For KPFK May 11th, 2012, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all, tonight's guest on Anti-War Radio is John Glazer, Assistant Editor at AntiWar.com, you can find him especially at AntiWar.com/blog, and also at News.
AntiWar.com.
Welcome to the show, John, how are you doing?
Very good, Scott, thanks for having me.
Well, thanks for joining me.
Very happy to have you here.
Lots of really big news has been breaking all over the farthest flung reaches of the empire all week.
I want to start with something that at least supposedly hits close to home, the threat of a second underpants attack on America.
This is actually, according to TV, a serious thing, these underpants attacks that are going on.
But then it was kind of scandalous that it came out that the CIA had something to do with the underpants bomber all along.
Why don't you take a complicated story and make it simple for us?
Well, to tell you the truth, the most revealing part about the whole underwear bomber plot was that before the news came out that it was actually a CIA informant, the administration was sending its soldiers all about the media talking about how, you know, we saved the country, this was such a brilliant plot that we foiled, we saved whoever would have been blown up on an airplane and so on and so forth.
But then the news came out that it was a CIA informant and they got a little red-faced.
They got a little shy.
They didn't want to brag anymore because suddenly they're not the heroes that they claim.
The thing about this is that with all of the domestic terrorist plots that the FBI can use to, quote-unquote, foil and stop, have their origins in our own law enforcement.
The FBI creates the plot.
They find their targets who they want to set up for the plot, and then they arrest them for having agreed to actually commit them.
What we know of the underwear bomber, or the would-be underwear bomber, is that he has ties to both British intelligence, to Saudi intelligence, and to CIA.
Who knows to what extent?
I mean, we don't have full-on inside information, but who knows to what extent that this whole plot was concocted by the CIA?
We just don't really know.
Okay, so I interviewed Marcy Wheeler, the empty wheel, earlier in the week, and she was saying that, you know, the story of the guy who made the bomb here, that apparently he was an actual bomb maker, not under American control.
He had one time tried to kill some kind of crown prince or another in Saudi Arabia, which made her think that, you know, probably it was the CIA assets' idea that this ought to be an underpants bomb, and it ought to be made to attack American air travel, that kind of thing, but that maybe, you know, a little bit of the plot was true in that they recruited an actual guy to do it.
So I guess we don't really know to what degree.
To some degree, it was a frame-up job.
Maybe they were framing up someone who is a threat to the Saudis or something, but other than that, it's pretty much a wash.
Right, but like I say, the most revealing parts of this are what are on the side, what the domestic issues that the CIA and the Obama administration is facing with this kind of stuff.
Because John Brennan and the counterterrorism advisor to Obama and the rest of his minions are doing two things.
First of all, they shut up as soon as it was revealed that the bomber was a CIA informant.
They stopped bragging.
They stopped playing the hero.
And number two, now the FBI director, Robert Mueller, says that we need to continue warrantless wiretapping because of things like this.
So they're using this sort of scare tactic from a foiled plot that had its birth, perhaps, in the CIA to increase the national security state control over Americans.
So it's bad all around.
Yeah, they must have read Crisis and Leviathan by Robert Higgs and thought it was supposed to be an instruction manual.
That's right.
Well, so let's move on to Syria.
The news broke yesterday of this huge suicide bombing against an intelligence services building there in Damascus.
And these are our guys, right?
Or at least the people that our government is trying to ally itself with as the suicide bombers in this case.
Is that really right?
Well, that's right.
And that's one of the most troubling parts of this talk about going actually in to intervene on behalf of the opposition.
The opposition, of course, is not a singular group, but we know that it does have elements of al-Qaeda and other sorts of religious extremists that want to use not just violence against the regime in a civil war type of way, but actual violence against civilians.
We've known this for months, that al-Qaeda in that area, you know, even went over the border from Iraq into Syria and started doing attacks like this.
I saw an interview with John McCain recently on one of the Sunday talk shows, and he said, well, I don't know what kind of blowback there would be except if the extremists took control once we ousted Assad.
Like, oh boy, that's no big deal, right?
Yeah, otherwise I can't imagine what could possibly be the problem.
