02/13/08 – John Taylor – The Scott Horton Show

Anti-war radio, I'm Scott Houghton, thanks for tuning in.
And our next guest is John Taylor.
He's been writing lately for antiwar.com, former Texas oil man.
And his new one is God versus Elliott Abrams, Advantage Abrams.
And I thought, wow, when I saw that headline, this National Security Council staffer must be inordinately powerful that he can take on the almighty and win.
But apparently that's the deal.
So welcome to the show, John.
Thanks very much, Scott.
How are you?
I'm great.
Good to have you on here.
How could it possibly be that a mere mortal on the National Security Council can thwart the will of Jehovah himself?
Well, I suspect he has some help, and that although George Bush says he would like to establish a Palestinian state, my suspicion is that he really has no interest in doing so, and that in fact, Elliott Abrams is a very convenient person to have on the National Security Council, because clearly he doesn't want to have a Palestinian state.
Yeah, you quote Bush here saying, God told me, George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq.
And I did.
Now I feel God's words coming to me.
Go and get the Palestinians their state.
That's how God talks.
And by God, I'm going to do it, he said.
So I guess your point is that Bush is really willing to that cynically deploy the use of God told me to do something, even if he doesn't really mean it at all.
And then he can just make it look like it was Elliott Abrams fault for thwarting the will of God through him when really, he never wanted to help the Palestinians have their own state in the West Bank and Gaza in the first place.
I think that's right.
And you kind of have to wonder what kind of rubes he thought Abbas and his and his buddy who were who were visiting him in the Oval Office really were, I mean, what, they're gonna be so silly as to fall for this stuff.
Well, you know, I just heard one yesterday from Glenn Greenwald, where Mike McConnell went and told the Congress, there's an Al Qaeda plot that's going to target Congress itself and kill all of you if you don't pass this Protect America Act, and it'll be all your fault if you don't pass it.
And so they did.
I mean, it seems like, you know, oh, God told me to do it.
Al Qaeda is going to kill you if you don't vote our way.
These guys have no limit to their cynicism, the people that run this government.
I couldn't agree with you more.
And it's a very sad, sad kind of statement, or they seem to be ably abetted by the press.
And I don't want to get too far afield.
But I have been reading Tom Lantos's obituaries.
He's regularly lauded as having been honest and personifying integrity, commitment to democracy, and fought against racism.
Well, you know, that's that's really absurd.
Here's a guy who brought this Kuwaiti, alleged Kuwaiti nurse up before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus back in October of 90, when we were getting ready when we were getting ready to get into Gulf War One.
That was Lantos that did that.
Exactly.
It was it was it was Tom Lantos.
And it turns out that this nurse was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, that her appearance before Lantos's outfit, that is the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, which is simply a gathering of like minded politicians, was orchestrated by Hill and Knowlton.
And it just so happens that they were on the payroll of Citizens for a Free Kuwait, which was 99% funded by the Al-Sabah family.
In other words, the rulers of Kuwait who'd been kicked out on their ear by Saddam Hussein.
So we have this incredible hoax about that this nurse cooks up about babies being tossed out of incubators in a hospital in Kuwait City.
Lantos cooks up this deal with Hill and Knowlton and the Al-Sabah family.
It goes around the world several times.
It's cited by several members of Congress, especially senators, as their main reason for launching Gulf War One to kick Saddam out of Kuwait.
Well, it turns out to be a total hoax.
I mean, what kind of honesty and integrity is that from Mr. Lantos?
And how can the press totally ignore this fraud that helped us get into Gulf War One, you know, in all of the obituaries?
And the same thing goes for his commitment to democracy.
You know, one of his things when we were coming up to Gulf War Two was that, hey, we're going to put a democracy in Baghdad and we're going to kick out Saddam.
Well, when he was saying that, he happened to be talking to a member of the Knesset, a woman named Colette Avital, and he said to her something to the effect of, my dear Colette, don't worry, we'll kick that bastard Saddam out and we're going to put a pro-Western dictator in his place.
So, I mean, where's the integrity?
Where's the commitment to democracy?
It's absurd.
You know, I actually have the clip of our young so-called nurse, daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador at the $10 million Hill and Knowlton PR conference put on in 1990 right here.
John, hang tight.
Committee from a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl.
The claim is she cannot be identified for fear of reprisals.
