07/22/13 – Nima Shirazi – The Scott Horton Show

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Okay, next up is Nima Shirazi.
His website is wideasleepinamerica.com.
Welcome back to the show.
Nima, how are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Great to be here.
Thanks.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And I was telling everybody earlier, but I want to make sure to get it on your interview archive too, so people know the great footnote, The Phantom Menace at Wide Asleep in America.
Another great chronicle, I guess, of 35, 40-something years' worth of Israeli government officials pretending the Iranians are making nuclear weapons, and it's never been true the whole time.
And isn't it hilarious to read quote after quote after quote in such context?
So I like referring people to that if they want to.
Yeah, thanks.
It's really, since I wrote it in December 2010, there have been well over 50 updates ever since.
And it's just a constant American and Israeli and other pundits here and there, politicians, pundits, commentators, warmongers, et cetera, constantly predicting Iranian nuclear weapons just around the corner.
They're getting closer and closer, closer and closer.
Just as Netanyahu said last week, yet again, on American television, right to Bob Schaefer, and was not challenged on it.
So that keeps happening, and it certainly keeps me busy.
Right.
Well, got 50 updates.
You know, what's funny is they're just taking it for granted that everybody knows nothing about this.
And so therefore, you know, premise one, you've got a big hole in your imagination when it comes to Iran's nuclear program.
Premise two, I can tell you whatever I want about it, and you'll believe it because you're afraid.
And so three, here we go.
They're about to have a nuke.
Whereas anybody who actually knows the first thing about the nonproliferation treaty or uranium or a damn thing in the world has anything to do with this, knows that it's just not true and it never has been true this whole time.
And in fact, it's a big, stupid lie.
Indeed.
But it's a very helpful lie if you're those folks.
But it's not like there's an informed debate about this among people who are informed.
Everyone who's informed and not a liar agrees.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Okay.
Good times.
Okay.
Good times.
All right.
So now, speaking of liars, let's talk about the language of power, Obama's humanitarian hawk and Israel's new gladiator at the U.N., Samantha Power.
With a name like that, I guess you're just destined for politics, right?
Exactly.
And she really does live up to it.
She's really just a kind of a militant careerist who, I mean, much like most people in certain government positions and who aspire to, you know, to even more and more power and influence, really will just bend all of their previously held principles to essentially whatever will be best to get them the next job, the next rung up on the ladder.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, you know, what's funny about that is, well, my favorite example of it anyway comes from the late, great Michael Hastings' work in Rolling Stone on the war in Libya and how, as people might remember, Samantha Power had denounced Hillary Clinton as a monster during the campaign, siding with Obama over Hillary in the primaries.
But then, oops, there was blowback from that because Hillary became the secretary of state in order to neutralize a powerful critic in the Senate.
Obama made her the secretary of state.
So then Samantha Power got regulated to the deputy assistant secretary of something or other goofing around, I guess, on the National Security Council and complained and is quoted in Hastings' piece, complaining about being relegated to do-gooder rinky-dink stuff like, you know, helping Iraqis with democracy and stuff like that that nobody cares about, obviously.
And she wanted some power and influence and some attention from the president.
She wanted a promotion.
And the war in Libya was a great opportunity for her to get some personal attention and maybe, you know, move up in the rank a little bit for next term.
And so if that means fighting for the Mujahideen of Benghazi, then, oh, well, whatever, dude.
I guess the blacks of Misrata are just going to have to suffer.
Yeah, exactly.
No, it's really true.
You know, she and she really did make a name for herself over Libya, basically hand in hand with Susan Rice, as well, who was previously the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and is now Obama's new national security advisor.
So yeah, back when Samantha Power was, yeah, she was on the National Security Council as the special assistant to the president and, what was it, the senior director in the multilateral affairs and human rights office.
So I guess in that position, even though her entire career had been spent, you know, for years and years being a journalist and then basically she would have referred to herself as a humanitarian and human rights activist and scholar.
She wrote books about genocide and about U.S. foreign policy towards perceived genocidal states.
And then, yeah, when she joined the Obama foreign policy team during the campaign, during the first campaign in 2008, her ideas about U.S. power and about the projection of power, whereas she certainly reveled in being, as I quote her, as saying about herself that she's a humanitarian hawk.
So for the good of the poor people that need the imperial grace of the United States to come in and save them from themselves, she's certainly a militarist, but she kind of masks that as being a human rights-y militarist.
So I guess in that role, she's then kind of embraced the Obama administration's policies, which are virtually, in large respect, indistinguishable from any neoconservative policy.
And so her new role, she sort of gets confirmed as the new ambassador to the UN.
