06/25/13 – Stephen Zunes – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, Shel, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
And our first guest on the show today is our good friend Stephen Zunis, this time writing at truthout.org, troubling implications of Susan Rice's appointment as National Security Advisor.
Don't tell me that she's going to sit around and do nothing with her thumb up or something as a gigantic 9-11 attack happens on her watch, like the last Rice National Security Advisor we had, or maybe she'll lie us into war with a country.
Another one.
Welcome back to the show, Stephen.
How are you doing?
Very good.
Thank you.
This lady does like to lie us into war.
Isn't she the one who claimed that Muammar Gaddafi was passing out Viagra to his military so they could rape their way across Libya to Benghazi?
Samantha Power has been one who has supported this idea of humanitarian intervention.
She was a big proponent of intervention in Bosnia, support of the intervention in Libya, and the like.
At the same time, she's not a neoconservative, not an underpennant hawk.
In fact, she was a very outspoken opponent of the invasion of Iraq.
She has been a little bit- Well, wait a minute.
We're not talking about Susan Rice.
We're talking about Samantha Power.
We're talking about Samantha Power.
Oh, okay.
Samantha Power.
She's more of a classic liberal hawk, if you will, than a neocon.
She's been somewhat nuanced, and some of her work on human rights has been admirable, in my view, taken more seriously than other people, but at the same time, she's one of those who is much more likely to criticize human rights abuses by governments we don't like than by governments we're allied with.
Yeah.
She's the one who really, and I guess we'll get back to Susan Rice in a minute, but Samantha Power probably more famously, or she's sort of the leader right now in public opinion in D.C. anyway, elite opinion, pushing this narrative that the worst thing that happened during the Bush administration wasn't the strangling of a million Iraqis to death by Bill Clinton.
It was his failure to intervene in Rwanda, and then that becomes the model for every other conflict in the world, including Syria today, that we have to intervene to protect the Hutus of tomorrow, or the Tutsis, I guess.
Exactly.
Exactly.
She's been a big proponent of this, including taking a more active stance in terms of Darfur and the like, and definitely believes in a very assertive foreign policy, ostensibly in the cause of human rights.
Okay, and now she's now been moved up to U.N. Ambassador from the position of Deputy Assistant Secretary of Nothing at the National Security Council, and she actually was cited complaining in Michael Hastings' great piece for Rolling Stone about the war in Libya, that she was tired of being relegated to the bottom ranks of the National Security Council, and teaching Iraqis how to paint schools, and do gooder rinky-dink stuff, that was the quote.
She wanted attention.
She wanted power and influence, and so she saw the, well, basically Qaddafi's putting down of the protest movement in Libya as her chance to advance herself, and so mongered a war in Libya.
She had been very upset in many ways that you, that the Obama administration had appointed a number of people, actually who were to her right, that people like Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.
She was a very big critic of Clinton, especially for her support for the Iraq war.
She saw herself, you know, as more of an idealist, more into, you know, seeing human rights as of a greater emphasis, so basically we're seeing two kinds of interventionists here.
We're seeing, you know, people like Hillary Clinton, who are getting more conventional, mainstream interventionists, and then you have, you know, Samantha Power, that likes to put herself on a higher moral plane, because, you know, saying this is not about empire, this is not about oil, you know, I wouldn't support an Iraq-type thing, but if there is a, you know, genocidal-type situation, this is where we need to assert a military force.
And then, as far as speaking personally, even though I very much, as you know, oppose the intervention in Libya, I very much oppose intervention in Syria, you know, I could see theoretically in a situation, you know, like Rwanda, where there was a clear-cut case of genocide, where some kind of humanitarian intervention might be appropriate, but, in theory, but in practice, you know, there's not a whole lot the United States can do realistically to prevent human rights abuses in countries we don't have much control over.
However, if we're really concerned about human rights, the first, what we should do first and foremost, before we even start talking about humanitarian intervention, before we even start talking about the responsibility to protect, we need to say, hey, where is the United States supporting repression?
