Alright y'all, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton.
It's Chaos 92.7 in Austin, streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at AntiWar.com slash radio.
And our guest today is Robert Dreyfuss from The Nation and Rolling Stone and The American Prospect and a great many other liberal-leaning magazines like that.
His blog is called The Dreyfuss Report and boy, try chasing this thing around the internet from Tom Payne to Bob's own site which is robertdreyfuss.com and now it's I think back at The Nation magazine, The Dreyfuss Report, thenation.com slash blogs slash Dreyfuss.
Welcome back to the show, Bob.
Thank you, always great to be here.
Well, it's great to have you here and always is.
I love this blog and not only do I think that you have a great take in your analysis on the things that are important in the world but you seem to think that the things that are important in the world to you are the very same things that matter most to me.
So when I look at your blog, it's analysis on exactly what I would have asked you to analyze for me if you worked for me, Bob.
So thanks.
Well, it's my pleasure.
All right, let's start with Syria.
Somebody called me, my boss called me actually and said, all right, there's your October surprise.
We bombed Syria.
And I said, what?
And then it turned out on, you know, further inspection, we didn't, we, the U.S. government didn't actually attack the Syrian state.
They attacked inside the Syrian state and then they left again.
What happened there?
Well, yeah, I don't think this quite rises to October's surprise status.
It's true that just as we've begun doing in Pakistan, that is crossing the border from Afghanistan where we have a lot of troops and hitting bases from which people are mounting attacks.
Apparently that's what happened in this case except it was from Iraq where we have a lot of troops crossing the border into Syria where we apparently sent helicopters and a commando team.
In other words, it wasn't just, you know, bombing them and ended up killing an al-Qaida guy, at least that's the news so far, who was helping to smuggle fighters across the border from Syria into Iraq.
Well, but if Syria tortures whoever we want for us, why wouldn't they just go arrest this guy for us?
Did they ask?
Well, Syria is not exactly in a cooperative mode now with the United States.
So I don't think, I mean, the Syrians don't consider themselves to be at war in Iraq or with Iraq and they don't have, you know, billions of dollars to spend sealing their border, which is a very long desert border with Iraq.
So it isn't so easy for the Syrian army to close down this border tight, plus I'm not sure that the Syrians have a big interest in doing so.
I mean, Syria is not exactly getting a receptive audience in Washington the last seven or eight years and they probably do have an interest in keeping the pot boiling in Iraq now, just as Iran and other countries might.
So but this was the, I think, the beginning of what's starting to emerge as a, what I call the new sort of parallel doctrine that is parallel to the old Bush doctrine, the one that Sarah Palin couldn't name.
That one says that the United States has the right to conduct preventive attacks against countries that might threaten us.
This one, this new doctrine says we have the right to conduct hot pursuit border crossing attacks against pretty much anybody we don't like.
And so in the case of Pakistan, we're doing it against the country that's nominally an ally of ours.
In the case of Syria now, we're doing it nominally against the country that's, you know, hostile to us.
And now the theory here is that the president could just do this on his own because it's not an act officially against the state, for example, of Pakistan or Syria.
It's against people within those states.
Well, without the question of whether the president can can do it.
I mean, the president can apparently, at least under the Bush administration, you know, can send, you know, a whole armies to war without getting support from a declaration or anything like that.
Well, they certainly they certainly don't declare war anymore.
But he went to Congress before Iraq in October or two and got an authorization from them.
Well, yes, but people would dispute, you know, how much power that really gave him.
But in this case, these are not wars.
You're right.
These are just, you know, military actions that are targeting, you know, based on intelligence, people or bases or whatever that might threaten American forces stationed in a neighboring country or American interests, for that matter.
And it raises the question, obviously, of whether the United States would extend this policy to Iran, because for the past several years now, the Bush administration has been arguing not entirely without reason that some of the fighters that we're dealing with in Iraq, especially among the Shiites, are armed and trained and supported by Iran next door.
So then that raises the question of whether, you know, we would then start carrying out military actions against Iran.