While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers coming to the hospital with guns.
They took the babies out of incubators, took incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor.
Those are some pretty convincing tears.
You got to hand it to her.
She's a good little actress.
Hey, with all that money at stake, I'd be a good actor.
Myself.
Anyway, that's good stuff.
All right.
So now tell me all about this guy, Elliott Abrams.
People know about George Bush and Dick Cheney and Connelly's rice and Colin Powell, but so often the general public gets lost and probably don't know why they should be interested in who are the third and the fourth level guys running the bureaucracies in Washington, D.C.
I think it's kind of gotten across that it matters this time because the neocons have really been sort of a different breed in this administration.
But, you know, for people who don't know who Elliott Abrams is or why they should care, why don't you give us some background?
Well, Abrams has been around for quite a while.
He had the he was, I believe, assistant secretary of state for Latin American Affairs for Ronald Reagan, and he got himself into a little trouble during Iran Contra for lying to Congress about supply arrangements for the Contra.
Pretty convoluted story about the sultan of Brunei, Israeli arms dealers, weapons from Iran.
I don't pretend to be an expert there, but basically he was about to be indicted for a felony of lying to Congress, but he pled to, I believe, withholding information, which is a misdemeanor and not a felony.
He didn't get any jail time, and everybody thought he'd be out of government for a long time.
I shouldn't say a long time, out of government forever.
I suspect he thought the same thing because he was something of a pundit between being kicked out of the Reagan administration and pleading to a misdemeanor and getting back into the Bush 2 administration.
He wrote a lot of remarkable stuff.
As you know, I recently wrote a small piece about Abrams for antiwar.com.
I really didn't get into some of the remarkable things which he put in a book called Faith and Fear that he wrote in 1997, and I don't want to go through it all.
I will mention that the New York Observer, a fellow named Phil Weiss, published a very interesting synopsis of Elliot Abrams' book, Faith and Fear, back in August of 2003.
Basically, Weiss calls him a zealot and a fanatic.
In this book, he decries intermarriage between Jews and Christians.
He thinks it's a great idea for evangelicals and Jews to work together for Israel's benefit, which I find kind of remarkable.
I guess it's happened, but a lot of very unpleasant things, and I'm not going to say any of them, were said by evangelicals about Jews.
For him to say, we need to get together to protect Israel, and we can forget about all these unpleasant things that were said, and we can forget about the evangelicals' position on evolution, etc., etc., seems a little silly.
Jim Loeb has actually talked about this.
In fact, Justin, in his article on antiwar.com today, kind of talks about the alliance that the neoconservatives made with all the money powers in the conservative movement.
To a great degree, that includes the evangelical Christians.
I know Jim Loeb has told me before that Irving Crystal arranged for Jerry Falwell to be bought a giant plane to fly around by the Israel lobby.
Somebody asked him, is this really a good idea?
Ultimately, this guy's calling for Jesus to come back and kill all the Jews.
Is this really a good idea, getting cozy with these guys?
Irving Crystal responded, well, it's their theology.
It's our Israel.
I'm not much of an Israeli partisan.
I'm from Austin, but boy, if I was from there, I would think that that was a really dangerous strategy.
Yeah, not only a dangerous strategy, a lot of the stuff that's been said is really distasteful.
There is one quote from Abrams' book, Faith and Fear, that I feel I should share.
He says, quote, surely intermarriage rates were held down in the past by anti-Semitism.
This age-old protection against intermarriage is evaporating.
Now, I find that amazing.
I was waiting for the next paragraph to have him say, well, anti-Semitism is really terrible and we need to fight it.
But I had to wait about another hundred pages or so before he denounced anti-Semitism in another context.
In this book, the guy is so much of a zealot that in certain circumstances, maybe anti-Semitism is okay.
Personally, I find that unacceptable.
But anyway, this guy who's a zealot and a fanatic is in charge of the Arab-Israeli, or I should say, the Israeli-Palestinian portfolio on the National Security Council.
Now, what does that mean, in charge of the portfolio?
Well, he is the primary advisor to the National Security Advisor that used to be Condoleezza Rice.
It's now a guy named Steve Hadley.
And I'm sure he also has George Bush's ear.
And he has been extraordinarily pro-Israel, which I think suits Condoleezza Rice, Hadley, and George Bush, because I don't think any of those three are really keen to take on the Israel lobby, the Evangelicals, AIPAC, because those people are major supporters of the right-wing Republicans.
