Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show is Charles Featherstone, he's a regular writer at LewRockwell.com, he keeps a blog called the Featherblog at thefeatherblog.blogspot.com and he's a songwriter and an anarchist and he says an amateur intellectual, I don't know about that, he's a former journalist and welcome back to the show, how are you doing?
Thanks Scott, it's good to be here, thank you for asking me and having me on the show.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here, I always love the stuff you write and especially because it comes from such an informed perspective, in fact, why don't you tell us a little bit about that, how much time you spent living in the Middle East and where and so forth before we get into this?
Well, I spent a little bit more than a year, I was a reporter in Dubai for a while and then I was an editor and consultant for an English language newspaper in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia and I have worked in Washington and New York covering Congress and the executive branch and the energy industry, the oil industry in particular, but I've done a little of a lot, I've covered the United Nations for a bit, so.
Good stuff, alright, well, you know what, let's start with what, one of the things you just mentioned there was oil, obviously it's got something to do with something but I never am exactly sure what, and I got two guys who I think it's fair to say count as progressives or leftists, not, well, progressives probably, not just, you know, run of the mill liberals or something, Pepe Escobar and Gareth Porter and both of them, you know, extremely important journalists and I believe they're personal friends too in fact, but they just can't agree about the role of oil, the role that oil plays in the thinking of the, you know, administrators of the American empire, basically.
Pepe Escobar, for example, when we talk about Afghanistan says, well, it's all about making sure that more than that the pipeline does go this way, making sure that it doesn't go that way and that, you know, these other countries aren't allowed to build these relationships over these pipelines that could be, you know, good for them but bad for our amount of influence in the region.
I think Lou said on the show last week, he thinks a lot of what's going on in Libya is not about, you know, Americans need gas for their SUV at a cheap price but about taking control of that oil, not from an oil company point of view but from a state government point of view so that if there's a crisis like, say, the Chinese want to dump their American securities, we can threaten somehow to limit their supplies of oil, that kind of thing.
And so I just wonder what you think about, you know, oh, and I was going to say Gareth Porter disagrees.
Gareth Porter says, nah, oil's got so little to do with it, forget about it.
It's all just about the generals and, you know, the policies that they build, how things must be, the ends that they must pursue, you know?
I think it's a good portion of both and it's not about contract grabbing, meaning that what's going on in Libya, for example, or Iraq was not about, the invasion of Iraq was not about contracts for Exxon Mobil, all right?
That's not what it was about.
It was, if oil played a role in it, it was about ensuring that a pro-American government would have the say-so over how that oil was produced and how it might not be produced in the future if it wasn't going to be produced.
There is probably, and I remember there was a spokesman for the Libyan rebels, oh, about a week and a half, two weeks ago, was talking about the need for assistance from the international community and at the end he tacked on this very fascinating statement, which he said, we will remember our friends.
And so there's probably an element in the French government thinking that this will be Total's, the French state oil company's, Total's moment when we are done.
But it's not about necessarily getting contracts for Total.
That's secondary.
But you don't have, the relationship between Washington and Riyadh is perhaps the most intense close relationship the United States has in the Middle East.
If Washington ever was forced to choose between Riyadh or Tel Aviv, I don't think Washington would hesitate very long to choose Riyadh.
Now, since 1948, the goal of American policy has been to make sure that we never have, the United States government never has to make that choice.
But underneath it all is a belief in a correct one.
Without Saudi oil production, you do not have the modern world.
You do not have modern industrial economies.
You don't have any of those things.
And so to ensure that the government that sits atop that oil and is responsible for producing it is a government that is friendly, as opposed to not, and will do things that will benefit the United States government, the American elites, those who run the American economy is, I think, a very, very important facet of policy.
It is one of the driving things.
But it is not the only driving thing.
And I think there's a lot of really crappy idealism out there, both from the neocons but also from the Samantha Powers of the world, who really want to use power to dominate and don't think economically in any way, shape, or form.
Well, yeah, you know, that's the thing, too, is sometimes it's hard to believe it.
It's so easy to see because what our government does is so evil, it makes it seem like it's all on purpose, you know.
But John McCain, when he was running for president, told the Wall Street Journal, yeah, economics, I don't really know anything about that.
I've never, you know, like, that's not his thing.
He's interested in politics, you know, for meaning whatever issue can help him get ahead at any given time or whatever in his own personal life.
But he never even was curious to figure out, like, what is the stock market anyway or anything, you know?
He doesn't even care.
And part of the problem is one of the ethics, part of the ethics of war that has developed in the Western tradition, starting with the Christian ethical and intellectual tradition but that has passed on to the Enlightenment secular tradition, is that in order for war to be morally legitimate, the person waging the war has to have no self-interest in it, which is why, for example, opponents of the invasion of Iraq ignored the neocon idealism and pointed simply to oil.