Right, it's amazing the cognitive dissonance they have to go through.
John Kerry, in fact, has joined the chorus.
Until now, he's not been included in the sort of Lindsey Graham, John McCain type, let's intervene on behalf of the opposition, like now.
But last week or this week, I think it was, Senator John McCain, he's powerful in terms of foreign policy in the Senate.
He's the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman.
He said that we should either do safe zones or potentially arm and train the opposition.
But, you know, that would just be a terrible mistake.
So-called safe zones are simply not a viable option.
They are extremely difficult to protect.
They would require a lot of resources in terms of troops and air power.
Safe zone meaning invade one little bit of the country, basically.
Right.
The Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia, that was in a safe zone.
But the so-called safe zones in Iraq that the U.S. imposed led to basically us bombing whenever we wanted to.
And then it led to the 2003 invasion in Iraq.
Yeah, well, you know, in fact, this used to be referred to as the most harebrained scheme of all back in the mid-1990s when Ahmed Chalabi and the neocons under the Clinton era wanted to do this in Iraq.
They said we could do it with 5,000 men.
And all we got to do is just carve out a little piece of Iraq and then everyone will flock to that great safe zone.
And then the sovereign new Iraq will steadily just grow and grow until Saddam Hussein is gone or something.
And I guess it was finally the generals who said absolutely not.
You know, like Shinseki said, you want to have a real war against the, you know, to overthrow the government of Baghdad, you're going to need hundreds of thousands of troops.
That was the real deal as they knew it.
But the neocons thought they could get away with this in Iraq.
Now here we are.
John Kerry is pushing for this strategy in Syria.
Yeah, and we don't know how fast it could snowball like the other example that you put.
I mean, new refugee crisis could happen if we try to set up safe zones because desperate civilians would, you know, rush into these so-called safe zones or neighboring countries.
And then what do we do with them?
They also, I mean, we shouldn't forget that Bashar al-Assad has anti-aircraft capabilities that are located near urban areas.
And if he starts to use those to try to prevent a safe zone from happening, we'll, you know, U.S. or NATO, whomever heads this so-called intervention will probably have to bomb.
And those are in urban areas.
So we're going to create an even worse humanitarian crisis than there already is.
And in terms of arming and training the opposition, I mean, this could have even worse outcomes.
I mean, it's likely that arms from the outside would come close to you.
It wouldn't balance.
You know, the argument is that they want to balance the power, right?
They want to even the balance of power from, you know, lift up the rebels to be on the same level as the Assad regime so then it's an even fight, a fair fight, so-called.
That's what McCain says.
But there's no way that that would happen.
It would probably just invite escalations from Syrian regime forces to fight even harder and kill more people.
It's a bad idea all around.
Well, and we saw the example, never even mind Iraq, which for some reason is ancient history to the American people, but just look at Libya one year ago.
As soon as they said we're going to have a no-fly zone, it was simply a rhetorical slippery slope.
You didn't even need to actually have a single bomb dropped yet or anything happen.
It was just as soon as the premise was accepted that the people of at least eastern Libya are not secure without our help means we have to take this war all the way to Tripoli and regime change their dictator.
Otherwise they'll never be safe again.
It's the same thing here.
And also a double whammy there, as Robert Gates put it, in trying to stop Barack Obama from doing it, there's no such thing as a no-fly zone.
You have to immediately, that means you have to bomb anything that could shoot down your planes.
And, you know, Assad has been too smart, I guess, to fly planes and drop bombs on people.
He's using ground artillery.
So now we've got to have, what, a no-drive zone?
You know, carve out a little piece of this thing?
They could really make this as bad as Iraq if they keep going the way they're going.
You know, and Hillary Clinton said, kind of rhetorically, asking herself questions or whatever in an interview with CBS News, are we supporting Hamas in Syria?
Are we supporting al-Qaeda?
Because here, Ayman al-Zawahiri was encouraging al-Qaeda guys to travel to Syria to go and fight.
And now, look, again, suicide bombings going off.
That's the side that we're intervening on behalf of.
That's right.
All of this stuff is mission creep run amok.
