09/22/08 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and Antiwar.com slash radio.
And introducing our friend from Antiwar.com, Philip Giraldi, he's a former CIA and DIA officer, partner in Canestraro Associates.
He's a contributing editor to the American Conservative Magazine, part of the American Conservative Defense Alliance, former advisor to Dr. Ron Paul's presidential campaign.
And every two weeks, he writes Smoke and Mirrors for Antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How are you doing, Scott?
I'm doing great.
How are you?
Oh, pretty well.
That's very good to know.
All right.
Let's get right to it.
You've got a great couple of articles here.
Your most recent, which is on the page right now, is called Feeding on Fear.
This is your September 11th article, basically, for this year, trying to shed some, I don't know, light and reason on the argument about terrorism.
I don't know if you got to see any of that debate that I did with Harvey Kushner at Texas A&M about terrorism on September 11th.
But basically, he maintained that our enemy, Phil, is Islamic terrorism and that the Islamic radicals, according to some poll that he cited, is about 10 percent of the population of every Muslim nation.
So that's 150 million Muslims in the world who are terrorists and are trying to kill you.
And you have to kill them first.
And that was basically his conclusion.
So, first of all, I know that you were not an analyst, but a covert operative in counterterrorism in the CIA and that you are a paleo-conservative, America first kind of guy, not some wishy-washy liberal and that you're perfectly happy to have Al-Qaeda guys killed.
I know this already.
But I want to know what you think when you hear somebody say that the enemy is 150 million radical Muslims in the world who've got to be killed.
Are they even close to right there?
Is that really what we're facing, Phil?
Well, I think, Scott, I did see your interview and I think you did a really terrific job against Harvey.
My feeling about this kind of distortion of statistics, which is really what we're talking about, is that it makes everybody who passionately dislikes the United States into a potential terrorist, into a potential person who will come over here and kill us.
But clearly, that's not what we're looking at here.
We're looking at a lot of people who, for a lot of sometimes very good reasons, dislike the United States and the way it's exercised its power in the last seven years.
And to conflate these people into terrorists is, of course, ridiculous.
I think even the CIA or State Department would not estimate that there are more than maybe three to five thousand terrorists scattered all throughout the world.
So this figure of 150 million is ridiculous.
Well, now, when you use that number, does that include the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and everybody, Fatah al-Islam, or we're talking just al-Qaeda guys who actually threaten America?
No, I think, again, nobody does a head count on terrorists, but the fact is that we're talking about a handful of thousands at the most, and that includes everybody.
That includes everybody that the State Department would define as a terrorist.
Wow.
Tell me, with that, I'm just doing a lame joke here, and I guess it's not going to be funny now, but does that include the Mujahideen al-Khalq and Jandala and PJAK and other groups that America supports against Iran?
Yeah, that would include anybody that we would call a terrorist.
I mean, you know, I'm talking about people who are actual terrorists, people who actually are toting guns, who are planting bombs, who are doing this.
A lot of these groups, as you well know, are much bigger in terms of their support structure and the people that are attached to the groups in one way or another, but the actual terrorists, you know, we're not speaking about huge numbers here.
Okay, now tell me about the Afghan camps, because one of the things that Kushner said was that between 70,000 and some other much bigger number than that have gone through the camps in Afghanistan, and I guess I've read before that actually it was sort of considered a rite of passage in the Arab world for a generation or so, that young men would go to the Afghan camps, but what do you think are the real numbers of how many people have really gone through there, and then I guess the point would be that most of them just go back to wherever they're from and get a real job then?
Yeah, I think that is the point.
They do, as you say, a lot of this was rite of passage.
This was something to do for an unemployed young Arab in his 20s back a few years ago when it was a less dangerous endeavor, and sure, most of them went back home and got a real job or got married and settled down, but very few of these people turned out to be terrorists.
How many people went through these camps, of course, is a matter of conjecture, and you know, it could be 70,000, it could be 100,000, but the fact is that the whole issue of terrorism, what constitutes a terrorist, is being much inflated by American politicians and the American media and some academics to, quite frankly, make a living.
