All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest on the show is Phil Giraldi.
He's a former CIA and DIA officer.
He writes for the American Conservative Magazine and for Antiwar.com, and he's the executive director of the Council on the National Interest Foundation.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
Hey, Scott.
Good to be back.
Did I get your title right there?
Well, kind of.
It was close.
I forget.
Anyway, yeah, the Council for the National Interest Foundation.
That's good stuff.
Actually, tell us a little bit about that real quick.
Well, the Council for the National Interest and the National Interest Foundation basically exist to change U.S. policy in the Middle East, and we essentially do that by pushing American interests as being the most important issue and also in terms of what it's costing us, and we'd like to see a more even-handed approach to Middle Eastern policy.
Right on.
Of course, that's the subject here today on the show.
I don't know if you've got your Al Jazeera English livestream going on like I do, but it's the most beautiful thing in the whole wide world.
Even MSNBC is showing it.
Yeah, unfortunately with Chris Matthews in the corner.
But we were already picking on him during the last interview, in fact.
Yeah, I wonder why.
No, this is a wonderful day.
I've never felt this euphoric in as long as I can remember, you know, the people have risen up and spoken.
This is amazing.
Yeah, I mean, just the sea of people.
It's just really incredible.
And after three weeks, you know, they really kept this up and they kept building it and building it and building it, and they got their way so far.
Yep, absolutely.
I don't think there's any downside to this.
I think it's going to be better for everybody, including Israel, as long as Israel lets it happen.
And it's I think this is just, you know, it's what we've been waiting for, I think.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's funny because the people of Egypt are far from the, you know, Team America, World Police version of, you know, the Middle East that people kind of believe in, you know, all these people here, they are they're just like us.
And in fact, they yell the very same things in the air really loud, like freedom is shaking their fists and stuff.
They're just like scenes out of Hollywood movies, out of our own history that we like to believe in anyway.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, you know, the reality is, I know we've talked on your show many times about, you know, you go around the world and everybody is basically like us.
I mean, the real mistake is to think that these people are fundamentally different and they're going to do nasty things just because it's somehow in their genetic code.
It's not.
And, you know, this is a great day for the human race.
You know, it's actually remarkable to me how little of this anti-Mubarak sentiment has been directed toward the United States.
I wonder if that's kind of been I should have asked Adam more about this.
So maybe I'll find out.
I have a guest from Egypt tonight, an Egyptian on the KPFK show.
I'll try to remember to ask him this.
But I wonder if they kind of, you know, sent, you know, word around that don't pick on the United States during this.
Let's just keep it local, because certainly they all know that it's the U.S. government that's foisted this torture regime on them all these years.
Well, you know, there was some carping about the fact that Obama did not come out more emphatically on the side of the demonstrators earlier.
And I did hear some of that.
And, you know, if you had been watching coverage in various places, you would have seen some of that complaining.
But you're right.
It was kind of low-keyed.
This was not an anti-Yankee issue.
And if Obama had listened to, I presume, some of his other advisors, he might have gone the other way and been a lot more hardline in supporting Mubarak, which would have been a bad step.
And, you know, and Ron Paul was calling yesterday.
He says, hey, you know, essentially this is not our game.
The Egyptians are doing this.
And let them do it.
And don't take sides.
Don't be playing, you know, like, oh, yeah, we support democracy as long as you exclude the Muslim Brotherhood, or as long as you do this and you do that.
And like, I was watching this idiot Congressman Mike Pence yesterday on television.
And he was, first thing he was saying, he said, oh, yeah, well, this is a great day for democracy.
But he said, let's make sure they adhere to all their treaty requirements.
And, you know, he said treaty requirements.
He winded out about three times.
And then he said Israel, you know, so it's like, let's not get into this again.
I mean, it's this is this is destroyed our foreign policy.
This has destroyed our standing in the world.
And let's not do it again.
Let's let's just enjoy the moment.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, it's a shame enough that our government is the one that has been backing the government.
These people are overthrowing.