Like you said, safe zones turn into a bombing campaign, arming and training the rebels turns into regime change, and you're right, it could get much, much worse than Iraq.
I mean, the sectarian nature of the conflict right now in Syria is even more sort of pronounced than it was when we first went into Iraq.
And look at the sectarianism that descended into Iraq after the civil war really broke out, and we sort of enlivened all of these different factions to start fighting each other and us and all around.
I mean, it could get much, much worse.
Right.
Yeah, the only debate is, was it hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people killed, or was it more than a million?
That's the debate about Iraq.
And still, it's funny, if you look at the criteria for intervening there, well, Saddam's friends with Al-Qaeda, well, that was a lie, but now there actually are Al-Qaeda guys there because of our war.
Does that mean we have to re-invade all over again now, or what's the deal with that?
Right.
We're going to create our own problems before they're even a reality in Syria, just like Iraq.
Yep.
And we talked with Stephen Zunes this week, earlier on my other show, about Mali and how it is simply just the textbook perfect example of intervention run amok.
Oh, we're going to go do this limited air war on a humanitarian mission for France's oil interests and to save the poor Libyan civilians from our new friend again, Muammar Gaddafi, whatever.
And then, as a result, these Tuareg rebels have gone back home to Mali, where they had been working for Gaddafi, brought all their weapons with them, and now spread that into a civil war breaking out down in Mali.
And we still don't know what happened to all those shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, and this is just a recipe for more intervention in at least northern Africa and maybe much more from now on, I guess.
John, what do you think?
You know what, that's another great point, because I hate the fact that McCain and Kerry and Lindsey Graham and all these people who are advocating for direct intervention into Syria, they have no idea what they're talking about.
They parade themselves as these experts in the area, and they don't know what they're talking about.
In Libya, as a perfect example, when Muammar Gaddafi finally fell and people were celebrating in Benghazi and in Tripoli, you, watching the media and listening to these interventionists, you would have thought that Thomas Jefferson himself had rode his horse into Tripoli and, you know, set up a flag of stars and stripes.
But what has happened?
These were not freedom fighters.
These people that we supported and we helped, oust Gaddafi, have committed war crimes during and after the war.
They have already basically made clear that they have no interest in democracy.
They're holding people without charge or trial, and torture is systematic and widespread, and nobody criticizes them.
Everyone forgets the fact that interventionists were calling these people freedom fighters.
Right now, the interventionists are calling the opposition in Syria freedom fighters, and you can bet that it's going to get much, much, much, much worse, and those freedom fighters will soon turn into the most extreme Islamic radical terrorists, so on and so forth, that you can imagine, and it's going to slip through our fingers before we're even in there.
And what could possibly be done to change the minds of these Democrats in power, to get them to realize that, you know what, it's better to back down now than to be too embarrassed to and go through with this thing.
I mean, you know what, who cares if Assad is the dictator of Syria?
I don't.
I certainly, well, I mean, all things being equal in a vacuum or whatever, of course, I wish every individual in the world peace and justice and whatever, as best they can have, but boy, this sure seems that they know what fire, I mean, who can deny it when there's suicide bombings going off in Damascus, and yet they're still talking about Assad must go.
I mean, they are just, this is just crazy.
Like you said, Hillary Clinton herself has recognized that elements of Al-Qaeda are fighting on the side of the opposition, and she has used, as a sort of rhetorical argumentative tactic against people and reporters who are asking her why aren't we intervening, she said herself, who are we going to support?
Zalaferi has voiced his support for Syria, and he has urged the opposition to continue fighting, and that he would send us fighters.
Who are we going to send arms to?
Our sworn enemy?
Well, but so wait a minute, if Hillary understands that, then the real question again comes back down to, since that is, she's impervious to her own brilliant obvious logic there, the question comes down to what does it take politically for these people to say, you know what, we're going to leave Syria well enough alone?
Well, you know, that's interesting.
It's possible that the upper crust of the Obama administration knows what chaos would ensue if we actually did intervene.
That's quite possible.
I mean, a lot of the foreign policy elite and sort of the technocrats have explained it thusly.