What about all these dictators that the United States is sending arms to?
What about the frequent use of the veto power to protect Israel from condemnation for its engagement in war crimes?
In other words, though I think reasonable people can disagree about humanitarian intervention in certain cases, we shouldn't even, my big critique about Samantha Power is not her openness on that, per se, but the fact that she is still part of the foreign policy establishment which rationalizes for support for repressive dictatorships, sort of exposing this whole myth that we really do care about human rights in our foreign policy.
Yeah, and I mean, look, do-go-to-Rinky-Dink stuff and her wanting a promotion and a pat on the head aside, I know people who at least have read her books and say she really, really believes in this America as Superman to go save the day and every crisis is another Rwanda where the fact that we have no national interest there is what proves how moral and high-minded we are by intervening and all that kind of stuff.
In essence, though, to the degree to which she believes all that stuff and repeats it, it's just PR for liberal support for the empire.
This is a right-wing nationalist, imperialist, corporatist state at war and yes, it's nice to have a little bit of baby blue window dressing and call it international law as you blow little children apart with your hellfire missiles.
And that's all she is, is just, she's just speaking.
In many ways, she gives a liberal cover for this because she has, again, to her credit, taken somewhat more independent critical stances on things like Iraq and Israel and a few other things that in many ways gives her more credibility when she starts talking about the use of U.S. force at other places.
Yeah, and it gives the empire credibility.
Exactly, exactly.
Not everybody up there is Donald Rumsfeld.
They all just agree with everything that he would do somehow.
That's funny.
And yeah, of course, the splinter in your eye and never mind the plank in mine is the name of the same song that they just sing over and over again.
And especially, look at the case of Libya where they sold that as some kind of humanitarian intervention when clearly it had nothing to do with that.
It had everything to do with, as Hastings reported in that same article, had everything to do with power getting a promotion, had everything to do with Hillary Clinton's point of view that we had a real bad PR, the empire had a real bad PR problem with our support for Mubarak that the people of Egypt wanted so badly to overthrow and every other dictator in the region.
And so they needed to overthrow an expendable puppet like Gaddafi, who wasn't that close of a friend, even though they had brought him in from the cold in 03, just to try to make it look like America was on the side of the little guy in any case in the region.
You know, well said, well said.
And of course, the Chinese had oil interests there.
And it's nice to not have that anymore, too.
And it's especially having Samantha Power in a role like the United Nations that is in many ways the public face of the United States and foreign policy.
And because she has all this kind of human rights credibility in the eyes of some, she can get away, I think, with supporting policies in ways that a lot of people in the foreign policy establishment would not.
At the same time, in terms of her own personal ambitions, one of the frustrating things about you and Ambassador, of course, is that you pretty much do what the president says you should do.
And they don't take a lot of initiative and leadership.
So in many ways, I'm actually more concerned, I'm less concerned about the Samantha Power appointment at the UN as I am about the Susan Rice appointment of the National Security Council.
Right.
Well, that was where I tried to start.
But maybe you couldn't hear me.
I was asking, isn't she the lady that lied us into war in Libya by telling the United Nations and therefore the American people by way of our own critical media that Gaddafi was passing out Viagra to commit mass rape, war crimes all the way to Benghazi?
Yes, she she I don't remember that specific thing, but she definitely did hype the war in a big way.
So, you know, she was.
And of course, I got a funny story about that, Stephen.
Let me tell you real quick.
I was driving down Sunset listening to some right wing Rush Limbaugh clone on the AM radio in L.A. and his whole thing was even Susan Rice says.
That Gaddafi's mass rape and everybody between Tripoli and Benghazi.
And so that's how, you know, it's true because of what a left wing liberal she is.
So that's what we call confirmation bias.
Sorry.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm concerned about Susan Rice on a number of things.
You know, one is that she is one of the more hawkish people vis-a-vis Israel and Palestine.