She has the backing of neocons like Max Boot and, you know, Zionist maniacs like Alan Dershowitz and foreign policy hawks like John McCain coming out and singing her praises because of what she has essentially built herself into in the past decade or so.
Essentially moving from someone who was at times skeptical about saber-rattling into someone who just reads from the tried-and-true playbook of how U.S. diplomats are supposed to talk, you know, and protecting Israel at all costs and demonizing Iran are going to be the two top things on her agenda, if, as long as you don't count probably trying to get the U.S. more militarily involved in Syria.
Right.
Oh, man.
Well, and see, it's such an important point about the neocons' support for her because politically they need her.
They need her terribly because, you know, they've had this bipartisan consensus around the so-called moderates or, you know, the centrists anyway, that they do get to call themselves moderates, the John McCain, the liberal Republican and, you know, formerly Joe Lieberman, the conservative Democrat, that kind of, you know, centrist extremist.
And but now they're faced with more libertarian-leaning bipartisan compromise on the other end, real moderation as opposed to all of their hawkishness.
And so I think that's why they're running Liz Cheney for the Senate in Wyoming.
And they certainly need Samantha Power so that they can say, even Samantha Power, even Susan Rice and these liberal liberals, they say we're right about who we got to kill.
So that's how you know that it's true.
In fact, that's almost a direct quote from some AM radio I heard back during the Libya war was, you know, the after Rush clone saying, listen, Susan Rice, I mean, Susan Rice, right?
Liberal black lady, U.N. ambassador, she's accusing Muammar Gaddafi of passing out Viagra to commit mass rapes.
So if that's what Rush Limbaugh wants you to believe and it's what Susan Rice wants you to believe, then that's a consensus you cannot deny.
That's like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush agreeing about Saddam's nuclear weapons program back in 2002 and three is must be true.
It is.
It is exactly, you know, the perfect way to get bipartisan imperialism as the as the consensus.
I mean, it is it is a perfectly placed person to do the bidding that has been done for years and years.
And I mean, it's certainly on a on a continuum.
I mean, it's not it's not something shocking.
I mean, watching Samantha Power's confirmation hearing last week in front of the Senate was really just like a it was almost like a Chuck Hagel redux, except there was far less pushback.
So essentially, she she played the role of Hagel, kind of disavowing and dismissing and distancing herself from previously stated positions that are now politically impossible to state things like warmongering about Iran might be a little not OK, or Israel may possibly sometime be sometimes maybe to blame for the human rights violations of Palestinians who they are occupying and slaughtering.
And so saying those things, she had to disavow each and every one of them.
And she literally called her her her her own comments incomprehensible, her own past comments.
She said, well, yeah, I mean, hearing that now, it just sounds completely crazy that I don't even know what I was talking about.
It's like, well, what she was talking about was something that was a little more reasonable, a little more rational than is what is allowed in our current political discourse, you know, and she's literally reading reading from the script that has already been been written out for her.
She repeated in her hearing verbatim something that warmongering John Bolton, her, you know, U.N. ambassador predecessor said about Iran, which is that the pursuit that Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons is a is a threat to international security.
I mean, word for word for word said these things.
I mean, she is no different than the rest of them.
And yet the the kind of brilliance of nominating her for this position is exactly as you said, Scott.
I mean, it kind of establishes this bipartisanship of militarism.
Yeah, consensus.
And everybody knows it's a lie.
Again, this is where the thing started.
I mean, I don't know how they don't break out laughing when they say this stuff, when again, everyone who knows anything about it knows that the international uranium cops are standing right there counting uranium atoms.
And they're all still sitting there where they're sitting, not being enriched to weapons grade.
End of argument.
Neiman, Scott Wynn and Samantha Powers, a liar.
Right, except except no one pays attention.
No one needs to pay attention.
You know, there's there's just the assumption that there are good guys and bad guys.
And that that's basically all you need to know.
You don't actually need to know facts.
You don't need to know about international law.
You don't need to know about treaty obligations or inalienable national rights.
You don't need to know about any of this, because, of course, we are the shining light upon the hill and we are the good guys and they are the bad guys.
And we don't want to smoke a gun to be a mushroom cloud.
We can't.
Right.
You can't take the risk that I'm lying to you.
Right, exactly.
Yeah, I mean, something that Power said constantly throughout her throughout her confirmation during the question and answer portion, which was interminable and really just so agonizing to pay attention to.
But she kept saying some variation on that she would never apologize for America.
She would never apologize that basically America is the greatest country ever to exist.
On planet Earth, we're a light unto nations, which she said, and that she would never apologize.
I would never apologize.
And this, I mean, it it it exactly echoes what George H.W. Bush was saying throughout 1988, throughout his presidential campaign.