People in the Council on Foreign Relations and these types of people, they have voiced these concerns.
As much as we hate the fact that the establishment wants to intervene wherever and whenever, they have voiced these concerns.
So as in Libya, they estimated that the downside would not be too bad, right?
They estimated that they could oust Gaddafi and appear to be on the side of the Arab Spring, and, you know, chaos would not ensue.
And despite the chaos that did ensue, compared to Syria, it's nothing.
So it's possible that they understand that this will be very, very bad.
And in terms of politically what will it take, I don't know.
The fact that we're in an election season kind of scares me.
And the fact that people like John Kerry on the Democratic side have fully endorsed intervention, that scares me too.
All right, y'all are listening to Antiwar Radio here on KPFK in L.A.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with John Glazer, assistant editor at Antiwar.com.
And now here's sort of an overriding theme of what we're talking about here.
We're basically a year into the Arab Spring, and what we're seeing is really a successful or at least halfway successful counterrevolution on the part of America and our puppets, really.
I mean, when we talk about Syria, the one thing we haven't really focused on, or maybe you mentioned it, is how Saudi and Qatar and all the Arab Peninsula sockpuppet dictatorships, they're really helping, along with Turkey, with the rebels in Syria because they're very worried that this Arab Spring thing can be turned against them.
And, of course, the American empire, they hate to see their allies like Ben Ali and Mubarak fall, but they figure real quick that if we can get our hands on this thing and use this to overthrow the last couple of dictatorships in the region that we don't like, that we don't control, then that can be great, and we can accomplish that at the same time that we're helping our friendly dictatorships, like, say, in Bahrain, for example, crack down on their people.
But meanwhile, showing the Americans on TV that, if anything, we're trying to figure out a good way to help the people of Syria, and it looks like America is Superman saving the little guy, the same way they pulled it off, I think, successfully on TV in Libya, while, really, we support every other kingdom and every sultan and emir in the entire region.
It's a very good point, and people forget about it.
I mean, there's all this harping on about Syria, and that is a special case because it's particularly more brutal than many other cases.
But in Bahrain, I mean, the kingdom monarch in Bahrain, the dictatorship that we've supported for decades, just this week announced that they would no more messing around, they basically said.
They said, if it requires tougher actions to quell this resistance movement, then we're going to use them.
And, you know, you haven't heard the Obama administration say anything about the systematic torture that Bahrainis are going through.
Police are just beating people in the street.
Peaceful protesters, they're using tear gas in residential areas.
People are dying consistently all the time there.
Julian Assange, and there's our key show, just had a Bahraini activist who's been arrested several times, tortured several times on his show, and he said people are dying all the time.
He's just not hearing about it in the media.
I mean, think about Al Jazeera, right?
Qatari-based Al Jazeera, basically an instrument of the state, isn't shedding any light on the situation in Bahrain because they don't want a revolution in Bahrain.
They don't support the Arab Spring in Bahrain.
Neither does America.
We don't support it in Saudi Arabia.
We don't support it in Qatar.
We don't support it in Yemen, where there was a virtual revolution, except we hijacked it.
We instituted a regime change, basically a transition deal, which took Saleh out of power and put in his deputy, who's now in power, who's now receiving increased foreign aid, increased military aid, who has now welcomed special operations forces from the U.S. on his land.
The supposed mission is to train Yemeni forces.
He's still receiving military equipment, and he's still condoning the fact that America has been launching drone strikes and airstrikes over Yemen and killing scores of civilians, although the only thing that they claim is being killed is al Qaeda militants.
But, of course, we have no confirmation of that.
So America has largely quelled every voice of dissent and for pro-reform democracy in the Middle East throughout this entire Arab Spring.
We still have to see what's going on in Egypt.
I can talk about that as well.
But by and large, America is on the side of the dictators, and it's very, very clear that that's the case over the broad scale of things.
Actually, I do want to let you get to Egypt in just a second, but on the issue of Bahrain, people ought to understand, in case they don't, I'll try to give them a chance to.
Here's this little tiny island nation in the Persian Gulf that is basically run by close friends of the Saudi kingdom there.