There are professional terrorist watchers out there now, and people who are making quite good livings out of hyping the terrorist threat.
Alright, so give me some realism then about Osama bin Laden.
I guess my basic understanding is that he and Zawahiri set off on this effort to try to unite disparate jihads all across the Middle East to fight against us, and that basically what they wanted to do was recreate what had happened to the Soviets.
They saw how the Soviet empire crumbled shortly after leaving Afghanistan, of course took all the credit, and they're trying to basically, or were trying to lure us into Afghanistan and or Iraq, Somalia, wherever they can bring our empire to bleed it dry to force us out for good.
That basically the action is in the reaction, and we're doing just what they want.
Is that about right?
Well, I would say that is about right, that basically this is what the groups like al-Qaeda have sought to do, which is essentially they see our weakness as being overextended and overcommitted in many parts of the world where we can't possibly accomplish anything except to put our soldiers and our diplomats in an exposed position, like we saw in Pakistan over the weekend.
Right, yeah.
Well, and you know where we also saw that?
And this is one that gets almost no attention at all, is the Khobar Towers bombing.
And I think probably if anybody remembers this, maybe the only thing they remember about it is that at a campaign appearance of some kind or another, a lady said to Bill Clinton, you suck, and he had the Secret Service arrest her and detain her overnight for saying that to him in public.
And what she was complaining about was that he had put a bunch of American servicemen in the Khobar Towers barracks, and just like in Beirut in 83 kind of situation, there's nobody armed enough to stop an attack guarding out front.
And 19 guys died.
That was Osama Bin Laden's first attack.
They tried to blame it on Iran, but that was Osama, wasn't it, Phil?
Yeah, it was Bin Laden.
And as you say, they did try to blame it on Iran, and indeed you still see efforts to try to blame it on Iran.
You know, I mean, I'm not trying to minimize what terrorists are and what terrorists represent.
And as you pointed out in your prologue, I mean, if a guy is a real terrorist, he's an al-Qaeda, he's trying to kill us or kill American citizens, I'd be quite happy to kill him.
But the fact is that, you know, this whole terrorism issue has become politicized, has become kind of a catchword, and it becomes a way of drumming up support for certain political positions.
And, again, follow the money.
Lots and lots and lots of people are making lots and lots of money out of the war on terror.
All right, well, so this is the question that I didn't answer well enough in that debate at all.
I have a few of them, but this is one that I actually have a really good answer for this, and I didn't use it.
But I'll go ahead and ask you the question, and that is, if you had been the National Security Advisor or the Secretary of Defense or the head of the CIA or something on September 11th, well, now, if you're the head of the CIA, I hope you would have resigned.
But if, anyway, if you were one of these policymakers and you were in charge of crafting this policy, what would you have told George Bush is the right thing to do?
I know it would have included, now, hold on, let's not be rash, let's be smart about this, but then what would you have told him?
Well, I would have told him, basically, what they did do in the beginning, which was, basically, we were attacked by a terrorist group, al-Qaeda, which was based in Afghanistan, and they went into Afghanistan, and they basically overthrew the government there.
But then that's when they failed.
They had bin Laden in their grasp, and General Tommy Franks overruled the guidance that was coming from CIA officers on the ground and Special Forces officers on the ground, refused to close the trap on them, and refused to kill them.
So, you know, I would have told them to do what they did, but unfortunately, this whole kind of thing unraveled around about December, January of 2001, 2002.
Do you think that Tommy Franks just made a bad calculation, or do you think that this was a White House strategy, that they wanted to have Goldstein on the run?
Well, I think that Tommy Franks is responsible for the bad judgment here, that the White House basically left the decision-making in his hands, because he was the Senior General, and that turned out to be a big mistake.
And then, of course, once you make a mistake in the U.S. government, you get a medal, and that's what Tommy Franks got, the Presidential Medal, together with George Tenet.
And these are people, as far as I'm concerned, that all should be in jail.
All right, well, so tell me about the situation in Afghanistan right now.
It looks like, I guess, from all the diversion of resources to the war in Iraq, the attempt to nation-build and secure a central government in that country is basically completely falling apart.