And apparently there's been some, you know, pressure from Cheney and the Hawks over the last two years to do exactly that, which so far the president has resisted wisely.
So I think because attacking Iran is kind of a different order of magnitude than doing something against these other countries.
So I put it partly in the context of this Bush-era notion that the way to fight terrorism is through military action.
And there's been a vast expansion of the U.S. Special Forces, of the Army and Navy and Marines Special Forces teams and the Special Operations Command and the Pentagon and so forth, who have had their budget and personnel doubled under the Bush administration and who operate now in 60 countries, that's six zero countries around the world.
I just went to hear the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations last week at a think tank and he outlined, you know, how tremendous the growth in special operations forces has been and how they plan to, by the way, over the next several years, continue that expansion.
So that gives the Pentagon the capability to conduct a great number of counterinsurgency, counterterrorist and other kinds of strikes all over the world without necessarily, you know, taking it to full scale war.
And I think this certainly doesn't exactly scare the terrorists to death, but I think it makes a lot of countries and governments all around the world very nervous that they could have to deal with the domestic aftermath of being unable to defend their borders if the United States comes across an attack.
Right.
I mean, this is what happened in Cambodia, was they kept bombing and bombing and their little princeling basically, you know, went along with it for the payoffs.
And his government ended up falling, being replaced by the Khmer Rouge.
Yeah.
And of course, that was somewhat different, that the campaign was much more intense and it was very heavy bombing raids.
But you're but you're right.
The idea that you can just expand the war into a neighboring country and through air attacks and commando attacks, you know, accomplish your mission and not make matters worse.
I mean, I think exactly it certainly could make things drastically worse in Pakistan, because for every bad guy we kill, not only are we creating a few more, but we're alienating a much broader population and even the government there.
In this case with Syria, we've not only gotten the Syrians mad at us, but the Iraqi government itself has criticized the raid and says it's going to conduct an investigation and share the result of that investigation with Syria.
And so we may have helped strengthen an Iraqi-Syrian alliance rather than accomplish anything particularly significant in this raid.
That's funny.
It reminds me of your article from, what, a year ago or two years ago now.
I forget.
I guess last year, right around this time, wasn't it, that, wow, this oil deal with the Kurds going around the government's back, the Blackwater massacre and all these things have really helped to unify the people of Iraq.
It seems like the more violence we commit in the region, the better everybody else seems to get along.
Bob?
Well, you know, right now I would say the Iraqis are pretty unified against the idea of the U.S. occupation.
And even though, you know, secretly some of those politicians in Iraq support this agreement we're trying to negotiate, there's no political payoff for them to do it in public.
So right now, if you're an American negotiator trying to work out the details of this status of forces agreement with Iraq, which, as you know, expires on, you know, New Year's Eve, you're facing an almost united Iraqi opposition to it, except for the Kurds.
Really all of the rest of the political powers in Iraq are either outright opposed or severely skeptical.
And so, you know, it doesn't look good to be able to accomplish this.
Of course, I predicted that way back in the spring when they first started talking about that.
Well, now, but won't the U.N. renew the mandate?
I just saw the foreign minister of Russia saying he would support it.
I guess they think it's funny watching America bleed to death over there.
Well, I don't know about funny, but I think the Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations said yesterday that, yeah, we can go back to the U.N. and just, you know, renew this and maybe just for six months instead of a year and leave it as it is.
And that's probably what's going to end up happening.
And but that doesn't give the Bush administration anything like what it wanted, because what it wanted was some sort of, you know, foundation for a lasting U.S.
-Iraqi security agreement.
By going back to the U.N., not only do you keep the authority in international hands, but you give the next president a chance to take an entirely different approach.
And if it's Obama, I think it will be an entirely different approach or largely different approach.
And so, therefore...
Well, Maliki might be able to deal with Obama in a way that he can kind of save face in a way that he really can't by capitulating to Bush now.
Yeah.
I mean, as you know, when Obama went to Iraq this past summer, McCain was hammering at him for being a surrender monkey, and Obama got to Baghdad, and he and Maliki said almost exactly the same thing, that we want to start withdrawing American troops according to a schedule.
