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Scott talks with Trita Parsi about the hollowness of Biden’s efforts to improve things in Gaza. They start with the Administration’s ridiculous framing, which seeks to admit that there are distasteful aspects of Israel’s Gaza campaign, but then to blame those aspects solely on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They also talk about how the war is affecting Democratic voters and the risk that this war will expand to southern Lebanon.

Discussed on the show:

• “The US is trying to force the Israeli government’s collapse” (Al Jazeera)
• “Israel Abandons Its Tortured Soldiers Too” (Substack)
• “U.S. Support for Israel’s War Has Become Indefensible” (The Atlantic)

Trita Parsi is the Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy. Parsi is the recipient of the 2010 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. Follow him on Twitter @tparsi.

This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott.

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Patrick Cockburn, author of ISIS: Battling the Menace, discusses why Donald Trump’s ‘Muslim Ban’ will lead to more terrorist attacks instead of preventing them; and why Al-Qaeda’s greatest success wasn’t bringing down the twin towers on 9/11, but provoking George W. Bush into invading Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Joseph Stromberg, an independent historian and writer, discusses how the Smoot-Hawley Tariff and worldwide protectionism ground the US economy to a halt in the 1930s; the enduring “accordion effect” of increasing government power and decline of civil liberties during wartime; how the distribution of defense contractor jobs among key congressional districts makes cuts in military spending politically impossible; and why government rationing is more a show of force than an attempt to fix economic problems.

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Gareth Porter, an independent journalist and historian, discusses the coalition of pro-intervention US think tanks trying to sell the Trump administration on a more muscular anti-Assad policy in Syria – a policy that has been repackaged from the previous version designed last summer for their preferred choice for president, Hillary Clinton.

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Doug Bandow, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, discusses why US sanctions against Sudan, put in place not long after President Omar Hassan al-Bashir took power in a 1989 coup, have failed to produce any positive results, serving only to economically cripple the Sudanese people and alienate them from Americans. Yet the sanctions endure, even though their original purpose – punishing the al-Bashir regime for sponsoring terrorism – is no longer valid.

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Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst and co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), discusses the “gap” in the Russian hack case; why it makes much more sense that a Democratic insider, fed up with the sidelining of Bernie Sanders, gave the DNC emails to WikiLeaks; why Obama protected the CIA and John Brennan from the Senate Intelligence committee’s investigation on torture; and how Donald Trump could fulfill his professed goal of quickly knocking out ISIS.

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Kelley B. Vlahos, a Washington, DC-based freelance reporter, discusses the unusual number of recently-retired generals in Donald Trump’s administration and whether security and foreign policy will be negatively effected as a result; and how Trump’s shift to the right on Israel has alarmed moderate Jewish groups like J Street who worry about an end to a two-state solution.

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Chase Madar, author of The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History, discusses President Obama’s commutation of Chelsea Manning’s unprecedented 35-year prison sentence for leaking government documents; whether Donald Trump could undue the commutation if he wanted to; Obama’s otherwise terrible record on government whistleblowers; and Manning’s personal motivation for giving WikiLeaks and the world an incredible treasure trove of documents showing the government at its worst, including the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and the State Department diplomatic cables.

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Stanley L Cohen, a lawyer and human rights activist, discusses the UN’s most recent toothless resolution chastising Israel’s occupation of the West Bank; why Israel’s treatment of Palestinians since 1948 amounts to genocide, as defined in international law; how secular and religious Israelis differ in their devotion to the state; and how love (sex and intermarriage) can ultimately overcome segregation in a bi-national state.

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