Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
This is Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton.
And I swear this morning, I hadn't drunk my coffee yet, I think this is the most ridiculous thing I've ever read.
I thought so when I read it anyway.
Gotta get the script to the three amigos.
That mic could top this.
Neoconomics, conscription, and war as well.
Grant, this is the most ridiculous thing you have ever written about.
Welcome to the show.
Hey, Scott, thank you.
You really should sign up for the Army so you can be a successful entrepreneur, Scott.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Yeah, I guess so.
Well, first of all, let me tell the good people that they can find your archive at AntiWar.com.
Your article's in the highlights section at the top of the page right now.
Neoconomics, war as well.
And they can look at your website at IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P dot org.
That's the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
And the latest book is Spy Trade.
How Israel's Lobby Undermines America's Economy.
Something a little bit more reasonable there.
But this, I almost can't believe this for the preposterousness.
Startup Nation, the Story of Israel's Economic Miracle is a 2009 Council on Foreign Relations book brimming with anecdotes, assumptions, and advice.
Really.
Well, why not tell us a little bit more about that?
Yeah, absolutely.
The book came out, as you said, from the Council on Foreign Relations, although maybe we can talk about it later.
Apparently different branches of CFR don't talk to one another because it's a little contradictory.
But basically it gives us the story about how the Israeli innovation model is really tied to the fact that it's an isolated country in the sea of enemies that has to improvise and be rather irreverent to authority in order to survive.
So basically the argument in the book is that the fact that there's a national conscription in Israel, everyone has to be in the intelligence, the army, the navy, whatever.
But this forms the cohesiveness that allows people to do a lot more innovation than virtually any other country.
And that makes the argument through case studies of various Israeli telecommunications companies, a new startup that is going to take the advantage of Israeli technology for dropping 500-pound bombs and put them in electric cars to allow people to swap in and out batteries.
Various things like that derived from the military experience is driving Israeli innovation.
And so the book makes a strong case that the fabric of the country from the vision of David Ben-Gurion when he sent emissaries to the U.S. to get what they needed to fight for a country is still alive, down to Shimon Peres who is now the father of innovation in the country and accessible to make entrepreneurs and startup industries the economic engine of the country.
National socialism.
Well, there's a little bit of a mix because the argument, for example, for going to electric cars and having this battery swapping technology sort of begins with the argument that you hear a lot in the U.S. which is foreign oil, foreign oil, foreign oil must become independent from any sort of fossil fuel based...
Yeah, speaking of bad economics.
Yeah, well, and so obviously a lot of central planning has to go into implementing an electric car system and they're apparently going to try it and then of course export it to the United States which is Israel's real market and always has been via a lot of preferential agreements that create demand but which go without mention in this particular book.
So the cohesiveness of the command structure of having universal conscription over there in Israel, that is, in this book, that is what all this advancement is attributed to?
Well, it's combined with the fact that because the officer corps is relatively small in proportion to the ground troops, Singer and Signor make the argument that the Israeli infantry is particularly creative and entrepreneurial whether it was fighting Sager anti-tank missiles on the Sinai or whether it's overcoming some other type of obstacle and in fact he even mentions cases where they can get together and actually oust officers which is somewhat unheard of in the United States if they're underperforming.
So he kind of attributes it to a sort of national character which is battlefield tested and makes entrepreneurship later in life possible.
In fact he makes the claim that it's better to be in the armed services in Israel than to go to college because you're going to get all of these dynamic opportunities.
Well, and in a sense there's got to be some truth to that, right?
Everybody gets school in one way or the other?
There might be some truth in some isolated cases but if you're going to take an anecdotal approach to everything you look at the list of top entrepreneurs in the U.S., Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Warren Buffet, a lot of them all have the common experience of not having been in the armed services and started at a very young age dispelling myths and breaking with paradigms in their own unique form of insolence and leaving college and going out and creating new industries.
So it might do something.
Hey, come on.
The American people spend a lot of money keeping the Israeli public school system functioning at a high degree of functionality there and I don't want to hear you undermining it.
Well, here's the problem with Startup Nation.
Startup Nation is about supply.