And Maliki said that Obama's schedule looked pretty good to him.
So now, you know, we can talk about Iraqi politics in terms of why that is.
But from the big-picture standpoint, it certainly undercut McCain entirely, since he was arguing that Obama was trying to pull out too fast, and here you have the guy we're trying to protect, Maliki, saying that it sounded just about right.
Well, let me ask you a couple of things about Iraqi politics while we're at it.
First of all, when you talk about... there seems to be some evidence, and I'm not sure how much evidence, or what exactly you think it means, you mentioned it sort of as an aside, that some Shiite Iraqi fighters are being trained inside Iran.
Are you mostly talking about the Badr Corps, which is more or less officially the Iraqi army, or are you really referring to Muqtada al-Sadr's group there, the so-called special groups that Cheney wants to use as an excuse to launch strikes into Iran there?
Well, the Badr group, as you say, it's the official militia of the Supreme Council in Iraq, which is pretty much the main coalition partner that Maliki has.
They were not only trained in Iran, but they were created by Iran in the 1980s and sustained for 20 years, until the fall of Saddam.
So Iran has very strong connections to them, but they don't have to do any more training because, happily for the Iranians, we're over there training the Iraqi army and building them up in terms of a fighting force.
What Iran is doing is not only maintaining its political connections to the Supreme Council and to Maliki and others, but it's also training probably four or five different potential fighting forces.
There are at least three now that have come out as sort of non-Badr and non-Sadr forces.
One's called Qatayab Hezbollah, which just means the Hezbollah Brigades.
That is a force that the military isn't yet saying how strong they believe it is, but they keep arresting people from it and tracing them back to Iran.
And some of the Sadr people, no doubt, are certainly getting arms from Iran, and some of them, whether they're special groups or not, are getting direct training in Iran.
So Iran has a lot of cards to play in Iraq, from its top-of-the-pyramid connections to the government, all the way down to some shadowy covert operations.
Bob, when the U.S. government calls these teams of Mahdi Army, that is, Muqtada al-Sadr's guys who are trained in Iran and come back, they call them the special groups, and in a sense it seemed like they were trying to give, at least maybe if we rewind a year or so, they were sort of trying to give Sadr some breathing room and basically wage war against his Mahdi Army, but call it not him, and call it special groups instead.
And it seemed like pretty much an artificial distinction, but I guess I wonder to what degree Muqtada al-Sadr takes his orders from Iran, as compared to, say, for example, Hakeem and the Supreme Islamic Council types.
I guess they say he's in Iran now, studying for a higher religious rank.
Yeah, I don't think it's right to see it as taking orders from Iran, but I think that all of these groups, to one degree or another, are both dependent on Iran, and they're also our allies, you know, loyal to Iran politically.
And Sadr, perhaps less so than some of these other more affluent and middle-class establishment Shiite groups, like the Badr Corps, but because Sadr has kind of represented this rebellious, working-class, lower-class, you know, kind of...
Well, an Arab nationalist, in a sense, too.
More than...
I mean, it seemed like the political fight over the years has been the Supreme Council types wanting a much more extreme federalism than a sort of Shia-stan in the south, you know, from Baghdad to Basra in alliance with Iran, where Sadr has insisted on Iraqi nationalism, right?
I mean, that's a pretty big policy split.
That's true, and I don't think that has changed, although what happened over the course of several years, let's say from 2005 until 2007, was our continued support for the Iraqi government and the establishment Shiite groups there, combined with our constant, you know, military actions against Sadr, pushed Sadr into the arms of Iran, since he had nowhere else to go, and we weren't going to support him.
He had his differences with these Badr people, and there were major armed clashes between these two factions of the Shiites for quite a while.
And so, all of a sudden, you had a situation where Sadr had to turn to Iran in order to get weapons and money, and that, in turn, gave Iran the ability not only to have leverage over him, but to infiltrate his movement, and that's apparently what happened as well.