She's very, very close to the to attend to Netanyahu's perspectives.
She has been highly undermined the United Nations left and right when it's tried to investigate well-documented war crimes by the Israeli government.
She cast a veto for a very mildly worded resolution that simply reiterated the illegality of the Israeli settlement and simply called for a freeze, you know, not even not even calling for their withdrawal as legally they're required to do.
And as for previous U.N. Security Council resolutions did demand, I mean, even Richard Nixon recognized that the Israeli settlements were illegal.
And she's also cozied up to a number of rather notorious African dictatorships when the dictator Ethiopia died a couple of years ago.
She had this eulogy about what a great man and good friend he was.
She has supported.
Actually, stop right there, Stephen.
Stephen, if you could, we got time.
Why don't you go ahead and tell us what a great man Mellis wasn't?
Well, certainly he had basically rigged, rigged elections, jailed opponents.
Political repression and torture was widespread.
The people had been thrilled back when the communist led Derg had been thrown out in a popular revolution back in the early 1990s.
But he had essentially brought in a new one party state and had really stifled the efforts of the Egyptians to try to build a more democratic society after years of war and communism and then prior to that, years of a pretty reactionary emperor.
And I mean, can you talk about like some of the so-called cleansing of the Oromos and some of these track of all the different internal wars there?
The worst part, actually, I think, is that there has been her support for the people that ended up being victorious in Rwanda.
They threw out the genocide heirs, which were good.
But the RPF, the rebel group, has been supporting some pretty sketchy characters in the Congo, including a group that has committed a huge series of major atrocities, killed not just UN forces, but killed, raped, plundered, you know, hundreds, literally hundreds of thousands of Congolese.
And her rationalization for it is just ridiculous.
She was saying, well, you know, these guys would be killing each other anyway, so our support isn't making that big a difference.
This kind of rationalization, and she really doesn't have an excuse here.
I mean, a lot of people are just ignorant about Africa, but she actually served in the Clinton administration as Secretary of State for African Affairs.
So she actually knows the continent.
She knows who these people are.
She is not being naïve.
And her proudest accomplishments in the Clinton years was pushing certain neoliberal economic plans on the societies that, due to their poverty and dependency and experience with colonialism, you know, ended up exacerbating their problems rather than helping them.
So even in an area of expertise like Africa, where she's gotten, you know, some kudos in the past, you know, there's quite a bit of controversy there as well.
Now, you know, if we can go back to 2011 and the war in Libya, there were a few different pieces like this, one of them in the Daily Beast, which is, I guess, Newsweek now, about the three women.
It was Rice, Power, and Clinton who got together and decided they really wanted to do this thing in Libya.
And in fact, according to all press reports, as far as I know, never contradicted over the objections of Defense Secretary Gates, who Obama had inherited from Bush, who was a George Bush senior Republican, basically.
And they decided to do this thing.
And so we already covered a couple of the motives.
As I said, I'm pretty convinced that, and I think Hastings reported this, that Hillary really wanted to try to take control of the narrative and really, you know, try to push that thing where America cares about the little guy, when in fact, America supported every dictatorship that people were protesting against during the...
That was the...
Clinton was a big supporter of the monarchy in Bahrain, which was brutally suppressing a nonviolent pro-democracy struggle there.
No complaints when the Saudis invaded that island nation to help the regime suppress the popular uprising, even though in terms of the actual sheer numbers on the street relative to the population, as well as to its nonviolent discipline, and the potential for various historical reasons for Bahrain actually to become a stable, democratic, secular society.
I mean, Bahrain had more hope than virtually any country there.
And what was the United States reaction to support the brutal suppression of the pro-democracy government, even as we were justifying intervention in Libya on the same grounds?
Yeah.
Well, and right after they had just been completely clumsily caught out doing everything they could to keep Mubarak in Egypt, and then trying to settle for Omar Suleiman, his head of the secret torture police, and not even getting him...
Torture in chief, Suleiman, yeah.
And so...