It's about Israeli exports and high tech and foreign direct investment into different companies and it says nothing whatsoever about demand.
But as you know and as more Americans know, the fact that the U.S. began signing memorandums of understanding in the 70s allowing Israel to service U.S. military equipment and provide services overseas and later allowed it to enter into the U.S. procurement system for the Pentagon, all in very sort of hush hush agreements with the Israelis and then to actually open up the entire consumer market via preferential bilateral trade relations, this has provided the destination for almost 40% of Israel's exports.
So via U.S. trade subsidies, which are about an additional $10 billion a year if you take Israel's exports to the U.S. and subtract our exports to them, are significant.
And yet all of these benefits and subsidies go completely unmentioned in Startup Nation and there's sort of a galling lack of gratitude for any of that.
The assumption is that those will continue and that moreover, the U.S. can't actually demand anything in return for that.
It can't demand bona fide peace negotiations.
It can't discuss that wonderful trade access within the framework of actually doing anything to stop settlement buildings.
You know, the U.S. is basically a patsy in this relationship and this book, which has a tremendous public relations campaign behind it and which is only building, sort of glosses over as well the long history of theft of intellectual property and other materials from the U.S. to build all of this industry.
So if I understand basically the deal here, there's this new book basically you're reviewing here, Startup Nation, The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle, a Council on Foreign Relations book, and it's by Dan Sonor and Saul Singer.
And basically the case that they make is after the American taxpayers pay for the entire public school system in Israel, pay for their entire military expenses and all of their higher education and all of their socialism and their society, then they get to use all that advanced education to basically sell weapons to America under special deals that Congress has cut that aren't really about free market trade between people in either nation.
Government-to-government transfers and private-to-government transfers.
As long as we keep fighting all of Israel's wars, then we'll be a great market for Israel to sell their weapons and this is what Dan Sonor and Saul Singer are celebrating here.
Is that basically right?
Well, you know, it's a good, yeah, you're raising all the right questions.
I mean, obviously what they're doing with this book, and I reference it as, you know, kind of a neocon manifesto, every bit as dangerous as a clean break or rebuilding America's defenses.
It's a very slick way of saying that, number one, Israel doesn't receive any help.
Its own accomplishments have been purely derived through its own ability to prevail in conflict.
And number two, that the United States needs to start conscripting people into national service.
Now think about how self-serving that is at this particular point in time where U.S. military officials are saying, hey, you know what, there aren't any more foot soldiers that can be deployed in the Middle East.
Yeah, when the real unemployment rate is up near 20%.
Right.
Denying reality.
So you've got, again, this heavily subsidized country, which when it couldn't obtain weapons or investments above the board, simply stole them, in many cases from the United States, stole patents, stole plans, created a pirate pharmaceutical industry, created its own nuclear industry, etc., etc.
Many of the people who were doing that, those covert operations in the United States, such as Adolf Schwimmer and Rafael Eaton, the top economic espionage network guy, Signor and Singer are actually saying these people are heroes.
They're swashbucklers, blah, blah, blah.
And it really, I mean, this is a disturbing book.
Any American who reads it, and I encourage people to read it, will see just a bevy of characters who, if they then turn to my book, which came out the same month and same year, that these people have criminal records and that they're not heroes in the United States because they were playing by a different set of rules.
So, you know, again, the book is driving toward this idea that the U.S. needs to become more militarized so that it can have all the successes the Israelis have had.
And my question in this essay is, what successes are you talking about?
Well, and this guy, Dan Signor, in practice is a fascist.
He makes his money, he's a former investment banker with the Carlyle Group, right?
He's got his hand in my taxpayer honeypot.
His record is moving from Harvard Business School to AIPAC to becoming a spokesperson in the occupation forces in Iraq.
I mean, how did he get into those positions?
I can hear his boots clicking from here, those hands, you know?
Right, so he's involved in one of the biggest disasters in U.S. military history, and I have some suggestions for how we can derail the economy even further by militarizing it and by trying to emulate this example.
So, you know, it's disturbing stuff, and it's particularly disturbing because this is a Council on Foreign Relations book, an American outfit, and yet Signor and Singer are abiding by Israeli military censorship because they won't talk openly and honestly about the Israeli nuclear weapons program and how the Israelis managed to obtain nuclear weapons.