And so, to the extent that we have these so-called special groups, these are groups that are probably, you know, nominally have pledged allegiance to Sadr and whatever that means, but on a local basis, when you get down into some small town or neighborhood of Baghdad, they're run by some commander who's been, you know, sent to Iran, has gotten military training and money and arms, and then sent back home, and who may be as equally loyal to Iran as he is to Sadr.
And so, when Sadr says, we're going to have a ceasefire, or we're going to stop fighting, or whatever it is, these groups don't necessarily go along with that.
Well, has there been much of that, them disobeying him?
Because I always thought that, you know, the way it played out was when Sadr said ceasefire, they really did ceasefire, that the special group designation was sort of artificial, made up by the American government, in a way.
Well, it may have been to some degree, and we'll never know exactly how that works, but I would look at it slightly differently, that I think that Iran itself made a strategic decision about, you know, the time that the surge started.
That, if you remember, at the beginning of the surge, President Bush was saying, we're going to crack down on these Iranian supply lines, we're going to go after the Iranian networks in Iraq, you know, he was making a big deal.
Yeah, the beginning of 2007, January, February 2007, there were mucky mucks.
I mean, Wayne White came on this show, he was a former high-level State Department intelligence officer, and he was worried that there could be strikes on Iran.
This is when Admiral Fallon intervened and refused a third carrier group, and...
Yeah, so okay, my point is that the Iranians, you know, figured all that out.
And I think even before that, had figured it out, and they started pulling back in terms of military confrontation, because they figured, you know, smartly, look, we've got all this influence in Iraq, we don't want to confront the United States directly militarily, that would be foolhardy.
So let's pull back, let's have as many, you know, ceasefires, and so on as we can get.
And then the United States will start withdrawing its troops, and we'll be sitting pretty.
And that's been their continuing calculation over the past two years now.
And I think it's worked out pretty well for them.
So the fact that Sadr declared these ceasefires, you know, from what we know about it, it was partly brokered by Iran, it was the Iranians going to Sadr and saying, you know, let's calm these things down.
And no doubt, by that logic, the Iranians said that same thing to all of their own agents among the Shia.
So it wasn't necessarily that they were listening to Sadr as more that there was kind of a general agreement among all the Shiite forces, including Sadr and Iran, to be quiet for a while.
And then when clashes erupted between Badr and the Sadrists, or when Maliki sent his army into Basra, the Iranians stepped in again, and said, look, we don't want this fighting happening, you know, we don't want these, you know, you Shia to go to war against each other.
Let's just keep it all quiet.
And so they had the Revolutionary Guard actually step in and broker a series of deals and ceasefires and arrangements among all of the Shiite parties.
Well, and they even had the meeting in Iran, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And so...
Well, the surge is working.
Well, I guess you could say it's working in the sense that the Iranians decided, you know, confront America directly.
So, you know, they pulled back where the surge hasn't worked at all, is that at the same time they did that, Iran and the Shiite establishment, especially Maliki and the Badr people said, we're not going to make any deal with these Sunnis.
And so the Iranians, you know, did not go so far and neither did the Shiite establishment to say, okay, now we're going to sit down with the Sunnis and make a deal to stabilize Iraq.
So as a result, Iraq is extremely explosive still.
We've got a whole, you know, 100,000 strong Sunni militia that we've helped to create, which is not going to just disappear, which will certainly get stronger as a result of these provincial elections that are coming up if indeed they decide to hold them.
And therefore, you know, there's at least a 50-50 chance that a renewed civil conflict, a civil war could escalate between the Sunnis and Shiites again, you know, sometime next year.
And that's something that the next president, whose initials are BO, is going to have to worry about.
Well, so I don't know, I guess there's just what, even a 50-50 chance, that to me sounds pretty good.
Are you implying that there's a likelihood in there that the sons of Iraq, the former Sunni insurgency, the militia you refer to here, that these men will actually somehow be brought into the Iraqi security forces?
It seems like that's really the only solution to preventing there being another battle for Baghdad and that kind of thing.
Well, the only way that could happen is if the next president is smart enough to deal with Iran and Iraq at once.
And if he's smart enough to say to the Iraqis, OK, we're going to make a political agreement, an accord, a grand bargain among all the Iraqi political factions that settles the differences among you, and then involves Iran and other Iraqi neighbors in underwriting that agreement.