But if our government continues to move to thwart the will of these people, the ones I'm looking at, who went out into the streets peacefully by the millions for three weeks in a row and didn't give up until they got rid of their president, then boy, that's going to be I don't know what I should have something smart to say at the end of that.
But that's going to piss me off, I guess.
You know, yeah, well, I mean, you got to just let things be, you know, exactly.
And we don't have to go out and and and make two new enemies even before the dust settles.
And that's, you know, that's a tendency on the part of US administrations to to think that, you know, we have some kind of God given authority to to tell other people what to do.
And, you know, we've been seeing a lot of that for the last 10 years.
And it's time to put an end to that.
Yeah, for sure.
Well, now, so what do you think happened between the time Mubarak gave a speech telling everybody to go to hell last night?
And which my time anyway, and this morning when the Vice President came on and said, Okay, okay, he's leaving town.
I know what happened.
Do you want me to tell you?
Yeah, I do.
Okay.
What happened was the army went out.
And basically the generals who had who had pledged themselves to support Mubarak, ask their company and feel great officers now that your officers from Lieutenant, up to Lieutenant Colonel, I guess you would include Lieutenant Colonel.
So these are the people that are on the ground in the streets, okay.
And they said, What will happen if we order you to shoot at the crowds?
And they came back unanimously, and said that the army would not shoot.
That's what happened.
That's what happened.
And how you know, can you tell me?
Well, I have friends I talked to in Egypt.
And apparently, they, some people became aware of the fact, you know, the the officers were the lower level officers were mingling quite heavily with the crowd.
So they were talking to people.
And, and this is what apparently some of them were saying that they had been, they had been queried from the top level, would the army shoot if it had to, and they went back unanimously saying it would not.
Well, you know, I have this piece, thanks to a friend from Facebook here.
It's a CNN blog that says, at 5.30pm in Cairo, 1032, or 532, 1032, Eastern Time, tanks guarding the presidential palace in Cairo, turn their turrets away from the approaching demonstrators, listening a huge cheer from the crowd.
So I don't know whether they pointed them at the palace, but apparently they pointed them away from the people as they marched on the palace itself.
Yep, that's what happened.
I mean, the army basically said it wouldn't kill their own people, which was great.
And so Mubarak then said, okay, the game is up and game is over, right?
Because that's what he was going to do is he was going to say drop napalm on them all.
Well, I don't think he was necessarily intending to do that.
But that had to be his his card to play.
If if, if the crowds refused to disperse, he would have had to, you know, fire shots over their heads first, and then maybe tear gas and then, you know, go from there and see what happened.
But there had to be a willingness on the part of the average soldier and the junior officers to open fire on on the Egyptian people.
And it just wasn't there.
It wasn't there.
Wow, that is absolutely, it's just the most remarkable thing.
I keep, I have, you know, all these great questions, but I have to keep stopping and talking about how great it is, because ultimately comes down to a full scale war between the state and the people, the state can usually win, they got the guns, that's what makes them the state.
And in this case, just the power of the citizens, the people of Egypt coming out in the street, and, and, you know, identifying with the army, the army identifying with them was enough to face down a dictator like this.
I mean, this is just great.
This is like the fall of the Berlin Wall to me.
And I was a kid, but I was watching that closely.
I still remember it well.
Yeah, and it kind of made me wonder what would happen here, if there were an analogous situation?
Well, I think we probably make David Petraeus Supreme Dictator for life.
He's the only he's the only person in government that people trust.
All right, we hold it right there.
We'll be back.
It's Phil Giraldi from the American Conservative magazine and anti war.com.
It's anti war radio.
We're celebrating the end of a dictatorship.
At least the partial and end.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And if you're not near a computer, you need to get to one and then pull up english.aljazeera.net/watch underscore now, or you know, just Google search Al Jazeera.
There it is, Al Jazeera English, the live stream.
It sure is pretty.
A million something people, maybe more out in the streets of Cairo today overthrown their government.
It's awesome.
But now tell me this, Phil, you say got sources inside Egypt to know enough to tell you that.
