08/08/12 – John Glaser – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest is John Glazer, assistant editor at Antiwar.com.
You can find him oftentimes at the blog and at news.antiwar.com.
Welcome back, John.
How are you doing?
I'm pretty good, Scott.
Good to talk to you.
Good.
Well, I'm happy to have you here.
You've been writing a lot of important stuff, like always.
And, well, really, Iran-Syria, that's what we've got to talk about today.
First of all, a little bit of history here.
Rumsfeld pushed hard for regime change in Iran.
I think this story is incredibly important.
Why don't you tell us all about what you wrote here?
This is at the blog, Antiwar.com/blog.
Well, there's a new book out by David Crist.
He's a U.S. Defense Department historian in the Marine Corps Reserve and so forth.
And his book, called The Twilight War, is about U.S. and Iranian relations.
And from what I hear, especially from reading Trita Parsi's Twitter page, is that there are a number of sort of big revelations in here, a lot of which people have been suspicious about for some time but have never been confirmed.
But one of these things that he confirms is that Rumsfeld's office, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld during the Bush administration, along with Vice President Dick Cheney, were pushing pretty hard for getting rid of the Iranian government right after getting rid of the Iraqi government, in part by supporting something called Iranian National Congress, which was based on Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, which was a group of exiles that were pining for the overthrow of the Iraqi government and gave us all sorts of bad intelligence in order to build their case for U.S. intervention.
The way you said that with the comments and everything, I want to make sure I understood, that they started this push really after the Iraq war, or they just wanted to do Iran after Iraq?
They had plans to do Iran after Iraq.
But the push that you're talking about, the conflict with Rice, etc., goes back to before the Axis of Evil speech then?
Or after it?
Or do you know?
Definitely before the invasion.
It says that...
Because you go back to what we've heard from the Leveretts, for example, this whole time, right?
About how they were working with the Iranians, members of the Khatami government at the time, and they had an equal interest, maybe much more than us, in getting rid of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and of course they wanted us to get rid of Saddam Hussein for them, and so they had made that golden offer, where they offered to deal on all of these different things, and there were people in the State Department and on the National Security Council, people working for Rice, like the Leveretts, who wanted to do this.
Who wanted to work with the Iranians.
It was obviously the smart thing to do, and it was obvious that the Ayatollah had decided, now's our chance to cool off our relationship with the Americans.
That's right.
The regime changes to Iran's left and right, in Afghanistan and Iraq, were in the Iranian government's interest.
They didn't like that.
They were warning about Taliban rule along the ports.
It bothered the Clinton administration.
And of course they had a long war with Saddam Hussein.
They didn't like him too much.
Apparently it went so far, as Condoleezza Rice wrote a draft proposal, in order to plan for some sort of long cooperation with Iran, in order to help us overthrow Iraq.
And there was a split in the administration, because Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, both of whom had enormous influence over George W. Bush, probably more than Condoleezza Rice, didn't want that.
They hated Iran.
They wanted to put regime change on Iran as well.
And so they nicked that whole effort, to be able to cooperate with Iran.
And incidentally, right after 9-11, and into this sort of Afghanistan-Iraq intervention, Iran had offered huge confessions to the United States.
They said things like, we'd stop supporting Hezbollah, we would be more than accommodating, in terms of showing you that we don't have nuclear weapons, and all this stuff.
And we rejected that plainly and outrightly.
And that was probably because of this influence from Rumsfeld and Cheney.
Well, you know, in 2005, when George Bush, he gave a, I don't think it was a speech, but it was like a little side at a press conference or something, where he gave a direct message to the people of Iran, that you better not vote for the right-winger or else.
And so they all were like, screw you, man, and went out and voted for Ahmadinejad.
And I don't know whether that was on purpose or not, but you can see in context, where this whole time, any moderates in Iran, who seem, even if they're not really that much different in practice than Ahmadinejad or whatever, somebody like Khatami or whatever, there's nothing moderate about him other than on TV, he seems like you could deal with him.
And so he became the enemy, the moderates.
Anybody who seems like they're even the kind of guy you might be able to have a deal with, those people must be marginalized by the United States.
And so there didn't have to be a plot behind Bush deliberately provoking the people into voting for Ahmadinejad, but in context, he might as well have done it on purpose.
That's right.
I mean, I think, broadly speaking, what we're talking about here is more evidence, if we needed any, that the Bush administration was really totally incompetent and understood very little about the region.
I mean, it's this black and white, good and evil thing that only seven-year-olds still believe in, and Bush has the mental capacity of such a child.
And so that's the kind of policy that we ended up getting.
With the trouble that we found in Iraq, when they didn't throw gold at our feet and flowers at our feet and welcome us as liberators, and when it wasn't so easy, like flipping a switch, as Rumsfeld and the rest of them predicted, then I think that is what changed the Bush administration's mind on putting regime change on Iran.