And that would in turn require that we give Iran some of what it wants.
In other words, we've got to make a deal with Iran at the same time so that this whole thing in Iraq becomes possible.
Well, I have the perfect offer that we could make the Iranians.
We will begin to live up to our end of the agreement we already have with them, known as the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which we're both signatures to.
Well, I think it has to go beyond the nuclear issue.
It needs to be along the lines of the grand bargain that Flint Leverett and lots of other people talk about.
The one that they made in 2003.
Iraq, Afghanistan, the Arab-Israeli issue, Hamas, Hezbollah.
It's got to cover Iran's economy and the World Trade Organization and various unfreezing of sanctions and financial controls over what Iran can do overseas.
It's got to include an American agreement to not subvert or overthrow or bring regime change to the Iranian government.
It's got to be kind of a package deal where the Iranians start to feel secure rather than besieged, because, in fact, Iran is kind of surrounded right now by NATO in Turkey, by NATO in the United States in Afghanistan, by the United States in Iraq, by the U.S. fleet in the Persian Gulf, and it's not exactly putting their minds at ease.
So part of the way to get them to move away from a nuclear program is to make them feel more secure.
Right, and this is an important point, too, because a Bush lover in the audience is going to say, hey, make them feel at ease.
The point is here, saying this whole time that you're evil and we're too good to meet with you or deal with you and you have to do everything we say before we'll even sit at a table and we'll besiege you on all sides and threaten you, hasn't worked at all.
It hasn't accomplished anything in terms of weakening the influence of Iran in the region whatsoever.
Yeah, well, I don't think you have too many Bush lovers among your audience.
Well, we are in Texas.
I think it's down to about 3 percent or something.
But you're right.
The idea that by not talking to Iran and by squeezing them with sanctions and making nasty faces at them from across the Atlantic, we're going to get them to change their nuclear policies just hasn't worked.
So I think it's clearly time for an approach that might actually work.
All right, well, now let's switch to Israel politics.
It's not much of a different issue.
The news, as best I can tell, is that Tzipi Livni, who was the foreign minister who seemed to be putting together a coalition to become prime minister, has been unable to do so.
She's the one who at least has been reported in Haaretz as saying off the record that, eh, we don't even care if Iran did have nukes.
They're not a threat to us and whatever, which means at least that she's somewhat reasonable.
But now it looks like, and it looks like I guess you're reporting here at your blog at The Nation magazine, that Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, is making strides.
What difference does that make when it comes to, say, for example, dealing with the issues of Hamas and Hezbollah and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, dealing with American withdrawal from Iraq, et cetera, war with Iran?
Well, you know, Netanyahu is the ultimate hawk in Israel.
And he's been, over the last couple of years, consistently ahead in the polls.
Now the later, more recent polls show it's kind of a neck-and-neck situation with a slight edge for Livni's group.
Part of the problem, though, is her party is not really a political party.
It was a creation of Ariel Sharon when he broke up the old Likud bloc and took himself and a bunch of other people and kind of created this new Kadima party, which is the ruling party now in Israel.
Well, Sharon is, as you know, in a coma.
He's sick.
He's out of the picture.
And his successor, first Olmert, was kind of a colorless character without charisma whose approval ratings literally sank into the single digits.
He would kill for Bush's, you know, 25% approval rating.
And his successor, his apparent successor, Livni, is not exactly charismatic either.
She's a brand-new politician.
I think she wasn't even in politics ten years ago.
And so, as a result of that, it's not clear that her party really has a base or a constituency because it all revolved around Sharon's big, outsized personality.
And so Netanyahu and the Likud party, what do they represent?
Well, they represent pretty much the concept of greater Israel.
In other words, that the occupied territories, and for that matter, according to some of them, Jordan itself, belonged to the land of biblical Israel.
And they overlay that with this ultra-hawkish view that the only way for Israel to have security is to fight militarily to build up its army, that there's no use negotiating with the Arabs.
So the idea that some sort of peace process could occur under Likud is pretty much impossible.
