All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show.
First guest up is John Glazer, assistant editor at antiwar.com.
You can find most of what he writes at antiwar.com/blog, but you can also find a lot at news.antiwar.com as well.
This one is, Obama denies deal with Iran, won't back Israeli strike if Iran steers clear of U.S. assets in Persian Gulf.
Well, that's a long headline.
Story breaking in Ynet News out of Israel, Monday.
What's going on here, John?
Welcome back to the show.
Thanks for having me.
Well, what's going on is that apparently, at least according to this Israeli news source, one of the most popular newspapers in Israel, the Obama administration sent a covert message through two European allies, probably someone like Sweden, because they've done this sort of thing for us in the past, to send this message to Iran that the U.S. will not back an Israeli strike so long as Iran doesn't retaliate to a potential Israeli strike by hitting U.S. assets in the region.
U.S. assets being, you know, U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet in neighboring Bahrain, and so forth.
The Obama administration has denied the report, although Washington insiders and reporters who actually know what's what have been saying that the report is probably true, but the Obama administration has plausible deniability.
This is notable for a couple of reasons.
First of all, it's notable that a sitting U.S. president would take a momentary lapse from what is usually a constant deference and subservience to the Israeli state.
But it's also notable because it's a reiteration of what has clearly been Obama's administration policy for some time now, which is that an unprovoked attack on Iran, which would be a war of choice since Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons, is going to be too costly for us, especially because Iran could retaliate and hit U.S. assets in the region.
So it's a reiteration of U.S. policy, and it has some nice aspects to it.
Well, it's funny.
Yesterday I had a different interpretation, or at least a different possible one, but I can't remember what it was.
It was something about, you know, a backhanded way of giving a blank check to Israel to go ahead and do it.
But now I can't remember what the hell my thinking was on that anymore.
It just sounds like, well...
Well, that is actually the case in literal terms, although it's implied that, and you know, the military establishment in both Israel and the U.S. know that Israel couldn't pull off such an attack on its own.
I mean, it was the top general in the entire U.S. military, General Martin Dempsey, said just last week that he doesn't want to be complicit in an Israeli attack on Iran.
Number one, because an Israeli attack on Iran would not be effective, because they don't have the capability to actually destroy such a redundant nuclear program, and that also it would be counterproductive, because it would cause Iran to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program, which is still not reconstituted since at least 2003, according to U.S. intelligence.
And U.S. intelligence has also said that it would only take six months to a year for Iran to completely recover its nuclear facilities from an Israeli strike.
So the fact that Israel can't do it on its own, it makes it sort of imply that the U.S. doesn't want Israel to attack, because if it doesn't have U.S. backing, it actually can't get the job done.
And the Obama administration has pretty much said explicitly that it doesn't have our backing.
And that was reiterated by Martin Dempsey just last week.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, yeah, in a way, it just sounds like they're sort of setting the stage to say, well, the Iranians forced us into intervening, because, you know, we said before, we didn't want to, but whatever it was that happened, they attacked us first, blaming us for what Israel did.
Oh, you mean in Iranian retaliation, you mean?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because like you're saying, Israel really can't do it themselves.
So if Netanyahu launches the war, Obama's going to have to help him finish it, because what's he going to do?
Not help him finish it in real life?
Come on.
I mean, if Netanyahu really started it.
So then at that point, it sounds like maybe this is just a way of, you know, setting the stage for, I don't know if they need a false flag or just, you know, some kind of Gulf of Tonkin type thing to point at and say, see, we told the Iranians that we wanted to stay out of it, but they dragged us into it.
You know, it's possible.
It's a fair analysis.
But I've been writing for, you know, about a year on at Antiwar.com about how the military establishment in both the U.S. and Israel is pretty firmly against a war on Iran.
They all see it as costly.
They all see it as unnecessary, given that there is no imminent threat of an Iranian bomb.
And so, you know, they're pretty firmly against it.
People like Netanyahu and crazies in Washington keep pushing for one and keep talking about it and keep, you know, keep up the warmongering.