It seems like less and less our guys are at war against the Taliban, and more and more they're at war simply against the Pashtuns.
And of course, now they're crossing the border.
One of the brand-new headlines today on AntiWar.com, that the Pakistani military has again fired on American helicopters flying over the border to bomb people inside Pakistan.
How dangerous of a pile of matches are these guys playing around with here?
Well, I think they're playing with sticks of dynamite.
The fact is that we're fighting two wars.
We're fighting a war that's basically located inside Pakistan itself, and we're doing that somewhat through surrogates and now increasingly by our own initiatives.
And we're fighting the war inside Afghanistan, and we're losing them both.
The two wars are connected, of course.
We basically blew it back in 2001, 2002, when there might have been an opportunity to stabilize Afghanistan and accomplish something, but we didn't do it.
And now the chickens have come home to roost, and as I know you've seen, I have an article coming out on AntiWar tomorrow about the Afghanistan situation, in which basically I raise the question of, can it be won?
And basically I'm questioning whether this is a winnable prospect for the United States, given our limited resources, and given the dynamics of what's going on there.
The situation in Afghanistan is getting worse by every possible way you can measure it.
And we know that.
And putting in 10,000 more soldiers, which actually translates into very few combat soldiers, is not going to change that dynamic.
Well, you know, this is really frustrating for most Americans, I think, because I think they've been instructed that there's no difference at all between al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and they think that the Taliban did the September 11th attacks, and they look at this country and say, here, we're the superpower, and we're unable to defeat the residents of the town of Bedrock?
What the hell is going on over there?
This ought to have been an easy thing.
And it's funny, because I was just remembering back, not very long after September 11th, must have just been a few days after September 11th, on the Art Bell Show, he interviewed a guy from the world's most dangerous places or something, who would go to wherever there was a war zone and interview everybody he could and write books about it and stuff.
And he was talking all about how he had hung out with Masoud and the Northern Alliance, and he had hung out with the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and he'd written all about them.
And he was explaining how no one in history has ever been able to conquer this land since those people originally conquered it 5,000 years ago, or whatever it was, and how we might be able to take the capital city, this and that, but in the long run, we're going to be driven out of there.
And I think that's the kind of thing that most Americans just can't accept.
How could America lose to the Taliban?
How could it be we can't just do whatever we want there?
Well, I mean, sure, I can see the frustration, but the fact is that what you're saying is essentially correct.
I mean, that basically this is a situation that is beyond our ability to control it.
As Admiral Mullen said about a month ago, he said, we can go to Afghanistan and we can kill everyone, but that's not a solution.
And you know, that's putting it mildly that it's not a solution.
So yeah, I mean, if this were total war, if we were fighting Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, and we were bombing the hell out of their cities, and willing to kill civilians and kill everyone, and sure, we could take Afghanistan, but that's not a solution to the problem.
The solution to the problem is to basically understand what's going on in the country to realize your own limitations and to do what works in terms of that country and in terms of our limitations.
First of all, before I was going to ask you about the history, but before we get into that, do you think that that's right when I characterize as basically a civil war against the Pashtuns?
It seems like that's an unwinnable type situation.
If we're talking about recognizing the reality on the ground, we should be trying to bring in the so-called Taliban, call them concerned local tribesmen or something, and bring them into the government, make a deal somehow with them.
Well, I mean, you know, certainly that's how the Pashtuns see it.
They see it as the United States and also Karzai, our puppet, as waging a war against them.
That's clearly how they see it.
And of course, as you know, the Pashtun also are the ones who live in Pakistan.
So that's why there's this dual-natured war that we're fighting.
It certainly is the Pashtun who see it that way.
But there's a broader problem, which is, of course, that everyone in Afghanistan, everyone in Iraq, everyone in a whole lot of countries believes that we're fighting an international and a global war against Muslims.
Well, and that really is the problem, too.
That is Osama bin Laden's number one sales pitch.
I know Michael Shoyer, well, anybody can read the fatwas of 1996 and 98.
They're on the PBS website.
And that's exactly what he says, is the Americans are at war against the Muslims.
And then he cites all these different examples of things that we're doing in the Muslim world.