And it is why, you know, opponents of wars will essentially make them, you're only doing this because you're self-interested, as if somehow not being self-interested is more noble.
And so, for example, you do have the Bernard-Henri Lévis and the, oh God, what's his name, Kouchner, the French foreign minister, and the Samantha Powers of the world who are saying that we have this virtuous power, we are virtuous people, we will intervene when there is absolutely no self-interest at stake, and that will prove that our wars are correct, because we are not doing this for any tangible benefit to ourselves.
I wonder, you know, how much, I read a piece by Alex Coburn where he was saying this has nothing to do with, you know, strategery at all, nothing to do with oil, nothing to do with empire, this is simply about Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, you know, war as fulfillment, basically.
I think that there's, in the case of Libya...
And of course, Sarkozy's politics in France.
I think in the case of Libya, that is most of what is driving this.
The Libyan rebels rose up, looked for the first two weeks for all the world like they were going to win.
And so basically, the response of the Western world was to, yay for you, we're going to, you know, clamp down on Gaddafi's funds so he can't get to his money anymore, we're going to sanction his government.
And those things would have been enough had the rebels had the wherewithal to win initially, but they didn't.
And once the rebels started losing, it became quite clear that Europe was trapped.
The world that had supported the rebels was trapped in either going farther or accepting the situation that if Gaddafi wins, we're going to have a sanctioned, broken country, we're going to deal with refugees, we're going to have all of these problems that you had with Iraq post-1991, and are we prepared to deal with this, or how far are we willing to go?
And I frankly think that in the case of Libya, the no-fly zone was on its face a half measure.
The NATO forces have been acting as the air cover for the rebels, the rebels still have not gotten their act together.
I suspect eventually at some point in time, NATO ground troops will be on the ground in Libya, helping the rebels.
Oh yeah, I mean, it's got to be a matter of days, not weeks.
All right, hold it right there everybody, it's Charles Featherstone, the Featherblog.blogspot.com, lourockwell.com.
All right, kiddos, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, on the line is Charles Featherstone, he writes for lourockwell.com, and he keeps a blog at thefeatherblog.blogspot.com.
Did you see, well, before the break, Charles, we were talking about how this is going to escalate, we're going to have ground troops in there, NATO ground troops eventually as it's going to have to be American ground troops, and I guess I'll let you explain the reasons why you think that.
The reasons I think that are twofold.
First off, the strange wording of the UN Security Council resolution specifically states ground occupation forces.
Now I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know of any lawyers who specialize in writing UN Security Council resolutions, but that's a very specific language.
Now after Resolution 1973 was put out, everybody was saying the resolution doesn't allow for ground troops, it forbids that specifically.
And that was probably everybody's intention, but the wording I think is very, very important because it actually doesn't say that.
And you could, I think it'd be very, very easy for the French to put in a couple of regiments of the Foreign Legion and that Marine Expeditionary Unit or whatever they're called these days that's sitting offshore could very easily do that too.
But the other simple reason is the rebels at this point are so disorganized, and the die is cast.
The West has committed itself to getting rid of Qaddafi, even if they aren't saying that that's the policy.
Regime change in Libya is the policy, and it is how it has to end in order for things to end right.
And that's eventually probably going to take some kind of Western ground force.
It may or may not have to be very, very much, and that will depend upon the circumstances as well.
But it's probably going to go in.
I can't see that happening any other way because the rebels in the East, frankly, they get their act together and they go on the road, and they win until they don't and then they flee.
And they're not much of an army, and they may need to take some time to learn how to be an army, but whether they will have that time or will be given that time, I do not know.
Well, and you know, as far as the UN resolution goes, it doesn't matter what it says.
Once they have it and the war is on, then it's on.
That's true.
You know, and I don't know if you saw this when it was in McClatchy newspapers, Libyan rebel leaders spent much of the past 20 years in suburban Virginia.
And it's not a very thinly veiled at all profile of this guy explaining that he's CIA and he's now over there leading this thing.
His name is Khalifa Hifter.
And I have, when I went to Georgetown, known a couple of the Libyan exiles, studied with one at the program, and her brother was one of the professors at Georgetown.
And so I know a few of these people, and that they have lived in the West.
And yes, yes, the exiles, in fact, what's interesting to watch is the exiles are now lending their organizational capability to the Syrians.
So whatever that may mean for the future in Syria, we don't know, but they are lending their organizational capability, providing Syrian opposition people with media contacts and the ability to get information out of Syria.
So that will be interesting to watch as well.
Yeah.
Well, and that's another one of the ones that the U.S. empire will actually be on the side of that revolution, as opposed to most of the rest of them.
It however will entirely depend upon how able the Ba'ath regime in Syria is to mobilize and continue to mobilize force on behalf.
A revolution in Syria will likely not succeed if the entire ruling establishment stays closely knit together.
If there are no defections in Syria, then a rebellion revolution cannot succeed in Syria.