And he kept saying it again and again and again, speech after speech, I will never apologize for America.
You know, maybe you want to vote for the people who are going to apologize for us.
I will never do that.
And he said this throughout the year, but most most noticeably, perhaps just just weeks after the United States Navy blew a Iran Air Airbus, a massive airplane out of the sky over the Persian Gulf, blew it up, killed all two hundred and ninety civilians on board.
They were on their way to Dubai somewhere and blew up this airplane.
The commander of the ship said that, oh, well, we thought it was we thought it was an F-14 Tomcat.
You know, we thought it was coming to attack us.
Meanwhile, it's this massive, massive civilian aircraft that's unmistakable.
And, you know, basically had daily, daily flights, the same flight route.
And the U.S. Navy blew it out of the sky.
Iran obviously said, what the hell is that about?
You know, you did.
That's a war crime.
This is insane.
And the U.S. completely denied the charge, said we did it out of self-defense.
And and, you know, whatever we did is perfectly fine.
And at the time, the vice president of the United States, George H.W. Bush, who was on the campaign trail for president, said, you know, literally, literally said the words, I will never apologize to the United States of America ever.
I don't care what the facts are.
And I mean, that basically sums it all up.
And now, years, years later, Sam Power is there in front of the Senate saying the exact same thing.
I mean, it it doesn't matter what we do.
It doesn't matter who we support, whether it's Saudi Arabia or Israel or whether we are, you know, invading Iraq, Afghanistan, bombing Yemen, bombing Somalia, bombing Libya.
It doesn't matter.
Whatever we do is a OK.
And that's the person that we now have or I mean, it's always been that person.
But now yet again, we have the same kind of person representing the United States at the UN, the place where with all of its myriad faults, of course, the only place that is really supposed to be a consensus of the international community and whether you value it or not, the idea that that there's going to be someone representing the most singular, most powerful and aggressive and lethal and and military built up country on the planet in the history of the world.
The United States is someone who basically is rejecting any claims that we can do anything wrong.
And it really just I mean, obviously, it's not surprising at this point.
It's just really, you know, frustrating and endlessly disturbing.
Yeah, well, you know, although if there's any kind of silver lining to it, I think it's just how obvious it is where here this person who's built her whole career about being more human rightsy than thou on every issue is now willing to say who, what Palestinians I've never heard of.
I don't know what you're talking about.
And oh, yeah, Iran, yeah, they're a nuclear weapon.
Whatever lie we need to be able to break international law in order to pretend to, you know, enforce it on them, whatever I mean, hey, at least we know how power is another great example of power corrupting anyone.
And where like she's not even embarrassed, right?
It's easy enough to Google where she has admitted that there are such a thing as Palestinians in the past.
Yeah, sure.
Sure.
But yeah, and I mean, and she's she's even pointed out that anyone claiming that Iran is producing nuclear weapons or is actively building a nuclear weapon, that no one believes them anymore.
She she she said that a number of years ago.
She said, you know, all of these all of these threats, these explicit and implicit threats just just don't really work in in our favor anymore because no one believes us.
And it really just sets up sets us up for for, you know, down the road to to military aggression, which she was at the time trying to kind of hedge against purely because she was working on the Obama campaign, which was supposed to be, in essence, marketing wise, a kind of a repudiation of the previous eight years of the Bush administration.
And so in her roles as as a foreign policy advisor for the Obama campaign, she was she was kind of acting as if saber rattling was a bad thing, because that's what generally people didn't really want to hear that much of at the time.
And now she's completely reversed course because she's able to and because the Senate hearing requires that you you will not get confirmed for that job.
You will not get that job if you say things that are true.
I mean, that is that is what is set up to be the case.
I mean, you cannot talk about Palestinian rights.
You can only talk about Israeli self-defense and legitimacy and promise endlessly that you will work tirelessly day in, day out to defend Israel in the United Nations, because as she says, Israel is the is is is the greatest friend we have on Earth.
Now, not only is that not true, what she should have said is that is that we are Israel's best friend on Earth.
That is certainly true, possibly the only friend.
But in terms of Israel being our friend, I mean, it is a completely asinine thing to say, considering our unconditional backing and support of that state has diminished our own ability to protect our own interests.
And that is kind of beyond beyond dispute.
And so to basically flip that on its head and to say, you know, Israel has been our best friend and that she will do everything to defend Israel, she's she's talking to the Congress.
She's not talking to the Knesset.
She's talking to our own government and that that somehow is a prerequisite to get this job.
I mean, it's really it's really thick.
Well, now, what is this about putting Israel on the U.N. Security Council?
I guess it's the victors of World War Two or the permanent members.
But they want to give Israel what, like Germany status on there?