But that's his spin, is that all this adds up, obviously, he says, to a war against Muslims.
You don't think that's really true, though, right?
It's mostly just about killing people and stealing their stuff and protecting Israel.
Well, I think there are a lot of elements in it.
But I think that there are certainly a lot of people, particularly in the U.S. Congress and media, who are projecting what seems to be an attitude, that we are at war with Islam, Islamofascism.
I mean, they've coined the word for it.
They've beaten us over the head with this, that we're fighting Islam.
I think the fact is that if I were Muslim, that's how I would see it.
Yeah, I'm afraid so.
All right, so now, let's get back into the history here, because you do such a great job of reviewing the history of Afghanistan in your new article, which I guess will be on antiwar.com, what, tomorrow or the next day, I forget?
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow, yeah.
And I have it right here in front of me.
It's called Ashes of Empire.
And you go through here and talk all about, I don't know if you include Genghis Khan and stuff in here, but you talk all about Alexander the Great and the British and the Russians.
And for people who don't know much about the history of Afghanistan, why don't you fill us in a little bit there?
Okay, well, I mean, part of the issue of Afghanistan is that it physically is a difficult place to conquer.
It's surrounded by mountains, has large areas that are deserts, it's virtually trackless in terms of well-established roads.
So it's a physically daunting place.
It's big, as has been pointed out by a number of people, it's as big as Texas.
And so it's a place that any conqueror would have a very difficult time.
And plus, the Afghans have been noted all through their history as being extremely warlike, organized in tribes, they've had been basically, they've had a royal family and a kingdom ever since the 18th century, which provides a certain amount of stability.
But fiercely independent, they've repelled virtually every invader that has dared to cross their land.
I mean, sometimes they've been occupied for a brief period, but after a while, the invader decides it's just not worth the game.
So the Alexander the Great didn't try to occupy it.
The Mongols did for a brief period, the Persians did for a brief period, both of them left after a while.
The British tried three times to conquer Afghanistan and finally gave up.
And of course, we all know about the Russians.
You know, I think it was on Lou Rockwell's blog or somewhere I read a quote from Rudyard Kipling, an advice to a young British soldier fighting in Afghanistan, save your last bullet for yourself before the women get you and skin you alive.
Yeah, no, the line is, roll onto your rifle and blow out your brains.
When you're left with the dead on Afghanistan's plains and the women come out to cut up your remains, just roll onto your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your God like a soldier.
Man, yeah, it's great.
Great Kipling.
Kipling, Kipling should be read by everyone who wants to know about Afghanistan.
Well, and so wasn't one of the stories, I don't know if this is a myth or this is what really happened, that one of these battles, the entire British army was decimated, but they let one guy live and escape to Pakistan just to tell the story or something.
Well, there's a there's a famous painting by an English woman artist who who painted a lot of military scenes in the 19th century.
It's called The Retreat.
I believe it's called The Retreat from Kabul or The Retreat from Kandahar.
And it's the one British officer who made it out of that that massacre wasn't decimation.
They killed everyone.
And he was a doctor and it shows him riding on his horse coming, I believe, through the Khyber Pass.
And he was the sole survivor of the second Afghan war waged by the British against the first Afghan war waged by the British against the Afghans.
Everyone else was killed.
Oh, man.
All right.
Well, so back to our current situation.
Here's the rub.
As long as Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden are sending out podcasts and doing interviews on Pakistani television, this war is never going to end because no American politician is going to be able to say, all right, we're done here.
We won.
And that's why we're leaving.
Not because we lost.
You know, it's funny.
As you know, I was in the Army during the Vietnam War.
And this is so reminiscent of that, where it's always generals and politicians saying, no, we just have to add a few more soldiers, a few more soldiers, and it's all going to change.
And of course, it never changes.
And it finally changes when you're pulled off the roof of the embassy building by a helicopter.
And I have a feeling that we are going to see the same kind of thing play out in Afghanistan.
We are not going to be able to win.
It's going to drag on.
A lot of people are going to die.
And at the end of the day, it's going to be as if we were never there.