But the thing of it is...
So, and then, obviously, we talked about how Samantha Power, she didn't want to do good or rinky-dink stuff.
She wanted detention and a promotion and things like that.
So that was part, at least, of her motivation there, again, as reported by Hastings.
But I think, you know, somewhere in there, we're talking about there's some true belief here that, yeah, this is like one of those Rwanda things, and this is the chance to demonstrate our wonderful idea of America really is Superman, and really our army does exist to go and save the day for people and whatever like that.
But then, so the question I'm trying to get to, which I'm not very good at forming here, obviously, is something about how, yeah, but what about the enemy?
The only enemies that the American people actually have, which is those who are willing to commit suicide trying to kill civilians of us, right?
Those are the only real problematic problems that the American people face in the world.
And that's who we fought the war for, was for the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and the Libyan veterans of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
And didn't they know, just like in Syria now, don't they know that these are the mujahideen?
Don't they know that by overthrowing a secular commie, and I know he wasn't like a pure Marxist or whatever, he was basically an atheist, Qaddafi, compared certainly to what they've got now.
And, I mean, what in the world, are they just not taking that into account at all?
Or they just think, wonderful, we'll have more crisis to exploit further on into Mali and Nigeria?
Or what is it with these people, man, help me.
I don't think, actually the more I study the inner workings of US foreign policy, the less prone I am to conspiracies, and more I'm into appreciating the role of ideology, that these guys really do believe a lot of their stuff.
I mean, I think they really did think that they could establish a secular, stable, democratic Libya.
And on one level, the fact that they had relatively free and fair elections, and they elected some fairly immoderate secular forces to power, and they say, hey, see, this works.
What they don't take into account, though, is out of a country of barely 6 million people, you have over 200,000 militiamen under arms, many of which are indeed part of these radical Salafi groups, some of which are affiliated with Al-Qaeda, who do not recognize this nice democratically elected secular government.
And they're basically running roughshod, and doing things like, you have a number of people who are in high positions, very responsible, fairly moderate people, who, like maybe in the early days of Qaddafi's regime, had a role, say, as an ambassador or something like that, but then they eventually figured out Qaddafi was crazy, and they resigned.
But because of that short period of time, these radical armed people saying, they cannot be part of this new government at all, and so the parliament was saying, no, let's try to find a compromise.
This militia surrounds the parliament building, guns pointed, and said, pass this law or else.
And they end up passing the law.
And this is how these guys are operating.
There was a big battle just a few months ago, battling over control of the Tripoli airport, because these rival militias were wanting to have their share of the spoils.
I read a little item about some hotel where some militia leader hadn't paid his hotel bill in six months, and finally the hotel owner forced him to leave, and the guy came back with his militia that afternoon and totally shot up the place.
And of course, what most Americans are familiar with the militias about, of course, would be the killing of the ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi last summer.
And while the Republicans are trying to manufacture a scandal, exaggerating some of the details of those final hours, the big questions they should be asking are this.
Why do we end up helping to support and foment a rebellion that led all these guys to get these guns and be capable of doing that kind of thing in the first place?
That's the big question.
And furthermore, when people like Susan Power and others, that would be a great massacre, they said they could be as many as 10,000 people killed if we don't stop them.
But in the war of the U.S. support, over 30,000 people were killed, and there are still people dying to this day.
Yeah, no, they claimed 100,000.
So your point's still good, though.
But it just makes their lie even more ridiculous.
You know, when Bill Clinton pretended 100,000 people had died at the, you know, civilians had died at the hands of the Serbs in Kosovo, at least he was pretending they had already died.
But in this case, they were just pretending that these people weren't going to die.
Trust us, because we can see the future.
He's going to kill 100,000 men, women, and children if we don't stop them.
There's an interesting thing about Kosovo, too, and you still hear this.
Now, prior to the launch of the NATO bombing campaign in February of 1999, you had, there were, the Serbs were indeed engaged in some pretty brutal counterinsurgency kind of campaigns that were taking the lives of Kosovo civilians.