Well, I mean, on the Security Council there, there are five permanent members, but also ten rotating members.
So every every few years there's a rotating additional body.
So when you hear about, you know, the Security Council voted, it's not merely the five nuclear armed powers, U.S., U.K., Russia, China and France.
It's not just those five.
There are 15 members of the Security Council at any given time.
It's just that those five, the original ones and the permanent members, have a veto, which the others don't.
So yeah, but Tower said during the hearing that she would really try to get Israel as one of the as one of the non-permanent members of the council and that she would try really hard to make that happen.
Incidentally, to make that happen, Israel would have to be nominated for the council as one of the Western European bloc of nations representatives.
So it wouldn't represent where it actually exists, because where it exists, it would have absolutely no support, because it's a colonial entity.
So basically, it's pretending Israel is somehow this Western European nation, like it is, let's say, in World Cup qualifiers, because no one around them will actually acknowledge them as a legitimate state.
So it's yet another kind of shoehorning in of American imperial power into this international organization, which, I mean, I don't think she's going to have much luck getting Israel on the Security Council.
But even to have to say that during the hearing to kind of prove to the AIPAC thought senators that she is so on Israel's side and she will do everything she can to back that state is really just kind of pathetic.
It is.
It's completely ridiculous.
All right.
Now, so what about Syria?
Does she have much to say about the situation in Syria?
During the hearing, I believe she kind of hemmed and hawed about it.
I think you can kind of extrapolate where she stands on things, but because that's not politically expedient right now for the Obama administration, she kind of hedged on the question of, let's say, direct involvement in Syria.
So she kind of hemmed and hawed her way, much, much like Hagel, actually, kind of hemmed and hawed her way through the...
And Obama.
And Obama.
Well, clearly.
And Obama always.
But in terms of these confirmation hearings, yeah, just basically giving non-answer answers to kind of glide through and then hitting on these kind of boilerplate bromides whenever she needs to to kind of get people on her side.
I mean, there's essentially no way she's not going to be confirmed.
But if you have John McCain and Obama both in your court, you're going to be OK.
Right.
Well, you know, back to the whole thing about the humanitarian interventionism.
I don't know how much pull that supposed, you know, what do you call those?
It's not really a political philosophy, but you got your realists and your neocons.
Your faction of your foreign policy power brokers.
How about that?
Do they have any pull?
I mean, it seems like the Iraq war really helped kill off that whole humanitarian intervention overseas kind of sentiment.
I don't know.
I mean, there's there's kind of no way to there's no way to tell until it happens.
I mean, you could argue that, you know, that's what that's exactly what we saw in Libya.
I mean, that that was built as a humanitarian crisis that needed NATO support.
And if Obama was really trying to sell Syria right now and Samantha Power and the rest of them, they were really trying to sell Syria right now.
They probably could.
Oh, no.
I think that's true.
If they really wanted to do it, they would do it.
I think they I think I think on paper they want to pretend that they want to do it because they care so much about the innocent lives being lost, which, of course, they don't.
But I think when they look at at the actual ability to influence things there and the fact that they would really just wind up forming elements of Al-Qaeda with with either knowingly or unknowingly, I think they just kind of don't know how to sell that to anyone and they don't know how to execute that in a way that it will wind up obviously benefiting the US, whether whether or not people's lives are lost or there's international consensus or abides by international law is obviously never a consideration when it comes to our own policy.
Right.
Well, and I guess they figured long term stalemate kind of a thing is probably the best thing that they could go for at this point there, rightfully, I think, as you're sort of indicating they're scared to death of what might happen if the government in Damascus really ceased to exist.
Right.
I mean, it's kind of a right if if there's a complete vacuum and the US can't necessarily prop up someone or can influence exactly what what's going on, I think they're a little hesitant to step in right away, which obviously sounds sounds a bit rational for this country.
But I think they're just scared to death of what they don't know.
I know.
I got to say, as much as I denounce him, at least it ain't John McCain.
You know what I mean?
Now, if it was Mitt Romney, cookie, you know, cookie cutter Republican clone, then that's one thing.
But if it was McCain, we'd probably all be dead, possibly, possibly.
He would have got to have his first day in power.
Hey, Putin, you think I'm scared of you?
It would have been hydrogen bombs.
All right.
Well, thanks.
Thanks, man.
I sure appreciate you coming back on the show, dude.
Of course, man.
Anytime.
I love being here.
All right.
Good.
Hey, everybody.
That's Nima Shirazi.
His blog is wide asleep in America dot com.
This one is called the language of power.
Obama's humanitarian hawk and Israel's new gladiator at the U.N.
Here about Samantha Power, the new ambassador to the U.N. as Susan Rice moves up to be national security adviser.
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