Well, you know, I think it was Eric Margulies said, I think it was Eric Margulies quoting Osama bin Laden, saying that what he really wanted was to get us involved in a war in Pakistan, that that would be the ultimate, you know, go for the gold, see if you can lure him into Pakistan.
We've got this new guy, Zardari, who's the widower of Benazir Bhutto, who I guess was the vice president's office choice for president to replace Musharraf.
And he was elected with a bare plurality in the parliament there.
And he's just taken power.
And it seems like a bomb a day goes off, scores killed.
What's going on in Pakistan?
Is this do you think that his government is in danger of falling apart?
And of course, there's the question about the military and their control over the nuclear weapons in that country.
Sure.
I mean, let's take that last question first, because that's the big issue of the obviously Pakistan, if I'm sure you've been seeing in the media, Pakistan has been frantically building a new reactor center to produce more plutonium for bombs.
So it's not just that they have maybe 50 or 60 bombs.
They are actively pursuing building more.
And even though the U.S. has made an effort to find out where the bombs are and how they're secured, I would bet you dollars to donuts that the Paks, not completely trusting us, have a secret arsenal somewhere.
And you know, who knows who's controlling what in Pakistan?
And the prime minister, of course, is well, the whole political situation in Pakistan is, of course, is falling apart in a lot of ways.
There's no real party or no real ruler that has any kind of majority that really he controls.
And of course, Zardari is Mr. 10 percent.
He was so corrupt when his wife was prime minister that he demanded 10 percent of any contract that was issued by the government.
So he's a this is an extremely corrupt official that we're kind of pinning our hopes on.
Well, now there's the whole issue of blowback, too, though, because you see what happened.
Somebody came and knocked down towers and killed three thousand Americans.
And America decided by 90 something percent that we would tell the world that we supported whatever George Bush had in store for their asses.
And I mean, really, the polls had been 90 percent, at least at one point.
And so but this same sort of thing has got to be happening in Pakistan, too, right, where people are looking at these militants and saying, look, you guys are not the good guys.
We might not like America, but we sure as hell don't like you.
Right.
You know, the problem is that not liking them doesn't equate to them liking us.
We have to kind of realize that.
And that's why this whole counterterrorism and this whole issue of the Pakistani federal areas that are controlled by the tribesmen had to be dealt with in Pakistani terms.
And the U.S., of course, never stays in a place long enough or tries to understand a place long enough to to really get a grasp on what's going on on the ground.
And in spite of everything, the percentage of people in Pakistan who could be regarded regarded as radicalized or, you know, people who are terrorist supporters is very low.
And there are even very few people in Pakistan who regard themselves as as religiously fundamentalists.
So you know, it's it's basically a country that that still has a very strong core of people that are sensible and are not radicalized.
And the key is to work with them to solve the problem, not impose a solution on them.
Yeah.
Obviously, it's in their interest to try to work this out as soon as possible anyway.
Seems like maybe it's just politics here in America is George Bush going for he's decided since he really can't work out anything, can't even get Christopher Hill to work out the North Korea deal.
Right.
That maybe he's taken one last one last chance at trying to get Osama bin Laden before he leaves power.
And he's willing to risk all this for that.
Well, I'm I'm thinking there's there's kind of several games being played here.
I don't I don't think Bush has much real anticipation of being able to accomplish anything anywhere.
But I think that basically what he sees is his legacy issue is getting John McCain elected because John McCain is a is a is a validation of Bush policies and a continuation of Bush policies.
So I think this is just a theory I have.
I think a lot of these crisis situations we see popping up with the Russians, with Pakistan, with Venezuela.
I think a lot of these situations are contrived because they're trying to make the world look like a much more dangerous place because they think that will help the McCain candidacy.
Well, and of course, no matter how many times they use this on us, it will help him and it is helping him.
Yeah, that's right.
And I think that that the whole issue is that you suddenly, you know, I know I'm sure you've had people on your show talking about the Russians and everything about Georgia.
And that whole thing was was completely turned on its head and misdescribed and turned into a crisis situation and virtually with the understanding that it might be a good thing to go back to the Cold War.
And this, of course, is totally ridiculous.