Oh, did I say we're talking with Phil Giraldi from the American Conservative and anti war.com former CIA and DIA officer.
You say, you know, people there who know enough to say that they actually asked, hey, will the will the soldiers fire on the troops that the soldiers were asked down at the lower level officers and they responded?
No, we won't.
And that's what led to the end of the Mubarak regime.
Well, then tell me what else you know about how much of a regime change this actually is.
If Mubarak is gone, and is Suleyman going to be able to take power?
Are the people going to put up with that for one more day?
Or was the deal here?
You think?
Well, I don't have any real special insights into that.
I mean, that's kind of probably Suleyman is sitting right now and trying to think this one through.
I you know, obviously, look, you have a lot of it's like any other Egypt's not so different from any other place, you have a lot of vested interests, who are going to be trying to protect themselves in terms of what goes on here.
I think it's a given that the really corrupt members of Mubarak's family, and corrupt businessmen that he promoted, and that he gave the big contracts and everything to are going to be gone, they're probably gone already.
And they probably got as much money out as they could.
Now you're going to have a lot of government officials who benefited from the system senior level officials, and they're going to try to figure out some way to hang on to to what they've got and and also senior army officers and military officers in general.
So you're going to have you're going to have all these groups that have a lot of power and have a lot of influence jockeying for for making sure that they don't go down with this.
So I think you're going to see a lot of that the next few days.
But I think Suleyman, if he manages to hang on as a caretaker, is going to have to negotiate with a very broad group of Egyptians.
And it's going to represent a lot of people and it's going to be confusing and nobody's going to have a real good idea what to do.
You know, but these things have a way of sorting out.
And if as long again, as long as we leave it alone, because we have a we have a history of kind of screwing these things up.
As long as we leave it alone and let them find their own, you know, comfort level.
I think this is going to be a good outcome.
Yeah, I think I agree with you.
It doesn't feel like there's much chance that things could get worse from here.
You know, this is, you know, the people really have the say now when when they do negotiate with Suleyman, he's going to have to bow down to a lot of their demands, huh?
Yeah, I think so.
And I think, look, nobody, nobody's going to solve the problem overnight that Egypt is a poor country.
But I think a lot of the perceived problem for Egypt or for Egyptians was the fact that the corruption was just so rampant.
And I think that that was that was what they were seeing.
And that's what they were hearing.
They they saw this oligarchy running the country now for 30 years.
And these people were were rich beyond belief.
What the estimates I've seen of Mubarak's personal fortune, what he's managed to steal, we're talking about between 10 and 30 billion dollars.
So, you know, I don't know if you see numbers that differ from that, but that's what I've been seeing.
And, you know, this is this is incredible.
The Shah of Iran was a similar case, you know, somebody who he obviously had a much richer country because it had oil revenue.
But you're seeing these these these oligarchies and and the people at the top stripping the country of all its all its wealth.
And that's what the people say.
And and, you know, they're not going to get richer overnight, but at least maybe the system will be fair.
Yeah, well, you know, it is amazing to see, you know, a number like 70 billion dollars in the hands of somebody like Hosni Mubarak, who never produced anything for anyone.
And, you know, a fortune comparable to Bill Gates, which as much as I hate windows, let's face it, this is how I'm talking to you today.
You know, he's actually, you know, helped people produce things in the marketplace.
This guy Mubarak outstrips him even as richest man in the world.
Yeah, well, it could be, you know, the estimates are all over the place.
Nobody knows how much money he has.
And, you know, it's just this is it's time for people to say this kind of stuff has to end, that the United States should not be supporting these people.
And and and that's all there is to it.
And, you know, we don't have to necessarily line up behind the Social Democrats or the socialists or the or the or the conservatives or anything like that.
We shouldn't be doing that kind of thing.
But the fact is that we we basically have to have to expect in terms of these countries, particularly countries we're giving money to, that there's a certain level of fairness in terms of how they operate.
Hey, did you see that at the CPAC conference, which I forget what the acronym stands for, but the big conservative conference there in Washington, D.C., that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney both were heckled by the Ron Paul kids in the audience, one of whom shouted, Where's Osama?