And it's a real shame, because right across the hall from Signor you've got Sasha Polakow-Saransky, who discovered that Singer and Signor's hero was actually offering apartheid South Africa nuclear weapons.
And so you've got one branch of the Council on Foreign Relations abiding by Israeli military censorship on nuclear weapons, and you've got Sasha Polakow-Saransky as an editor over there saying, hey, you know what, Perez wanted to sell nukes to South Africa.
So it's a real disingenuous book whenever it coyly talks about the Israeli nuclear capacity.
Well, you know, it's funny, because I remember Lou Rockwell one time titled this article, it was a Jim Loeb piece about, is it going to be Robert Zoellick or David Wilmser who's going to be Rice's number two at State?
And Lou titled it, It's a Heck of a Note to Have to Root for the Rockefellers.
And, you know, like that was really the thing, right, was, you know, at least the Rockefellers put England first or something.
These guys putting Israel first are getting us into a real mess here.
And you've got Max Boot over there, always puts Israel before the United States.
And I guess I didn't realize that Dan Senor and I don't know how many of these neoconservatives are now at the Council on Foreign Relations, but raise the Union Jack back up over Pratt House, I say.
It's a real insidious and ongoing influence.
At least Senor, he's very open.
In fact, it makes me wonder, you know, why he even wanted a job in the U.S. government.
But he's very open that he's putting this Israeli objective first.
I mean, you know, you didn't always get that with Richard Perle or Douglas Fyfe.
They were very cautious about talking about their interests.
You know, Philip Weiss over at Mondo Weiss always talks about Douglas Fyfe having Theodore Herzl's portrait on his wall.
But, you know, they would never just come out and say, yes, here's what we're doing, and it's because we really want to advance this foreign country's interests.
Senor's a little bit more honest about that.
But the prescriptions for the United States, which, you know, which he's making in this book, you know, national service, more investment, perpetual warfare, the fundamental argument that conflict and perpetual conflict with its enemies is actually a comparative advantage for Israeli industry.
You know, I don't think so.
I think he's trying to build a bridge too far.
And then you say by the end of this thing it becomes a policy recommendation.
This is how we ought to run the United States.
Well, it is a policy recommendation, and he's in a position of influence.
There are glowing book reviews in The Washington Post, The New York Times, all of the neocon fronts as well.
I mean, to my knowledge, I didn't look until today, but there isn't a single critical review of this book and what the implications are.
And I think it's because there's so much coded language in it that, you know, maybe people aren't understanding what the real policy implications are.
But, you know, I think it's important to get out in front of this.
And, you know, thank goodness antiwar.com is continually questioning this sort of thing.
Yeah, well, we've had about enough of those neocons over there.
And this guy Dan Sonor is one of the worst of them.
As you write in this article, he co-founded the Foreign Policy Initiative with William Kristol and Robert Kagan, the other two worst people on the face of the earth.
Yeah, I've heard you talk about the spelt and athletic Mr. Kagan many times on the show, and I agree.
They're not producing good ideas for the United States.
They're producing ideas, but they're not good ideas for the United States.
They're not models.
And, you know, we haven't totally destroyed the U.S. economy, but if you start taking some of these top-down sort of industrial policy initiatives that are implied by this book, and if you continue giving privilege to the sort of illegal behavior that Sonor and Singer are lauding in this book, you can't have a vibrant U.S. economy.
You can only have kind of a command economy, and we don't want that.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, it's hard to tell sometimes who's who on these things, because America's had a very militarized, very national-socialistic type economy here for a long, long time.
I mean, they still let us vote for the House of Representatives, but not like it means a damn thing.
So, you know, I don't know whether we're copying the Israelis or they're copying us, but it sort of seems like that stare into the abyss that stares back into you kind of thing going on, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
All right.
Thanks very much.
I really appreciate your time.
All right.
You got it.
Bye.
Everybody, that's Grant F. Smith.
He's at the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, irmep.org, and he wrote the book Spy Trade, How Israel's Lobby Undermines America's Economy, and a hundred more than that.
Go look at his new article today on antiwar.com.