In fact, the last one, the Oslo Agreement of the 1990s, was basically killed when Netanyahu was prime minister for three years.
And so it's going to make it a lot harder for the next U.S. administration to bring Israel into an agreement with the Arab states if you have a hawk like Netanyahu in the government who will fight tooth and claw every step of the way.
Well, and he's the kind of guy who is always making outrageous claims about Iran's nuclear progress and what must be done.
He's really hawkish on Iran.
He's famous for the statement that it is 1938 and Iran is Nazi Germany and they're going for a bomb and we can't have another Holocaust.
In other words, he uses the most extreme rhetoric imaginable in the Israeli context to warn that Iran's leaders are new Hitlers.
And it's unclear to me and to many other people that Israel has much of an option to actually attack Iran since it's far away and Israel doesn't have the kind of strategic air force and cruise missiles and things like that that the United States has.
But certainly they could carry out a symbolic or slightly more than symbolic attack on some Iranian positions and that would upset even further the whole apple cart in that part of the world.
And, you know, yet inflame another crisis.
So it's something to worry about and certainly Netanyahu taking over in Israel were that to happen would make it a lot harder to deal with the Iranian issue as well.
Never mind the Arab-Israeli one.
Well, and you know, if it's Barack Obama, they're already calling this guy a Hezbollah terrorist.
I mean, any kind of pressure that he wants to, even getting out of Iraq, any kind of pressure he may possibly want to exercise on the Israeli government to concede a thing to anyone ever is going to be portrayed as, you know, this guy is a Muslim terrorist fanatic and how dare he, etc., like that.
All the political pressure is going to be on him to be a hawk on all these issues.
Well, that may be true and some of his advisors are more hawkish than others.
But I hope that, you know, Obama doesn't do what most U.S. presidents do, which is to leave the Arab-Israeli issue to their second term when they're no longer, you know, up for re-election.
Because I don't think it can wait.
This whole part of the world, from Egypt to India, you know, is a huge mess and it's not something that's going to wait for attention.
I think the real thing to worry about is that Obama is inheriting such a mess domestically in terms of economics, that he won't have the energy to devote to this, you know, foreign policy mess.
And he may decide, you know, that, look, I've got to spend more time sitting down and hammering away at my domestic team, you know, to deal with taxes and health care and the budget and the bailout and everything else.
And so I'll, you know, put this stuff on hold.
And that's, you know, really just a sign of what an unbelievable mess the administration now is handing off to the next one.
You know, you're the author of this book, Devil's Game, How the United States Helped to Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.
And I noted that you wrote on your blog at the Nation magazine website about the report, anyway, in the Washington Post that supposedly an Al-Qaeda guy in an Al-Qaeda chat room or message board or something has said, you know, they would benefit most from a McCain presidency.
And I wonder if you can explain why that would be.
McCain, of course, is famous for saying he'll hunt Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell and whatever, which he gets that expression wrong.
But, anyway, you know what he meant.
Yeah, well, look, I mean, these Al-Qaeda people, they're not exactly strategic geniuses of any kind.
Well, I wouldn't say that.
I mean, well, I don't know about geniuses, but they sure seem competent.
September 11th has accomplished exactly what it was supposed to.
Well, I don't agree with that.
I think they were shocked beyond their wildest fears by the reaction to 9-11.
Scott, I don't agree with that.
I think they attacked the United States and thought that the result would be the United States would pack up and go home, just like they did in Lebanon in 1983.
And they had a complete misunderstanding of the reaction.
I think the last thing they wanted was the United States to come into their homeland, Afghanistan, and beat the crap out of them.
So forgive me for saying so, but I think that's absurd and silly.
On the other hand, they do have, from the 1980s, this notion that, hey, we Islamists brought down the Soviet Empire, and we can now bring down, by guerrilla warfare and attacks and the sheer brilliance of our jihad, we can bring down the American Empire.
But I've got to tell you, they're not bringing down the American Empire.
They're a bunch of little half-savages living in caves and slums in Pakistan.
Well, but isn't the whole thing about the reaction?
Yeah, yeah.
