin on Tuesday, uh, to, to warn him about the dangers here, uh, to say that, uh, we've got lots of grievances, but let's get together and talk about all these things that are irritating US-Russian relations.
Well, you know, it wasn't Biden that called Putin.
He was returning Putin's voicemail, so to speak.
Hey, Mr.
President, things are getting really, really interesting here.
Really, really dangerous.
Call me as soon as you can.
In other words, Putin was saying, look, uh, enough already, enough already.
Uh, we don't want a war, but there's going to be one and we're prepared to do it.
And if, uh, Zelensky and the likes of those neo-fascists, neo-Nazis, which is what the Russians are calling the Ukrainian government, if they decide to try to give us a bloody nose, well, that's going to be the end of Ukraine.
Biden got the message.
Okay.
Not only that, but he called off the deployment of two major naval vessels, uh, headed through the Dardanelles, well, they hadn't entered the Dardanelles yet, but they were headed to the Black Sea, uh, to be there until maybe the second week of May.
Now, the interesting thing is that in very undiplomatic, um, uh, language, the deputy, uh, foreign secretary, uh, Ryabkov, um, on the Russian side had warned specifically just in about the same day, actually, that Biden talked to Putin, he said, look, um, if you deploy those things in the, in the Black Sea, uh, this is going to be openly provocative.
His words, American ships have absolutely nothing to do near our shores.
They are testing our strength and playing on our nerves.
If you do this, the U S has to realize that various incidents are very, very highly likely.
We warn the U S that it should stay away from Crimea and our Black Sea coast for their own benefit, end quote.
What did Biden do?
He called it off.
Now, I think the Pentagon was just happy, happy as can be, uh, to call that off.
It's the neocon type people like Blinken who are egging this thing on, who are adducing all kinds of spurious evidence, uh, to, to, uh, to vilify Russia, including the totally discredited charge that the Russians were paying bounties to kill U S soldiers in Afghanistan.
And actually the U S government came out with a disclaimer on that just yesterday.
So what we have here is a, uh, a bunch of, uh, uh, people in the Pentagon who know what the stakes are.
Uh, they overruled Blinken to the extent that they got the president to cease and desist this unwavering support and to tell Zelensky, look, don't be, don't be, don't misinterpret our unwavering support for real support.
It's rhetorical support.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The Russians, what he meant was you and him go fight.
That's all.
Yeah.
So, so let's ski on the ninth.
Changed his tune.
And he said, you know, we think there should be another ceasefire, uh, in Ukraine, uh, you know, we, we're really bothered and our commander in chief has warned me that there would be a lot of civilian casualties as well as military casualties.
So, uh, so we don't want to do this.
Whoa.
So he blinked, Blinken blinked, the president blinked.
And the status now is that, uh, it looks, well, those ships are not going through the Dardanelles.
They're in Cyprus, I'm told for repairs.
Okay.
And, uh, the system is a situation with respect to Ukraine has, in my view, uh, settled down for the nonce.
Now, the day after all, well, yesterday, uh, the U S announced extreme sanctions against Russia for all these terrible things they've done.
Now, among those things were hacking.
Now your audience probably knows if they've been listening that the house intelligence committee released testimony, testimony taken on December 5th, 2017.
They didn't release it until May 7th, 2020.
But what did it say?
It said that CrowdStrike, and this was the CEO testifying, admitted that there was no evidence that anyone hacked those DNC emails that were provided to, uh, to WikiLeaks, no one hacked that, not the Russians, nobody else, because they looked into it and there was no evidence of exfiltration.
Whoa.
Okay.
So if there was no evidence of exfiltration, and that was the reason why Russian diplomats were expelled and why Russiagate completely started, well, how are we to look at these latest allegations about solar wind, where the Russians are, are accused of all manner of things, all of which fit into the category of traditional espionage, in my view, unless I'm proved, proven wrong.
So, uh, here we have the, uh, uh, the Blinken faction, uh, trying to appear really, really strong.
After all, we're withdrawing from Afghanistan in total disarray.
Uh, that is if, well, it will be by, by September 11th with a complete loss.
Uh, we're also, you know, kind of not doing a real good job in other areas in terms of, uh, uh, showing strength.
So last thing I'll say here is that we are acting like the proverbial, according to Richard Nixon, uh, the proverbial, pitiable, helpless giant, while Russia has, uh, has improved its, its, its relations with China to the point of a military alliance.
And as you may recall, my saying this for almost a year now, if there's a dustup in the Ukraine or in the Baltic or in the black sea, you can, you can look to the South China sea and the Taiwan Straits for some Chinese support, uh, for the notion of a two front war from which any sensible military analyst would, would shrink and say, my God, what are these, what are these political scientists posing as diplomats getting us into, you know, last thing I'll say here, Scott, is that, that, uh, Robert Tuchman, uh, the historian had this wonderful book, uh, the March of Folly from Troy to Vietnam.