And another who shouted war criminal.
And what do you make of that?
Well, they also marched out in mass.
I gather that was at least 100, maybe a couple hundred of them marched out of the auditorium where where Donald Rumsfeld was getting a defender of the Constitution award from that slimy character, David Keene, who had CPAC.
That's the Conservative Political Action Committee.
But it's it's what is it?
Conservative American Union is the organization.
And, you know, you know, and there were and there were, you know, Michelle Bachman was there.
And I don't know.
Did you see the rebuttal by Michelle Bachman at after the State of the Union address?
Oh, no, I'm afraid not.
Well, it was it was educational.
I mean, a lot of what she said was was quite sensible about cutting budgets and cutting government.
Okay.
But then at the end, it was like this five minute screech about how America has the finest health care system in the United in the world.
And we have to preserve it.
Obviously, congressional people get a much better health care, you know, system than the rest of us get.
That would be my surmise.
But what an idiotic comment coming from this woman.
American health care is one of the worst systems in the in the world, because it's the most expensive and provides the best the least service.
I mean, it's just where does she come from?
Yeah, well, from Washington, D.C., where they run the American health care industry, which is why it's so bad.
Yeah.
But what I was about to say was that CPAC is awash with these idiots.
I mean, it has Newt Gingrich, you know, why doesn't that guy just go away?
Well, I like him.
I think he's here in this society for comic relief for me, because his lust for power is still written all over his face, no matter how much it's already been concluded in this society that nobody likes him at all.
He still thinks he can run for president.
He's always like bribing his friends to say, yeah, I think Newt might run for president.
It's just I love it so much.
It really makes me laugh my ass off.
I got to tell you.
So you think there's a small, small clack of people that he's bribed that are the ones that are constantly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's all just his friends say that he's mulling it over and whatever, and they try to make a news story out of it and see if it gets traction.
It never does.
Everybody just rolls their eyes.
Are you kidding me?
This is the best that the right wing has.
That's what I think's fun.
Yeah, well, that's totally plausible.
All right.
Well, you know, hopefully this CPAC thing represents kind of the future of conservatism, a much more Rampalian view.
And I just wish he would go ahead and announce he's running for president right now and get the speaking tour and the controversy underway here.
Let's fight about war.
Let's fight about corporate welfare.
Let's fight about the Bill of Rights and bring this thing to a head.
You think about where he was when he announced he was running for president in 2007.
He had to announce it on Washington Journal.
Nobody knew who he was except the few of us who thought, hey, did you know there's that one good congressman or whatever?
Now he's world famous, you know, like a like a TV star or something.
And so he's going to be starting out from post the last Rampal Revolution benchmark.
And it's going to be huge.
I just can't wait to have this fight because Newt Gingrich is the best the war party has when it comes to arguing with him on the right.
And he can't win against Rampal, not on a single issue.
Yeah, it will be interesting to see.
They're going to have the straw poll tomorrow at CPAC and see.
And Paul, of course, won it handily last year.
And it'll be interesting to see how it plays out this year, because I know there aren't as many Rampal people at the conference this year as there were last year, because there were complaints that the polices had taken it over.
So they decided just for for cosmetic reasons to to keep their profile a little bit lower.
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see, you know, where it comes in this year.
Well, I think a lot of the social conservatives, maybe more of them, I don't know, are boycotting this year as well, though, because of the gay issue.
And there's some gay Republican group that's been included.
And so a lot of the Heritage Foundation types are saying include me out, which, you know, maybe tilts it back in our favor.
Yep, that's quite true.
Anyway, yeah, I just can't wait because the, you know, it's just like with Egypt, the precedent for the revolution is set.
You know, if the Egyptians can do it, we sure can.
Right, Phil?
Absolutely.
All right, y'all.
That's Phil Giraldi, antiwar.com/Giraldi, of course, amconmag.com and the Council for the National Interest Foundation.
Forget the acronym.org.
Thanks a lot, Phil.
Thanks, Scott.