But the military establishment is pretty much against it.
And I wouldn't sort of discount that.
I mean, Obama probably prefers to maintain Middle East hegemony over a war of choice on Iran, given how destabilizing it would be.
I mean, the United States can't really afford to do that.
It's possible that Obama's being pragmatic here.
You know, that's not to praise Obama.
I mean, for him to calculate that war should be held off because oil and hegemony are more important is really to have lost a piece of his humanity, because the immense human cost of war on Iran alone should cast it out of a rational person's consideration.
But he might prefer, you know, quote-unquote stability and maintaining U.S. hegemony and preventing an uncontrollable sort of regional conflagration that would be too destabilizing and could potentially sort of cut into the free flow of oil.
He might prefer, you know, holding off war as opposed to all that chaos.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's interesting that even when Dempsey, the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, came out and said, hey, look, you know, I don't want to be part of the America I don't want to be part of any Israeli war against Iran and that kind of thing.
He didn't sound like he was really very worried about it.
And, you know, really, since January, I guess, Netanyahu cranked up this whole new campaign of hold me back, everybody, because I'm about to bomb him.
But for the boy who cried wolf so many times, it seems like and maybe this is just me because I really don't have a very common perspective on this, you know, argument, as you well know.
So I'm not necessarily the best to see kind of the broader strokes of it, maybe.
But it sort of seems like nobody cares what Benjamin Netanyahu says at this point.
He's a laughingstock.
He's pathetic.
And his own war cabinet is not going to let him do it.
His own generals aren't going to let him do it.
No one in America even seems to be worried about it.
And I saw a thing on Facebook that said that that rare moment when someone, you know, announces they're going to start a war in three months and nobody pays any attention.
And I thought, yeah, but I think it's good.
Nobody's paying any attention, really.
Why should anyone pay any attention to Benjamin Netanyahu anymore?
He's not a serious person, really, is he?
No, he's a nutcase.
I mean, he's literally out of his mind.
He has a.
And he might be the prime minister, but it doesn't sound like the people around him are going to let him exercise this power.
They've already decided they won't.
They've already told him they won't.
You know, it's funny because the whole much of the debate, especially by people like Netanyahu and this trickles down, actually, to ordinary Americans that probably vote Republican, which is like half of the electorate.
But the whole debate is framed as, you know, these crazy Iranians who are apocalyptic and messianic and out of their mind and willing to commit national suicide by provoking nuclear retaliation on their country and all this stuff.
Start nuclear war.
I mean, they have to be nuts to be able to do this right.
That's the framework of dialogue that's been pushed down from people like Netanyahu and Hawks in Washington.
But you know, I was looking back at something former National Security Advisor to President Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said recently.
He said it like a year ago or back in March, I think it was.
He said that there is no argument to actually say that we need to bomb Iran, except one extremely silly argument that somehow or another, the Iranians are messianic and they want desperately to commit suicide.
And then he paused.
This was at a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations.
He paused and then he said, you know, who's messianic, Netanyahu.
So even people within the establishment structure of the United States foreign policy elite, like Zbigniew Brzezinski, who by the way is no dove, say openly that Netanyahu is the messianic one.
He's the one that wants to restructure the Middle East.
He's the one that has religious sort of plans for his region and his country.
And he's the one that will disregard other core interests of the state in order to carry out this crazy, you know, messianic plan, sort of like George W. Bush.
Right.
Well, you know, just like with George W. Bush, you could say, you know, some arguments were, well, you know, he Gog and Magog and all of this weird biblical stuff.
And then others would point out that, well, really, it sounds more like the secular kind of world revolution of Napoleon Bonaparte or Leon Trotsky rather than something religious.
And then that's like the most charitable interpretation, right?
And so like in this case, Netanyahu, you know, maybe he wants to be, you know, King David out of the Bible or something like that.
Or maybe he just wants to be Winston Churchill.
You know, which is pretty biblical in its scope as it is, you know, and we'll be lucky if he's willing to settle for such a small vision as that.
Right.
That's fair.