And, and in the end, she said this, just three sentences, a last folly was the absence of reflective thought about the nature of what we were doing, about the effectiveness of, of relation in, in relation to the object sought.
Absence of intelligent thinking in rulership is another universal.
And it raises the question as to whether modern states and here's the kicker, whether there's something about political and bureaucratic life that subdues the functioning of intellect in favor of quote, working the levers and quote, without regard to rational expectations, this would seem to be an ongoing prospect.
End quote, that's 40 years ago.
It's happening still.
Yep.
And in the case of Russia, and then my next interview, I hope that you've read this article.
If not, you got to see it at Newsweek by William Arkin about why America can't end it's forever wars.
And, and he just goes on and on and excruciating detailed explanation of the bureaucracy of the war on terrorism, all the different parts of the CIA and the special operations command and all the different services and all the drone warriors and all the ships captains and all the everything and how it works so well now, finally in their terms, they can't turn it off.
It was just like, um, Andrew Coburn wrote this article back a few years ago about how the British bureaucracy in charge of enforcing the blockade on Germany in world war one got perfected right when the war ended and they were like, well, so we could either dissolve our new department or we could continue the blockade and so they continued the blockade and decided to starve the Germans into Nazism, you know, because essentially they had this new bureaucracy.
And then I guess that's the same sort of thing you're talking about where, and I know you see this all the time.
If we do get out of Afghanistan, it's because the argument is we have bigger fish to fry with Russia and China.
And it's madness.
It's really madness to be taking on Russia and China at the same time.
Uh, the only hopeful note is that our military recognizes this.
And although the hotheads in command of the, uh, of the, the ships out there in the Pacific and also in the seventh and the sixth fleet in the Mediterranean, uh, speak a real loud noise, uh, you know, uh, the good, the hope is that, uh, that Biden was admonished enough by Putin.
Uh, and you know, it's very clear to me what happened.
Putin said, look, you know, the Ukraine's going to fall apart if they try something stupid.
Biden backed off.
Uh, he's also instituted sanctions that aren't worth the, the, the sanction.
People are saying, well, what about those terrible sanctions about the Russians?
Well, the only one that really matters, you know, the financial institutions said, well, the, the Financial Times says today in a, in a, in a article titled Western investors brush off us bond sanctions on Russia, it says now that the bond, it'll just be sold to Russian state banks and then they resell them to the same, very same Western banks on a secondary market, no big deal, no big deal, I don't understand all that Scott, but the Financial Times is usually pretty good on these things.
So the sanctions and, and also Blinken adducing, uh, the so-called bounties for killing US soldiers in Afghanistan, uh, the bounties that have been totally discredited and officially discredited just the day after he used them to, to justify these things, you know, it's really come to, uh, to a difficult pass and the real brush, the real, the real problem here is that as you probably know, 77% of the American people have been brainwashed into thinking very unfavorably about Mr.
Putin and the Russians.
Uh, the figure is 79% or 80%, depending on which poll you believe for China.
Now, if I'm Putin and I'm sitting in Moscow and I'm saying, my God, what's going on here?
Is this preparation for war?
Are these people thinking that they can challenge us militarily and that we can't, we with our Mach 8, uh, missiles, I can't counter whatever they put up against us and China as our ally in the East, what's going through these people's minds?
And so what I see, uh, in the future is that Putin will keep calling Biden and say, look, here's the reality, Joe, uh, you, you're not being told the truth by these guys, especially with respect to, you know, things like bounties and hacking, and you ought to be very aware that your presidency is going to fall apart if we have to do something that you will consider untoward toward those Ukrainian neo-Nazis.
Now that's what the Russian leaders call these guys.
Now, if you know anything about Russian history, you know what Nazi means to those people who lost 26 million people in World War II.
So it's an emotional thing as well as a historical thing.
And Blinken and his coterie of political scientists know nothing about history.
And that's a large part of the problem.
Yeah.
Well, and it's absolutely true that, you know, Andre Peruby from, uh, the Svoboda party over there that used to be called the social nationalists.
He was the speaker of the parliament for like five years.
And there's no question that there, the Ukrainian armed forces are infested with members of the right sector and Azov battalion, and the evidence of this has gone on and on.
In fact, even the intercept for whatever reason, years ago, ran a story about Mujahideen from the war in Syria, going to fight on the side of the Nazis, as long as they're killing Russians.
And these were guys who, cause Chechens had gone to fight in Syria and then they brought some foreign fighters back with them to go join up the Ukrainian Nazis to fight against Russian backed forces in the Donbass.
You know, Scott, I was in Crimea five years ago on the anniversary in June of the Nazi, of the German attack on Russia.
It was very moving.
There was a major meeting in Yalta.
I was invited to speak.
There were people there old enough to remember, mostly children of people who perished during the Nazi invasion, but also some people a little bit older than me still around, there wasn't a dry eye.
I recited a poem from the Russian poet Nikolai Nikrasov, the poet of Russian grief.