Anybody sitting down for three seconds and thinking about it would realize this this whole argument is ridiculous and that nobody wants that.
And yet, by cranking up a situation where Russia is perceived as a threat and where Russia is seen as an aggressive power, you create an environment that's that's more conducive for a candidate like McCain.
Right.
Well, you know, I had a question for you, too, about Georgia.
In fact, I'm sure you saw Arnaud Deborah Grof in UPI write that the Israelis had bases in Georgia that they were going to use or at least had plans to use to attack Iran from Georgia, a much shorter distance than across Jordan and Iraq.
And I guess in that circumstance, wouldn't compromise the Americans and in having the Americans give them permission to overfly Iraq or have to refuel them or what have you.
And yet at the same time, you got an Israeli as their defense minister at the time that they pick a fight with the Russians over such.
It seems to me that if they wanted to bomb Iran from Georgia, picking a fight with Russia on the eve of the thing and giving the Russians the opportunity to come in and smash their drone planes and screw up their bases in whatever other ways is pretty counterproductive there.
So what's the solution to that riddle?
Well, I think you have to assume that the Israelis have screwed up a policy as we have, that essentially they the Israelis have much more national interest in having good relationships with the Russians than they are in having them with the Georgians.
But the Georgians were Georgia was a cash cow.
The United States was funded funneling in two billion dollars there.
The Israelis were getting a huge chunk of that to provide training and materiel.
And so that's how they were looking at it.
And yeah, I've seen all the coverage about the Israeli desire to have a couple of bases in Georgia.
I'm not so sure.
I believe all that.
But I do believe that there may be there may be these these these stories are a bit overstated because think of one thing here.
So you have your base in Georgia.
How do you get your planes in there?
Right.
Yeah, that's a good question.
I mean, you know, come on.
I mean, they have to fly over Turkey or they have to fly over.
How do you do it?
You know, ship them in in pieces in cardboard boxes and put them together.
So there are a lot of things about that story that just don't don't work for me.
Hmm.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Well, and so in the larger sense, well, this is some, you know, I talk with all these wide and varied sources and try to make sense of all this stuff.
I talked with Daniel Levy.
I'll tell you that one as an anecdote.
I like this one.
Daniel Levy, who's from the New America Foundation, is a liberal, was a negotiator for Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak's administrations.
And I told him, well, you know, I got to tell you all this hype, you know, June and July hype about the Israelis are just determined to bomb Iran, whether we're going to help them or not and all those kinds of things made, even though all that hype was going on, it made me think that actually or something made me think at the same time that it was less likely than ever and that actually, you know, Gates had won the argument or whatever was the situation up there and that America was really not going to go along with this thing.
And so that maybe the danger had passed somewhat.
And Daniel Levy said, well, don't you believe it?
He was on the phone from Tel Aviv and he said, there are people here who are hell bent on doing this and the danger is not past and the lies have not been widely enough debunked and the danger is still there and should not be dismissed at all, even though obviously as Scott Ritter pointed out, when the Iranians announced, oh yeah, well, we'll counterattack in these 50 different ways that that must have sent the Pentagon reeling everyone back to their desks to double and triple and quadruple every part of their strike plan and that it would make the whole thing undoable at that point.
Yeah.
Well, I think we have to consider the fact that there are, there are crazy people in Israel.
There are crazy people in Iran and there are crazy people in Washington and all these people want war and they want war for a lot of different reasons.
There are a lot of rationalizations from, from every point of view.
And the fact is it behooves the rest of us.
I mean, the anti-war community, if you want to call it that, to, to try to, you know, have some clarity and, and some transparency in what's going on and to put these people back in the closet.
But yeah, I'm, I'm sure Levy is right.
He's, he's, I've, I've spoken to him too and he's a, he's a very bright guy.
He's very well wired in.
And I've heard from, from others that there are plenty of people in Israel who are hell bent on starting a war.
And, and of course we know that the, that Cheney and his people are hell bent on the same thing.
So, you know it's, it's a, it's an awful thing when the, the wellbeing of our country, of other countries and the whole world kind of rests on these people.