The practical thing that Netanyahu has on his mind has nothing to do with an Iranian bomb.
It has nothing to do with Iranians wanting to wipe Israel off the map or anything like this.
What he doesn't want, it's not about opposition to nuclear proliferation per se.
It's about Iran having the ability to deter an attack.
So Israel views it as their prerogative to attack any country in that region at will.
And if they are prevented from doing that by some sort of a nuclear deterrent or some sort of zone of immunity type thing, they view that as a threat to their regional hegemony.
And if they can't just go around bombing people, you know, without consequence, if somehow the power is balanced, as Kenneth Waltz wrote recently in the Foreign Affairs that Iran might, you know, should be allowed to get the bomb because it'll balance out the power.
That's what they really don't want.
So there is some pragmatism here.
There is some sort of realpolitik.
But that's the neoconservative doctrine for the United States, that we will never allow any near peer competitor.
And if any state looks like they're even considering ever being able to rival us, then we'll bomb them way before it ever gets to that point.
Simple as that.
That's exactly right.
They have that exact policy, just on a regional level instead of the entire world.
That's right.
That's Israel's policy outlook in the Middle East, and that's our policy outlook in the world.
We're seeing that with China.
We've seen it with the Middle East since World War II and, you know, Latin America since the 1870s and so forth.
So yeah, that's exactly right.
And the authors of the Clean Break Strategy for Israel are the authors of the defense planning guidance here in the United States.
It's the very same guys.
Right.
But you need a little bit of psycho in you to be able to carry out that kind of policy with the recklessness that Netanyahu currently is advocating.
I mean, if he had a green light from the Obama administration tomorrow, it seems pretty clear he'd be bombing Iran.
So I mean, it's so psycho.
It's even more psycho, I think, than planning to invade and perform regime change on Iraq in 2003, because Iran has, you know, more capabilities.
They're more strategically placed to actually hit a bunch of U.S. assets.
And I don't think that the Obama administration is ready for that.
They might be, you know, preparing for it down the line.
I mean, they are carrying out basically a genocidal policy of economic warfare on Iran.
So they could just be planning on weakening the country as they did Iraq in the 1990s until an attack is more doable.
But right now, I think the Obama administration views it as not doable.
Yeah.
Which is why I mean, that's the thing.
You could have a generation of sanctions that's never going to make the place doable as far as land invasion.
And really, you know, 1953 and all that is out of the question to us.
We saw in 2009, they sort of tried that to co-opt the Green Revolution and make that work.
But it didn't work.
And if it had worked, they still only would have gotten Mousavi, who wasn't going to be their sock puppet anyway.
That's right.
That's right.
Yeah.
So that doable.
And, you know, the world is changing a bit.
And U.S. hegemony is being punctured.
It's nowhere close to actually, you know, evening out among the world power players.
But stuff like Iraq 2003 can't happen with Iran.
And stuff like Iran 1953 can't happen with Iran right now.
And that's why it's sort of notable that Obama would send this message to Iran saying that, you know, pretty please don't hit our assets in the region.
And if you do that, we'll promise not to back an Israeli strike.
Whether that's going to stick, I'm not sure, because like I say, Netanyahu is a crazy person.
And as the leader of Hezbollah, Nasrallah, Hassan Nasrallah said just yesterday, he said, I'm quoting, a decision has been taken to respond and the response will be very great.
He's talking about an Israeli attack.
He said, if Israel targets Iran, America bears responsibility.
So just because Obama asked really politely doesn't mean Iran will actually abide by that.
And that follows with a, that's in line with a declassified war simulation was run by the Pentagon earlier this year, which forecasted that, you know, a strike, an Israeli strike would lead to a wider regional war.
It could draw in the United States, immediately get at least, you know, 200 or 300 Americans killed in Iran's retaliation and so on and so forth.
So they understand that the backlash could be huge and they're not prepared to actually go for it right now.
That's pretty brave talk for Hezbollah saying that America would be held responsible by them, huh?