It has to do with war and who suffers from war, and especially mothers who suffer from war.
You know, this was a poignant manifestation of how real, just five years ago, the Nazi attack on Russia was and how deeply ensconced in people's hearts and minds it was.
Putin doesn't have to make this up.
He doesn't have to stoke up passion about this.
The other thing is that Crimea for centuries was drenched with Russian blood, especially under the Nazis, of course, but since Catherine the Great, who was around the time of our revolution, was she that set up Sevastopol down in Crimea as the only warm water naval base that Russia was able to put together.
There it is.
It stands there.
There are air bases also in Crimea.
Crimea is going to be Russian territory for the rest of my life, for sure.
And for Zelensky, aided and abetted by Biden and Blinken, at least up until last Tuesday when Biden and Putin talked, for them to pretend that Zelensky is going to take back Crimea, that's madness.
That can only be perpetrated, only be fostered, that notion by people like Victoria Nuland, who will be number three in the State Department if she is confirmed.
And I don't know what the holdup is there, but maybe people realized that she was responsible, largely responsible for the coup in Kiev on the 22nd of February, 2014, which set all this stuff in train and allowed the U.S. or perpetrated, let the U.S. impose sanctions, sanctions, sanctions, more of which we saw just yesterday.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, listen, the last couple of minutes here, Ray, can you address the threat of Ukraine and or Georgia being brought into NATO now?
Is that really a possibility?
I guess the last time the French and the Germans said, no, we're not doing this.
And that was enough.
But what about next time?
Well, the good news is that the head of the CIA right now, followed by the name of Bill Burns, was our ambassador in Moscow on the 1st of February, 2008, when all this was being brooded about, Ukraine, Georgia going to be part of NATO.
He was called into the foreign ministry.
Lavrov, who was a newly appointed foreign foreign minister, said, Mr.
Burns, do you know what nyet means?
Yeah.
This is in the WikiLeaks, everybody.
Nyet means nyet.
William Burns.
It's at WikiLeaks.org.
And thank you, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange again for all that.
Sorry.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
Thanks.
Thanks for mentioning that.
That's how we know this.
You know, if I've seen one Moscow cable from Embassy Moscow, I've seen about 10,000.
All right.
This was genuine.
And and to his credit, Bill Burns reported back to Secretary Condoleezza Rice.
Look, the Russians have strategic interests, too.
They're very defensive about all this.
And here is what Lavrov called, quote, a red line, end quote, for us.
So what's going to happen?
Well, what happened in 2008, in August, just a few months later, was Shakashvili, head of Georgia, decided, well, OK, NATO is going to support me.
So I'll give Russia a bloody nose by going into that area just on top of where just north of Georgia and give the part.
Well, he attacked to kill some Russians.
The Russians came through those tunnels and over those mountains and went up to the gates of Tbilisi and said, look, this is not going to happen.
So Shakashvili has been an advisor to Zelensky and the other Ukrainians.
Finally, he may have said, look, you know, don't be deceived by this by this bragging, by this, quote, unwavering, end quote, support from all these politicos in the West.
When push comes to shove, you're going to get a real bloody nose.
Your country is going to be decimated, if not destroyed, by the Russian forces already in place and able and willing to do this because it's it's a big deal for them.
Yeah.
And by the way, I want to issue a correction here because I know I've gotten this quote wrong a couple of times as I conflated two different things.
The Nyet means Nyet, WikiLeaks thing.
And then there was another threat that, you know, we could be in Kiev in two weeks.
But that wasn't Lavrov.
He's much more diplomatic.
That was Putin.
And I forget now if it was a hot mic or if it was just recorded or, you know, reported by the diplomat that he said it to, you know, talk to the newspaper about it.
It was kind of an aside in an interview about a year ago, as I recall.
But, you know, you're right.
He's right.
And he probably told Biden the same thing.
Thankfully, Biden is still compass mentis enough to realize what that meant.
And he called off the dogs of war.
I think the U.S. Navy was just delighted to get those ships restrained, not going into the Black Sea, but rather going for repairs in Cyprus.
Yeah.
Well, I hope you're right about that.
The last thing we need is the Navy, you know, out there, the actual guys with the guns leading the charge and trying to come up with a provocation or something like that.
So I sure hope that that's right.
And I'm sorry I got to end it here because I got to go to my next one.
But thank you so much, Ray, for doing the show again.
Appreciate it.
You're most welcome.
All right, you guys, that's the great Ray McGovern.
Find him at Antiwar.com.
I'll write you all that is antiwar radio for this morning.
Thanks very much for listening.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm editorial director of Antiwar.com and author of the new book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,500 of them now going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show.
And again, I'll be seeing you guys next Saturday, April the 24th, for the End U.S.
Support for Israeli Apartheid Conference.
That's at IsraelApartheidCon.org.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
See you next week.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'll write you all that is antiwar radio for this morning.
Thanks very much for listening.
I'll write you all that is antiwar radio for this morning.