And these people are, are, are basically crazy.
It's just an awful thing.
But all the rest of us can do is, is to keep the light on and keep, you know, keep exposing what these people are saying and what these people are doing.
Really from my point of view anyway, there's almost no difference at all between who's going to be the president.
And I got to tell you in policy, I really don't think there's that much of a difference between Obama and McCain.
And yet in terms of who I see surrounding these guys, I think I discern a difference there between the realists on one side, so-called realists, which just means they don't pretend to invoke morality in foreign policy.
And the neocons surrounding John McCain, basically promising a rehash of Bush's first term.
And I wonder to what degree you prefer Obama over McCain or vice versa at all and why?
Well, I prefer Bob Barr over either one of them and Ron Paul if he had run.
But the fact is that, yeah, you're right.
I don't, I don't discern a whole lot of difference between the two candidates in foreign policy, particularly in foreign policy in the Middle East.
I mean, Obama is advised by Madeleine Albright and by Dennis Ross.
Dennis Ross is a neocon.
You know, he didn't call himself a neocon, but he's a neocon in everything but.
And so there's not a whole lot of space between the two of them.
So I don't know.
I mean, I would say this.
I would say that I am probably going to vote for Bob Barr, although since I vote in Virginia and it looks like it'll be a toss-up state, I might well vote for Obama because I think it is very important to repudiate the policies of George Bush.
And McCain victory in the election would be a validation of Bush and a validation of all the horrors that have been going on for the last seven years.
Yeah, I think that's a very important point.
And that's what I thought in 2004 too, was that as bad as everything was, if and never even mind John Kerry or if it had been any of the other Democrats, Howard Dean or any of these kooks, that the American people simply had to fire this guy.
He'd lied them into a war.
He had to be fired.
There's no way you can keep a guy for something like that.
That policy must be repudiated.
And I hope it's not too late to repudiate it after eight years, but boy, it's going to be really difficult after four more.
Well, they'll probably send you to jail under the Patriot Act too or the Military Commissions Act.
Right.
You're obstructing our war effort, pal.
Exactly.
All you and your anti-war writings and, you know, reasoned conclusions and stuff like that.
All right.
Well, so in terms of fighting the so-called war on terrorism, which I guess is just, you know, a cover for all these little proxy wars and regime changes that they want to do.
If we can pretend for a moment, Philip Giraldi, that the policy was really all about fighting the actual terrorists who threatened the United States of America, and then from then on having some sort of Ron Paul foreign policy of peace and freedom.
What's the way to do it?
You told me before, and I love this quote, ramp this whole thing down.
What exactly does that mean?
Yeah, well, basically, I mean, we're fighting people hiding in caves or hiding in safe houses in Karachi with the 101st Airborne.
This essentially, first of all, is not going to work because the 101st Airborne guys will blow up the whole building, kill 400 other innocent people, and ultimately will not solve the terrorism problem.
What we have to do is we have to look at history again, and we have to say, how have other places defeated terrorists?
And if you think back in the 1970s, when I first started in the CIA, there was a huge terrorism problem in Europe.
We had the Red Brigades, we had the Baader-Meinhof Group, I mean, virtually every country had one or more terrorist groups operating in it.
But the Europeans basically did not throw away their constitutions.
They basically worked through police, through the judiciary, they ramped up their intelligence capabilities, both among the police and among their government intelligence agencies.
They did that, which is a good thing to do, and they basically tackled this as a law and enforcement problem, and they eventually defeated the terrorists.
And that's exactly what we should be doing.
We should be working with friends all around the world.
The Pakistanis don't want terrorists in their midst.
If we were working with them in an effective way, we would probably be doing a lot more in terms of solving the terrorism problem there.
So it's the same in every country, and essentially, let's get away from the idea that there's a global war on terrorism, and let's start thinking in terms of every country as an individual case and working with those countries to eliminate terrorists.
All right.
Thank you very much, everybody.
That's Philip Giraldi, former CIA counterterrorism officer, contributing editor to the American Conservative Magazine, to Anti-War.com, a member of the American Conservative Defense Alliance.
Thanks very much, Phil.