Well, by Iran, he was talking in the context, I mean, he's Iranian backed, but he also said that if Israel attacks Iran, we will bomb Israel.
We'll rocket Israel.
We don't have chemical weapons, but we'll target Israel's nuclear reactors.
So that's a deterrent for Israel that he's trying to put out there and he's also trying to say Iran is going to, you know, target the United States if Israel bombs.
So yeah.
Of course, where'd they get all their bombs?
Where'd they get all their F-16s?
Where'd they get all their radars?
Where'd they get all their everything from America?
And then if they use it against Iran, we get to say, hey, but that doesn't have anything to do with us.
Yeah, right.
Of course, that's exactly right.
Not just weaponry, but the fact that we are such, you know, constant supporters of Israel on the international scene and sort of diplomatically, anything they do is warranted because of what the United States gives them in support.
So anything they do is just completely fine because it has United States backing and they can't face any consequences for that.
That runs through from Israel-Palestine issues to Israel-Lebanon issues to Israel-Syria issues to Israel-Iran issues.
Anything Israel do, it's a rubber stamp by the United States because we give them $3 billion a year, all this weaponry, and constant support diplomatically in order to erase any of Israel's wrongdoings.
So obviously, Israel and Hezbollah are warranted in saying that they'll hold America accountable if Israel decides to strike because we're actually giving them the ability to do all this kind of nonsense.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, as long as we're talking about stuff that I've been warning about this show for eight years or something, also, all of our guys in Kuwait are hostages.
All of our guys in Baghdad are hostages.
All the State Department weenies hiding out in that big compound there.
They're all Iranian hostages.
All our 80,000-plus troops and all the mercenaries and all the do-gooders and everybody else in Afghanistan are all Iranian hostages.
All of our assets in the Gulf, the Fifth Fleet, and all the rest of that, the Straits of Hormuz and, in fact, the global economy are Iranian hostages.
And never mind all of our little sock puppet dictatorships in the Caspian Basin and in Central Asia where I don't really know the particulars, but I'd have to bet you, John, that the Iranian CIA's got more influence there than the American CIA does and that if they want to kill some people and disrupt some things and, you know, screw up America's sock puppet dictatorships like Islam Karamov in Uzbekistan or something like that, who knows?
But I'm just betting they got the ability to do that.
Why wouldn't they have developed that ability?
That's all they got is asymmetric war.
So how do you fight an empire?
Well, I don't know, shoot some of their sock puppets in the head, for example.
You know, you don't have to use that much imagination.
Yeah, they would probably target U.S. assets first and hold off on puppet dictators because of one reason.
And don't discount the power of what we've seen in the Arab Spring.
I think that one of the, you know, restraining factors on the Obama administration is exactly that attacking Iran would change the framework and change the sort of dialogue and how people view the popular perception of the Arab Spring.
So right now, you know, across the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, there are popular movements, some not so popular, some minority, but there are movements trying to overthrow their governments, just like happened in Tunisia and Egypt.
And I think that if the United States launches another war in the Middle East, that dialogue could change and the target could be the imperial crusader as opposed to, you know, the overthrowing Saudi Arabia or whatever.
And so I think that the United States doesn't discount that either.
The backlash could be huge.
You know, I was reading a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report that was released back in June, and it said exactly this.
It said the challenge is to maintain imperial dominance over the region, but to avoid the messy backlash, quote-unquote, and embarrassing support for human rights.
The report acknowledged that previous deployments, military deployments in Saudi Arabia and Iraq generated violent local opposition.
And by the way, wink, wink, Al-Qaeda.
And so we don't want to get into that kind of garbage again.
So they're looking to try and be the imperial overlord of the region, but do it sort of softly and not so overtly like another preemptive invasion of an unthreatening country like Iraq or Iran.
Yeah, well, that's part of what the military is saying, too, is that we don't really need all these lily pad bases.
I mean, we can actually dominate the entire planet from Missouri, but certainly we have Guam and Diego Garcia.
That was what it's in David Vine's book.
I forget, maybe it was a CIA report, but I think it was a military report looking toward the future.