But the full-scale ethnic cleansing did not begin until NATO said, OK, all the OECD inspectors get out, we're going to start bombing, and they started bombing.
That's when the ethnic cleansing began, on the full scale.
And that's, and yet to this day, you said, oh, NATO intervened in response to the ethnic cleansing.
No, the ethnic cleansing, the full-scale cleansing, when you had hundreds of thousands of people being forced out and the really nasty stuff started, that was only after the bombing began.
And indeed, statistically, empirically, people find that when there is third-party intervention, even in a humanitarian responsibility to protect kind of scenario, it virtually always increases the rate of killing.
And it prolongs the conflict, because the dictator was saying, oh, I have nothing to lose now.
The gloves come completely off, and they go all out.
And then the rebels say, hey, we don't need to compromise or negotiate, because we have a back of these powerful Western powers.
So it makes things so, so even, so even if we were to assume this all has pure humanitarian intention, there's just not geopolitical or economic or other things involved.
Even if we assume the best of the Susan Powers and the, I mean, Samantha Powers and Susan Rice and people like that, even using that kind of logic, that this kind of military intervention ends up costing more lives than it saves.
Yeah.
Well, and then there's the interesting fact that they always still have to lie us in with the war.
And they never did find the 100,000 dead Kosovar men, women, and children.
It was a few thousand.
They were all fighting-age males.
Whether they were armed at the time they were killed, I don't know.
But as John Pilger reported then, the FBI packed up and went home after two weeks.
They looked for the mass graves.
There were no mass graves.
The whole thing was just a Bill Clinton hoax, just like Waco, just like everything else.
Just like Saddam's weapons of mass destruction that he kept bombing for eight years in a row.
A little side note there.
There were no 100,000 bodies.
Now so, well, I don't know.
I read a thing by Max Boot in the commentary saying, oh, thank God, it's Susan Rice.
She's going to save the day.
She can lie us into war in Syria.
We've got to go and help the cannibal suicide bomber, Zawahiri-loving jihadist as fast as we can over there.
And thank goodness we have her leadership now to help get it done.
I'm paraphrasing roughly.
It's very, I mean, there are a whole number of areas I've been disappointed about Obama on.
But I think the foreign policy realm, I think more than any other.
Because Iran, as sort of the alternative, not just to Bush, but to traditional Democrats like Hillary Clinton as well.
He said, if you elect me, you will not just end the war, but will end the mentality that led to the Iraq War in the first place.
Yet the majority of the people he's appointed have been supporters, were supporters of the Iraq War.
And even people like Samantha Power, who opposed the war, is still one, as you have pointed out, who tends to be enthusiastic about the prospects of U.S. military intervention elsewhere.
Yep.
Well, I don't agree with these two on everything, but it was pretty obvious in 07.
There were two honest men up on that stage, Kucinich and Gravel, whatever else you think of them.
They're decent men.
And then there are the three lizard beings from beyond the moon, or wherever they get these terrible senators, Clinton, Obama, and Edwards, all three of whom were completely and totally interchangeable with each other.
The only thing about them was that they were all worse from each other than each other in a hundred ways.
But they were all indistinguishable from each other.
Anybody who mistook and thought that Obama was over there in the category with Kucinich and Gravel must have been smoking crack.
He's just tall, black male Hillary Clinton is all he ever was.
That's what I'm saying.
Anyway, that's what I said in 07 when I first heard of him, too.
All right.
Hey, thanks very much.
I appreciate it.
My pleasure.
All right, everybody.
That's the great Stephen Zunis.
He's at Truthout.org with troubling implications of Susan Rice's appointment as national security advisor, especially on the Israel stuff.
This is really good.
Go take a look at it.
Would you?
Truthout.org.
We'll be right back.
Oh, man.
I'm late.
I sure hope I can make my flight.
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Me?
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Oh, easy.
Into the scanner.
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