And, you know, as I mentioned in the blog post, it probably wasn't just Iran.
I think the Bush administration had very expansive ambitions right after 9-11 and kept them quiet.
But as General Wesley Clark, and has been mentioned on the site before and, you know, popularly around the Internet, Wesley Clark mentioned in 2007 that he was told by someone in the Pentagon that the Bush administration was thinking early on about regime change in seven countries in five years.
Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and then Iran.
And so this is the kind of radical thinking that was going on in the Bush administration.
And, you know, they were in for a rude awakening when they screwed things up so badly in Iraq.
Right.
Well, and see, that's the whole thing here.
Well, I don't know.
There's a lot of whole things here.
One of the things to me is, you know, whatever Cheney and Rumsfeld were thinking, I don't really know.
But the neoconservatives who kept telling them how right they were all the time, or maybe it was the other way around, those guys made not even a secret about it.
You know, Larry Wilkerson, who was Colin Powell, the Secretary of State's right-hand man at the time, he said on this show that, hey, look, David Wumser and Douglas Feith, those guys were outright Israeli agents inside the government.
And that's what they were doing there, was doing this for Israel.
And that's why they took the attack that we would rather pick a fight with Iran rather than ally with them against al-Qaeda, the people who actually attacked the United States and killed 3,000 people, including attacked the Pentagon itself, these guys.
And so that was why they took this whole policy in the first place.
And yet look at what a disaster it was because of how stupid they were when Ahmed Chalabi was actually an Iranian agent sent to lie to these idiots and tell them that they were going to make the new Shiite Iraq was going to not be friends with Iran.
It was going to be friends with Israel and America and put a lot of pressure on Iran and just set them up to be ripe for regime change.
I mean, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz have got to be dumber than dirt to have fallen for that.
And look at what they've done.
And now they're trying to undo it all by backing al-Qaeda in Syria.
We'll get to that on the other side of this break.
John Glazer, Antiwar.com.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
ScottHorton.org is the website where I keep all the interview archives.
Talking with John Glazer from Antiwar.com.
And I want y'all to listen to this for just a second.
We know al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting al-Qaeda in Syria?
Hamas is now supporting the opposition.
Are we supporting Hamas in Syria?
Now, Hillary Clinton, when she said that, that's the Secretary of State from I think late February, early March, something like that.
The question at CBS News was, what's taking so long for us to intervene on the side of the good guys?
Because that's what we heard somewhere.
And so she's trying to make excuses for what's taking so long.
And you have a piece about she's doing this again.
I noticed that the Council on Foreign Relations and in the Wall Street Journal, they're publishing pieces saying, you know, we have to make sure that al-Qaeda doesn't benefit from this war that we're fighting for them.
So everybody, that's the lesson of the Iraq war, I guess, is to get out ahead of the argument that your war that you support is good for the actual enemy.
You know, your extra bonus side issue war you get to have.
And so they're all saying we must topple Assad, but we must prevent al-Qaeda from benefiting from that.
And then so I guess that's supposed to be good enough for us.
How about you, John?
Well, look, the whole situation is so convoluted that it's even hard to know where to start.
I mean, according to U.S. intelligence, which probably lowballs this estimate, but they estimate that up to a quarter of the 300 different disparate rebel groups in Syria are fighting under the banner of al-Qaeda.
Now, yes, we're not only sending nonlethal aid like communications gear and intelligence to the rebels, but we're also facilitating the delivery of weapons from Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Who want to give weapons to these rebels.
So we're helping them out.
Turkey, at the same time, is giving safe haven to the Free Syrian Army, as well as providing military training at a secret military base in Turkey.
And this is all while more radical Sunni extremists and al-Qaeda type people are coming over the border from Iraq and probably from many places elsewhere as well.
The U.S. continues to support this and continues to have the ultimate goal of overthrowing the Assad regime.
Now, I want to get back to something that you said right before the break, which is a brilliant point.
You know, we have two main issues here.
First of all, we have people saying we should intervene in Syria in order to shape the conflict and help push democracy in Syria for someone that will come after Assad.
The second one is that we need to eliminate one of Iran's primary allies.
But let's just take a brief look at history.
First of all, we supported these same types of people in Afghanistan in order to oust the Soviets who had invaded Afghanistan.
And what ended up happening?
Well, again, we had cooperated with people in the Persian Gulf, like the Saudis and the Gulf states, to, you know, basically radicalize this mujahideen, this holy warrior group.
And, you know, they ended up adopting this Wahhabi extremist religious position.
And then we know the rest of the history.
Al-Qaeda was welcomed there, Bin Laden was welcomed there, hosted by the Taliban, so on and so forth.
However reluctantly.
And so that's obviously not the way we want to go down.
And we can obviously say that supporting rebel proxies and warlords does not typically end in some sort of a democracy.
Let's take Iraq as well.