And it said by 2015, we could rule the whole planet from Guam and Diego Garcia.
And I guess Missouri, too.
And that means stealth bombers, long range stealth bombers, is what that means.
What else do you need?
The ability to kill anyone as soon as you threaten to.
Right.
What else do you need after that?
That's right.
I'm going to kill you in like 15 minutes.
Well, and, you know, the Obama administration is working so hard on this.
They want to put conventional explosives on the tips of three stage intercontinental ballistic missiles, and maybe they'll start, you know, species ending nuclear holocaust accidentally, or maybe they won't.
But if not, that makes a great way to kill somebody within twenty nine minutes, at least, you know, anywhere in the world.
Yeah, you bet.
I mean, what we've seen actually is that the Obama administration and President Obama specifically is prone to violence and bloodshed, but he especially likes violence and bloodshed when it's on the cheap and when it's secret.
And so you can do it on the cheap.
You can have imperial hegemony and kill anyone in 15 minutes on the cheap and when it's secret without having, you know, the traditional style empire in the Middle East.
You can have drones and you can have those special bases in Guam and Diego Garcia from which jets can bomb anyone at any time.
And this is the way that, you know, this is the way that things are going.
And I just want to reiterate that Obama's opposition to a needless war on Iran has nothing to do with the moral implications of it, of attacking an unprovoked country, a country that's not provoking you.
It has nothing to do with the fact that the human costs of the war would be so immense as to be almost unthinkable, you know, on an immediate basis, sort of shock and awe.
It has to do with, well, we need to maintain our hegemony in the Middle East so we can't go cowboying around, you know, as the Bush administration did.
And then, you know, people in the foreign policy elite recognize that the Bush administration's war on Iraq was so horrible in a strategic sense, even from their own perspective, given that, you know, now Iran is with the Da'wah Party and, you know, is more influenced by Iran and so on and so forth.
So, you know, there's a collective understanding that you can't just do that again.
I think it's beneficial, on the one hand, because we won't see a war on Iran any time soon unless Netanyahu goes nuts.
But it's also, you know, it requires some more scrutiny, because leaders are thinking differently about how to maintain ultimate sort of authoritarian control over an entire region.
Yeah, well, it's always a scramble.
They call it leading from behind.
I call it scrambling to catch up, but, you know, they're just going to keep trying.
And they'll just keep making matters worse the harder they try, just like, same as always.
It's really a great strategy.
I forget, you know, I'm sure Ludwig von Mises and all these geniuses have, you know, great terms for it all, but just the way government fails upward, especially in foreign policy, man, the bigger mess you make, the better it is for your department's longer term budget future, you know?
Definitely.
I wrote a piece recently about Syria, in which I took Hayek's concept of fatal conceit.
He described a fatal conceit being that, you know...
The local information problem, you mean?
Exactly.
So, for the listeners, leaders think that they can just basically redraw the entire, you know, redesign an entire economy to their own wishes and, you know, understand production and all the local knowledge that's actually needed, and they can't, and that's a fatal conceit because they end up ruining things.
And this is the same thing with places like Iran or Syria.
They have this small group of knuckleheads in the executive branch that think they can, you know, control the outcome of severely complex conflicts and geopolitical situations with the touch of, like, they have a wand in their hand or something, and they can't do that.
They don't know all of the contingencies, they don't know the consequences, they can't control the future.
And as soon as we stop this, you know, collective deference to authority in this country that especially the electorate has, you know, these wise leaders taking care of us and shaping the world for our betterment, we need to drop that and realize that these guys don't know what they're doing, and that's the ultimate argument for non-intervention, is that these jerks don't know what the hell they're doing.
Right.
Yeah, I saw a headline today, earlier, Iran calls for a new world order.
Hell, it couldn't be any worse than the one we've got now.
It just, yeah, anyway.
All right.
We're all out of time.
Thanks very much for your time, John.
All right.
Thank you.
Good talking to you.
Everybody, that's John Glazer, assistant editor at Antiwar.com.
And we'll be right back after this.