That's their argument.
That's what they say.
I know that.
They are taking the economic collapse in the United States, the collapse of the markets and all of that, as a sign from God, too, that they're on the right track.
That doesn't mean that they had anything to do with it, nor does it mean that God had anything to do with it.
Look, Scott, these people are complete idiots and morons, and they're savage killers.
The idea, on the other hand, that they are capable of causing havoc politically is true.
The Bush administration and McCain and others have completely mismanaged the notion of how you deal with al-Qaeda, and they've got us involved in seemingly unwinnable wars, which al-Qaeda thinks is to their benefit.
So I think that's the idea of this endorsement of McCain, is that, look, we want somebody in there who will continue this foolhardy policy of bleeding to death.
But I'm not sure that their logic completely holds.
Among other things, it's actually Obama who's talked more about beefing up the war in Afghanistan.
So if their idea is to bleed us more in Afghanistan, I think they would support Obama more than McCain.
Well, I think now you're getting to they would have to be sophisticated enough to be past the who's the peace candidate and who's the war candidate.
I interviewed Michael Shoyer last week, and he said the reason they would prefer McCain is because he's the most explicit.
He doesn't speak in nuance.
He's like George Bush and announces these wide-ranging policies against people in the Muslim world that's great for al-Qaeda recruitment.
And Michael Shoyer says that this was the point, that the action is in the reaction.
James Bamford quotes Ayman al-Zawahiri from before September 11th, saying, we're trying to draw them in and give them their own Afghanistan, just like we did to the Russians, and give them their own Vietnam, just like in Rambo III.
Yeah, I know.
I agree.
I don't buy it.
I mean, like I said before, I think the last thing they wanted was for us to invade Afghanistan in 2001.
Well, you have written before about how the CIA, with their laser designators and the U.S. Air Force, absolutely obliterated 99% of these guys back then, and I certainly would argue that they didn't anticipate that, as far as how effective the original strikes against the organization would be.
Yeah, they're making somewhat of a comeback now, both the Taliban and al-Qaeda and so forth, and I imagine that there's a certain amount of giddy excitement among some of their leaders that it's only a matter of time now before the United States goes home and we can take over Afghanistan again, and maybe Pakistan, and then the world.
And so they may feel like victory is just around the corner.
I don't think that's true either, but I think that they may believe that.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know.
I guess, basically, just to make sure I understand you right, that any of this talk about we're bleeding you to bankruptcy and whatever is just after the fact, trying to take credit for things that are outside of anything they ever planned for.
Well, I don't know.
Look, I really don't do a lot of thinking about what al-Qaeda thinks, because I think, as I said, they're not exactly strategic geniuses, but in any case, who they endorse and what they think about the American elections, I don't think matters too much to any of us.
Well, it's a question of how to fight them.
I find it kind of ironic that this al-Qaeda leader was endorsing McCain since it runs contrary to the McCain narrative that Obama is the favored candidate of the terrorists.
It's funnier more than it is some big strategic point to make.
Right.
Well, the importance of what they think, to me, has always been, well, you know, like Robert Pape's book, that suicide terrorism is caused by occupation.
So if we accept, for example, and I know you don't, we're, I believe, almost entirely agreed on what actually should be done about al-Qaeda, that rather than regime changing and occupying all these countries and killing all these people and creating more enemies, that this should be as limited an action as possible.
And like Philip Giroir says, ramp this whole thing down.
Use cooperation between national government police forces and intelligence agencies and get rid of the last few guys and try to call it off, right?
Right.
Well, listen, Scott, I've got to run, but it's always great to be on your show and sort of hammer through these things and try to figure them out.
Well, I always greatly appreciate your time on this show and your insight into all these issues, Bob.
Thanks a lot.
Okay, thank you.
All right, everybody, that's Robert Dreyfuss from The Nation magazine.
It's The Dreyfuss Report, thenation.com, slash blogs, slash Dreyfuss.
And his book, Devil's Game, How the United States Helped to Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, is top of the list, top of the list.
Go and get it.
All right, we'll be right back.
Anti-War Radio.