So for Elliott Abrams to be stifling any movement toward peace is quite acceptable to the Bush administration, as far as I can see.
But when he blocks the road map, that is, when he blocks land for peace, he produces these tensions in the Middle East.
When you have 400 roadblocks, when you have continuing settlement activity in the West Bank, which is, after all, only 20% of historic Palestine, when you have a separation wall, which really separates Palestinians from Palestinians, because it cuts deeply into the West Bank, when you have that kind of ongoing process, you create tensions, which will eventually explode.
Good example, the Abbas regime came in, Arafat died, Abbas became president of Palestine, and he wasn't able to bring about any amelioration of the conditions that Palestinians lived under.
So lo and behold, when they had an election, Hamas won the vast majority of seats.
Right.
Well, and even we could rewind a little bit further, and this is actually one of the things I really liked about this article, is you kind of went step by step through, and I don't even think this is really your point, but it all kind of gets laid out anyway, the insanity of America's policy, or maybe it's very sane, but it surely doesn't make a lot of sense, at least to me, the policy that America and Israel have had toward the Palestinians throughout the Bush years, it was isolate Arafat, he's the devil himself, he's got to be, you know, put under house arrest and bombed and the Fatah PLO movement has to be completely marginalized and destroyed.
So they did that.
Then they put in this ineffectual guy, they refuse to even let him collect his taxes so he can buy his votes.
And they demand these free elections when, which Hamas is basically guaranteed to win.
And after all the time of saying no, the Israelis don't have to negotiate with Arafat and the PLO types because they weren't democratically elected, they only have to deal with a legitimate democratically elected government, then Hamas gets elected and they go, oh no, Hamas, well they're not legitimate at all, it doesn't matter if they're elected or not.
And just now, you know, Gaza's turned into a prison by the sea and and they're, you know, moving settlers into, more and more into eastern Jerusalem and into the West Bank and it's all by the problems that they create in the first place.
Arafat would have been much easier to work with this whole time if they'd, you know, dealt with him.
Yeah, he was a knowledge leader, he's gone now, it's true.
I mean, it's a terrible situation now that you have Hamas in Gaza and you have a government on the West Bank whose primary support that is the United States and Israel are also regarded as the primary tormentors of the Palestinians.
So, in fact, the constituents of Mahmoud Abbas are actually being oppressed by the people that are supporting Abbas.
So, I kind of wonder how much longer is he going to be in power and when he goes are we going to have a Hamas regime on the West Bank as well?
Right, yeah, because there's really nobody else to replace him, is there?
No, no, and you kind of, according to what I've been hearing, if they had an election now on the West Bank, the Fatah party would be finished and Hamas would be elected there too.
It's, you know, what advantage is there to dismantling the forces of resistance, resistance to the Israeli occupation, resistance to Israeli settlement, if the settlement activity is going to continue?
I mean, it's remarkable, I mean, it's nonsensical.
Well, you know, this is just an analogy.
I know in terms of Iran, the hawks in the American administration have always basically considered the moderates and the reformers, anybody between them and the craziest of the ayatollahs, basically, to be the enemy.
How are you supposed to have a revolution if you have this big cushion in the middle?
You got to, you know, marginalize the moderates in order that the craziest Iranians will be in charge because they're easier to have a war with.
And I guess in that sense, you know, if that was the policy, then maybe that does make sense to go ahead and completely, you know, make a clean break from land for peace and create a situation where Hamas does rule in the West Bank and Gaza.
So then that would justify finally, quote unquote, doing something about it and, you know, kicking them all out of the West Bank and Gaza, perhaps into Jordan and Egypt, that kind of thing.
Well, it's interesting that Mike Huckabee supports the Palestinian state.
He just happens to support it in Saudi Arabia or Egypt.
Yeah.
Oh, there's plenty of land in the Arab world that they could have.
It's also kind of funny getting back to Lantos, that, you know, having been a Holocaust survivor, he was quite willing to cozy up to Adigor Lieberman, whose party in the Israeli parliament advocated or advocates expelling all the Palestinians, not only from the West Bank, but also from Israel proper.
Yeah, I found that sort of amusing in a way, too.
Well, in fact, didn't he just he broke with Olmert because he was too crazy for Olmert?