If pieces of the elite then begin to break off, as they are doing in Yemen, and Yemen will now go through a civil war, as Libya is going through, then yes.
And there will definitely be an intervention in Syria.
I can almost guarantee that.
Oh man.
Well, boy, I'm sorry, I'm just thinking about what that would really be like to have, you know, the war, you know, a real war in Syria.
I mean, how are you going to intervene just a little there?
I mean, these people are really intent on setting the whole Middle East on fire, huh?
Where it's going to get exceptionally dicey.
Right now, things have been reasonably stable inside Saudi Arabia.
If there is anything remotely resembling a challenge to the Al Saud government, and the royal family is fairly, is very united.
The royal family has long understood in Saudi Arabia that they hang together, they hang separately.
So they are fairly united.
But there is a large state apparatus that they have built.
And King Abdullah has, he's not quite the Saudi equivalent of Louis Philippe.
He's not the, he's not the king of the Sauds, but he is much more, sees himself much more as less of a kind of total authoritarian monarch than his predecessors.
And there is a Saudi national identity.
And it will be interesting to see if things percolate into and through Saudi Arabia, because that will be the, that will be the uprising that will prompt major U.S. action.
Well, now, so far, and look, whether we're talking about Saudi Arabia or Syria or any of the rest of these countries, it basically comes down to what it came down to in Egypt.
Will the army fire on the people in order to keep the dictator in power?
Exactly, yes.
And so, but when you say, you know, the political establishment, does that include the conscripts in the Saudi army and the U.S., the Saudi army?
There are several Saudi armies.
And the one that would likely be most loyal to the government would be the National Guard.
That that is, that is the army that Abdullah has commanded.
That is the army that his son is, I think, deputy commander of.
Well, now, most of the dissent, the news anyway, out of Saudi Arabia is that the protest is in the oil region, which is where the Shia minority lives.
Is it, and I guess there was a little bit, something about some protests about some flooding, but I wonder how widespread is the protest movement or push for reform among the, you know, population of Jeddah, for example?
It's going, it's difficult for me to gauge.
It's been a while since I have been there, and Jeddah is a, it is a difficult place for people to meet and to gather.
So because, not because the police prevent it, but because they're, they may in certain circumstances, they do under certain circumstances, but just there is no place to actually physically do it in any large, in any larger great way.
Well, you know, I think you told me in the past on the show that I think I asked you if America didn't support the Saudi kingdom at all, then would they still, would the Saudi royal family still be the government of that country?
And you said you thought so, right?
Yes, and I still believe that.
They still possess a fair amount of what I call moral legitimacy, which I believe is the most important legitimacy that a government and a state has.
They are still morally legitimate in the eyes of most Saudis, and Sunni Saudis in particular.
The Shia, for the most part, aren't going to matter, and as long as unrest in Saudi Arabia is seen as a Shia thing, then the Sunnis will hang tight.
So yeah, but as events are going on, one of the things that I'm realizing is that the Middle East I studied 10, 12 years ago at Georgetown, and the Middle East I lived in is disappearing.
It is disappearing.
It really is an amazing thing.
I don't know whether it'll turn out to be as nice as the results of 89, but it's that momentous of a change in the face of the way things are done in the world going on right now.
It is staggering, and the two things that strike me most are how irrelevant al-Qaeda is to everything that is going on, and how irrelevant Israel is to everything that is going on.
That's funny, because as Phil Duraldi will be talking about at the bottom of the next hour, they think it's all about them, and of course the Arab Spring, it's all about Persia, and now's our chance to attack Iran for some reason.
Yeah, I keep hearing that, and unfortunately the other precedent that Barack Obama's action sets is that the next time Iranian protesters start protesting and they start getting mowed down by Revolutionary Guards, suddenly the next president will have ample justification, or even maybe the current president will have ample justification for acting.
Yeah, well and you can see ever since the end of the Cold War, the precedent for intervention just gets looser and looser and looser, where now they're just talking about pre-emptive attacks to prevent, not an attack on us, but a massacre against civilians that could happen.
That could happen, yes.
Yeah, I mean, in Kosovo they had to pretend that there was one going on, that there were 100,000 civilians killed, which was a total lie, and you know, in Iraq they had to pretend that the guy was manufacturing nuclear bombs for use against American cities in order to justify that thing.
He could give them to Osama Bin Laden for crying out loud, they said, you know, anthrax.
In this case, there could be a massacre, and really this isn't a populist uprising in the sense of Egypt the same way, it's really much more just a tribal civil war it's looking like, isn't it?
I think to an extent, though that's oversimplifying it.
Well, next time we'll catch up.
God bless you.
All right, thanks very much.
Everybody, that's the great Charles Featherstone.
He's at the Featherblog, that's thefeatherblog.blogspot.com, and find his archives at lewrockwell.com.