And it's something like a 70-30 split, maybe even 80-20 split, between the Sunni minority and the Shia majority.
And when the Arab Spring hit Bahrain, the people protesting in Pearl Square or Pearl Roundabout there, they were asking for the slightest semblance of a rule of law.
Please, Your Highness, just give us...
We want you to be the king we love you so much.
Please just give us the slightest bit of a pretense of a rule of law and maybe a fair trial every once in a while.
And he went to war against them for it, and America helped him.
So it wasn't like...
Well, I don't know.
I mean, hell, if they wanted to cut his head off, that'd be just fine.
He's a king, right?
I mean, what right does he have to be anybody's king?
But anyway, they weren't pushing for that.
They were pushing for the slightest bit of reform.
And because America stations our fifth fleet in Bahrain...
And in fact, this is what...
Didn't Admiral Mullen say this on Meet the Press?
He was asked, What's the difference between Libya, where we're helping the people, and Bahrain, where we're not?
And he said, Bahrain's our ally.
Simple as that.
You know?
That's right.
And it shouldn't be discounted, the issue of Iran with Bahrain.
So, yes, we have the fifth fleet in there.
Yes, we patrol fleets of Navy warships in the Gulf, to the north of Bahrain and to the south of Iran, in that little, you know, 20-mile strip of Gulf waters right there.
And what the Bahraini kingdom is saying, what the dictatorship is saying, is, okay, these Shiites who are protesting in the streets, they're being co-opted by Iran, and now elements of Iran are in the opposition, right?
He's saying this very loudly, making sure Washington can hear.
And this is an attempt, it's a lie, but it's an attempt to get Washington to support his regime even more and condone even worse, more harsh actions against the protesters.
So this kind of thing is a lie, and we should understand the broader regional implications of this, because a lot of it is about maintaining our presence in the region and containing Iran, and that's what Washington cares about.
It doesn't care about pro-reform, protest movements, it doesn't care about democracy.
All right, now talk to me very quickly about the revolution and the counter-revolution going on in Egypt.
They have upcoming elections.
Who's who and what's what, and which side is the CIA on there, John Glaser?
Well, they do have upcoming elections, but what's been happening is that the SCAF, that's the acronym for the military rulers that have been in power since Mubarak fell.
Mubarak was, of course, supported by the United States government for decades while he tortured his own people and laid waste to Egypt.
So the SCAF is still in power.
What they've been doing is most recently they've banned up to ten prominent presidential candidates.
They said, no, you can't run.
Two of the front-runners, actually, were included in that ban, and people are very, very angry about this.
Secular protesters as well as Islamist sort of partisans in Egypt have been protesting again.
SCAF is still receiving U.S. support.
Egypt is still receiving just under $2 billion every single year from Washington, and SCAF repeatedly has been shown by Amnesty International and others to have received crowd control sort of gear, things like tear gas and rubber bullets and, you know, the small tanks that they put on the roads to scare protesters away and so forth.
The SCAF has shown zero interest in democracy, and as soon as the Obama administration found itself faced with a brick wall and realized that they could no longer support Mubarak, they came out in support of people like Omar Suleiman, who is Mubarak's torturer-in-chief, his sort of deputy, and the people that are in power now are not much different than him.
And we continue to support them, and we continue to do everything in our power to repress the dissent and repress the pro-democracy movement in that country.
And it's the same story.
It's the same in Bahrain.
It's the same in Yemen.
And it's the same thing in Egypt.
That is John Glazer, assistant editor at Antiwar.com.
You can find him and Jason Ditz covering every important news story in the whole wide world, really, at news.antiwar.com.
You can also find him at the blog, Antiwar.com/blog.
Thanks so much for your time again on the show tonight, John.
It was great.
Thank you.
All right, everybody, and that's it for the show tonight.
I'm Scott Horton.
This has been Antiwar Radio.
All my archives of this interview and all my KPFK interviews and those from my other radio shows as well can be found at Antiwar.com/radio.
We'll be here next Friday, again, 630 to 7 Pacific Time on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
See you then.