That's right.
I think he got to the position of deputy prime minister.
I mean, this guy's this guy's an out and out racist.
We've got Lantos, who's a Holocaust survivor who you'd have liked to think might have learned something about racism from from the murder of six million Jews.
But instead, you know, he supports this racist guy.
Remarkable.
Yeah.
Well, so now this guy, Elliott Abrams, has basically all along been doing what he could to create this policy.
How much of this policy is actually his?
This is a very interesting question, isn't it?
Because you could say that he's hired on as sort of the ultimate flak catcher, you know, who could be more pro-Israel than than Elliott Abrams.
So how can you disagree with what the Bush administration is doing?
Oh, I see.
So you could even take that from the reverse sense.
Any concessions that America would insist that Israel make, they would that the Israelis would have to see it as reasonable because it's Elliott Abrams.
You could take it that way.
But I don't think they're going to be any I don't think the United States will be insisting on any on on any concessions from Israel.
And I don't think Israel will make any significant concessions.
They obviously want to keep large swaths of the West Bank.
They want to keep the Golan Heights.
And I don't see anyone in the United any serious politician in the United States having the political will to force them to to give up the West Bank.
I mean, they might give up some cities and we might have the proverbial Bantustan or Palestine on the West Bank.
But I think it's having as far as having a viable state consisting of, you know, ninety five, ninety six percent of the West Bank.
I think I think it's absurd to think that we're going to push for that.
There's nothing nothing shows that we will.
So it seems I hate I hate to be so negative, but it seems we're going to have, you know, an internal struggle over the Palestinian question.
Well, I guess if I can try to take the side of the Israeli hawks, I mean, do they have an argument that, listen, if we give up the West Bank and the Golan Heights, that, you know, we'll be at greater risk?
You know, I guess the West Bank is the high ground.
That's where they launched the war from in 67 or whatever.
That kind of thing is what they say, right?
Yeah.
Well, you if you.
First of all, Israel is far more powerful than any combination of nations in the Middle East.
They have 200 nuclear weapons, have a very good army, very good air force.
Well, the army probably has been degraded a little by having to be on police duty in the West Bank for the last 40 years or so.
So I don't think that a weak and divided Palestinian state provides any real risk.
I think by continuing to hold on and settle the territories, ultimately, there is a tremendous demographic risk, because you can probably see way out into the future.
You want to say way out, maybe 40, 50 years when they're going to be more Muslims and Christians in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean than there are Jews.
And then you will truly have an apartheid situation where a minority is ruling a majority.
So well, so I guess where we are now, we're in the middle of somebody's plan because this is no ending point or anything.
This is no long term policy the way we're going.
I don't think what's the end game here.
I don't think there is one.
I think the idea is just to see if we can keep this under control.
Just low level occupation and conflict forever.
Apparently.
I mean, I don't see anybody that really wants to settle it, because I don't think people have, as I said, the political will to push land for peace.
Yeah.
You know, I read something, I guess years ago now, that said that the Israeli people in the opinion polls and so forth, they were more than happy to support a peace candidate to support, I guess, you know, the labor types and people who wanted to do land for peace if the Americans were on board and they thought it was actually going to happen, if the Americans were really going to make it happen.
Otherwise, they wanted Ariel Sharon, because at least he can provide security.
And so that was basically how Likud won then.
I mean, I just, I think the Israelis have a much higher desire for peace than their supporters in the United States.
I think they're more willing to compromise.
But until they're pushed, you know, the other side is going to win.
And that's why I don't see any obvious ending here.
I don't see any endgame.
Well, what about America's West Bank over there in Iraq?
Do you fear that, you know, staying over there is going to lead to some kind of escalation of hostilities, perhaps Syria, Iran, Lebanon again?
I think the question is, does the United States want to attack Iran?
Obviously, there are elements of the government that would like to.
It seems like the neocons are infiltrating John McCain's campaign.
And yeah.
And so if he were to get elected, I think there would be a very good chance of the confrontation with Iran.
All right.
Well, I want to again, remind everybody, this article we ran on Antiwar.com yesterday.
It's God versus Elliott Abrams.
Advantage Abrams by John Taylor.
And you can find it if you go to Antiwar.com today and click on more viewpoints.
You can find it there.
And I want to thank you very much for your time today, John.
Thanks, Scott.
It was nice to chat.