Now, this whole, let's eliminate Iran's main ally in the region, well, yeah, that didn't work out so well for Iraq.
What ended up happening was, first of all, it's a terrible dictatorship, no democracy, no respect for human rights.
But more to the point, the Iraqis and the Iranians are much more of an alliance than they ever were.
And we end up with a situation where the Iraqis kick us out of their country.
Okay, well, yeah, so these grand designs, these grand imperial strategies don't always end up working out so well.
And you don't hear that from the pro-interventionist crowd.
You don't hear them saying, oh, maybe these rebel fighters aren't exactly Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.
And you don't hear them saying, oh, maybe us intervening to try and shape the conflict isn't as easy as flipping a switch.
And might there be some unintended consequences, like getting an even worse regime in Syria, one that's even more contrary to our interests, or one that's even perhaps more allied with Iran?
I mean, you just don't know these things.
The unintended consequences are immense, and these idiots in Washington don't know what the heck they're doing.
No, yeah, they don't.
I mean, Hillary Clinton's got it right.
This is the Secretary of State of the United States saying, Iman al-Zawahiri is on the same side as us.
Are we sure we want to be on the same side as him?
And then what does she do?
She just keeps on doing it.
I know.
It's amazing.
I mean, you want to move to limit al-Qaeda in Syria, support Assad, or at least leave them the hell alone.
Yeah, we should be leaving them alone.
And, you know, Michael Schoyer said this about the Iraq war, and it's true that it – I don't think Israel really benefited at all.
I mean, a strong Arab state, or possibly a strong Arab state, was destroyed.
So that kind of benefited Israel.
But really, Iran benefited, and al-Qaeda benefited more than anybody from the war in Iraq, which Hillary Clinton, of course, also supported.
And then – shit, I forgot where I was going with that.
Well, just as another point, I mean, to this whole issue of the U.S. apparatchiks, the foreign policy elite that try to craft these policies and, you know, control the strings of this entire Middle East region like a marionette puppeteer, you know, the biggest blunders, the biggest areas where they have made giant mistakes that have, you know, come back to bite us in the end, were done when we had this, you know, 10 or 20 years of, you know, a unipolar world where no match could even touch the United States in any shape or form.
We were Rome.
It was Pax Americana.
We were the most powerful, the most – you know, we could do anything we wanted around the world.
That's when we made our worst mistakes.
And now we're in a situation where we don't even have that kind of power anymore.
It's already started to sink with, you know, Russia and China blocking our entry into Syria and so forth and so on.
And, you know, the Arab Spring uprising where we have to tread a lot more lightly because we have less leverage in Egypt and so forth.
I mean we don't even have the power that we had in the Pax Americana 1990s and 2000s.
Now we're entering a new era where we don't even have that kind of power and we're still trying to make the same mistakes.
If we think we're not going to end up worse than they even did when we were unchallenged, I think we have another thing coming.
Right.
And I remember the awesome thing I was going to say, which was – I was going to quote Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the bin Laden unit, saying, no, don't do the Iraq war.
This will be the hoped for but unexpected gift to bin Laden.
This is exactly from, again, the people who actually arranged the attack against us.
Not all the phony enemies that are just Israel's enemies or somebody else's enemies, but the actual enemy of the American people out there.
What they wanted was, first of all, for us to get bogged down and bankrupt in Afghanistan, but secondly, if there was a way to swing it, see if we can get the Americans to get rid of Saddam, Assad, and Ayatollah Khamenei for us too.
I mean that was exactly their agenda.
And also, of course, you know, radicalize the entire region and spur people to overthrow our sock puppet dictatorships.
You know, like in Tunisia and Egypt.
Right, this goes to the point.
The people crafting grand strategy are so incompetent and have so little foresight that they end up working directly against their own stated interests and these unintended consequences that happen.
You know, I wrote a couple times about this because it was mentioned in every one of the three major newspapers, New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times.
Unnamed anonymous sources in the intelligence community, presumably the CIA, mentioned to reporters in all three of these papers that this so-called vetting process that the CIA is supposedly going through at the behest of the Obama administration, the vetting process that says, okay, we're going to control where the delivery of weapons goes from Saudi Arabia and Qatar so it doesn't get into the hands of these Al-Qaeda members that Hillary Clinton keeps warning about.
Yeah, all of them said, no, there is no vetting process.
It's ineffective.
We're basing this on untrustworthy third parties to tell us where and when these people are and which rebel groups are actually trustworthy and which rebel groups are.
Of course.
I mean, it's a total crapshoot and they don't know what they're doing and they're doing it poorly.
Well, you've got to look at just geographically speaking.
They've allowed Al-Qaeda now to come all the way almost to the Mediterranean Sea, whereas before they were banned in no man's land on the far side of Iran from here.
It's just, anyway.
Yep, thanks.
John Glazer, everybody.
Antiwar.com/blog and news.antiwar.com.
I really appreciate your time.