05/27/14 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
And next up is Phil Giraldi, former CIA and DIA officer, and now writer at Al Jazeera and UNZ.com, as well as the American Conservative Magazine.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
And it's a hell of an article you have here, Baiting Dragons, Bears, and Lions at the UNZ Review.
Again, that's UNZ.com, U-N-Z, UNZ.com.
And this is about the American Empire.
I think as you put it, they got no, I don't know exactly how you put it, something about they have no real cards to play.
And the fewer cards to play that they have, the more of a fight they seem to want to pick with people who can apparently just ignore us without consequence and go on about their business.
So first up here, and or, you know, could lead to a crisis, but not one where America seems to have any obvious way of getting what they want.
So first of all, could you take us through all the different contrives with China here, the rising yellow peril in the east?
Yeah, well, I mean, basically, we've come down heavily on the side of one communist government against the other communist government, siding with Vietnam against China.
China admittedly triggered a series of incidents by placing a oil drilling rig in disputed territory in the South China Sea area that was disputed with Vietnam.
And Vietnam reacted by, or rather, the Vietnamese people reacted by rioting and killing a number of Chinese who were running factories and businesses in Vietnam.
And anyway, Obama immediately jumped into it and said that the Chinese had staged a disgraceful provocation.
And as a result, the United States condemned the action.
Now, my point is that, you know, what goes on between China and Vietnam is in a lot of ways, none of our business.
And secondly, the statement by Obama absolutely has no teeth of any kind, because both countries are acting in terms of their own self-interest.
We have nothing to do with it.
And the fact that our government and our president would feel compelled to make a comment in a situation in which he has no influence whatsoever, to me, is the height of hypocrisy and actually stupidity.
Yeah, it makes him look even weaker, really.
It seems kind of ham-handed.
Oh, look, something to say.
I better get out there and say something, kind of a thing, when, you know, this would be a great opportunity for him to actually sit back and not say something for once, maybe.
Yeah, that's right.
He's going to make a speech, I guess, tomorrow night at West Point about his foreign policy.
It should be fun to watch.
And the other point I make is about the naming of five Chinese military officers in an indictment in the United States for cybersecurity issues.
And of course, is there a bigger hacker in the world than the United States government?
Here it's accusing the Chinese of doing the same thing, although on a much smaller scale.
You know, it's just, again, is it going to change anything?
No, it's not going to change anything.
It's just that it's another kind of empty threat, a commentary, as I think you put it, in terms of how weak we look, how silly we look.
And I think everybody's going to see it that way.
Yeah, I mean, I think it was, what, four or five days later, somebody at the State Department said, well, you know, yeah, those indictments were basically symbolic.
Symbolic?
What, that they're copying DVDs of U.S. movies?
Is that it?
Is that what we're crying about here?
Or what is it that they supposedly did?
Yeah, well, basically the accusation was that China has a part of its military that hacks into industry, primarily industrial websites in other countries, to obtain technological secrets, secrets that make them more competitive in terms of their own business and that sort of thing.
So that should surprise no one that that's going on.
How do they figure they can indict foreign government officials for something like that, though?
I guess sovereign immunity only applies to American government officials.
Yeah, I think that's clearly the way they see it.
It just seems like a very strange way to handle it, right?
Indictments of individuals.
Well, you know, I read a lot of the commentary on this, and there were a lot of people saying a lot of goofy things about what this was intended to do.
But I can't make any sense out of it.
I mean, if there was a, if there was somebody in the National Security Council or the White House who had a sensible agenda here, I can't even fathom what it might be.
Yeah, even with a bad motive.
I mean, again, another exercise in just looking like goofballs here.
As the empire's falling apart, I mean, it could be worse.
It could be lashing out much more violent ways, I guess.
But it seems like they could be leaving well enough alone here rather than, you know, getting too excited all the time.
Sure.
And as the rest of the article goes on, I assume we'll talk about it.
I'm talking, you know, you see the same kind of pattern of inconsequential behavior playing out in terms of how we're dealing with Russia and in terms of how we're dealing with Iran.
Right, yeah.
Again, lots of talking big but not carrying much of a big stick, right?
Well, it's not only that.
It's just, you know, if the idea is that you're going to be saying something that will have a result, then I can't see where the saying something in all these cases has had any result at all, except to make people think that the United States has finally completely gone looney tunes.
Right.
All right.
Well, now, so we talked a bit about Ukraine with Ray McGovern on the show earlier, your fellow veteran intelligence professional for sanity there.
But so I guess one of the things that that Ray kept talking about was about NATO expansion over these years since the end of the Cold War.
And I'm trying to remember where it was I read, but I guess it doesn't really matter that many people, many Americans actually don't know what NATO is.
I think they're probably all familiar with the term.
They don't really understand the nature of the military alliance or what exactly NATO expansion means or which direction on the map it's going or why anyone cares.
It becomes a bit esoteric.
It sounds like the kind of thing that, well, certainly more people should be aware of, but apparently are really lacking it.
So I was wondering if maybe you could talk a little bit about that and how America is taking on Russia, making a much more of an adversary out of Russia than is necessary here and what they're supposed to get out of it, if anything.
Well, NATO was created in the wake of the Second World War.
And the original intention or the original argument was basically that communism at that time, of course, we had Joseph Stalin as the communist, was in an expansionistic mood.
It had basically taken half of Germany.
It was occupying Austria.
There were strong communist parties in France, Italy, Spain.
Communism seemed to be on the march.
So the argument was that the United States wanted to create a military alliance in Western Europe that basically counter any kind of overt attempt by the Soviet Union and by communism to take a bigger bite out of Europe.
So that was the original idea.
The problem was, of course, that there's never been actually any kind of war with the communist bloc that formed its own Warsaw Pact as a response.
So this basically created the Cold War, which lasted for 50 years.
And anyway, the alliances had no meaning since that time, because by 1992, the Soviet Union or Russia, as it then became again, no longer was an expansionist power, no longer was aggressive, was in fact showing every sign of being willing to become part of a broader economic and political community.
So the whole argument for the continuation of NATO basically fell apart.
But the problem is NATO did continue and it had a nice bureaucracy in Brussels.
It had a lot of member states who were benefiting in one way or another in budgetary terms and other ways for by the money coming in.
So it continued to survive.
And now we see the strange spectacle of NATO, which was created to defend Western Europe, essentially getting involved in places like Libya, getting involved in Afghanistan, getting involved hypothetically in Syria.
And now, of course, the alliance has been expanding and expanding and expanding, even though the Cold War is long since over.
It's Phil Giraldi, everybody.
We're going out to this break.
We'll be right back after this.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
Thanks for hanging on through that break.
We're talking with Phil Giraldi from the American conservative magazine on dot com and writing for Al Jazeera now sometimes, too, which is great.
And now this one is that on dot com baiting dragons, bears and lions.
And so we're talking about NATO expansion up to Russia's border there.
And now I learn in this article, why did I not know this?
They the missile, the anti-missile missiles going into Poland that had been called off have been called back on again.
Is that right, Phil?
Yeah, that's right.
The the Obama administration basically reversed itself on the issue.
I don't know under what kind of pressure, but the the fact is that, you know, this is kind of an on again, off again project.
So I wouldn't be surprised to see that if it if it goes the other way yet again, because it's it's one of these things that's completely senseless.
The whole project is being billed as a defense against Iran.
But in fact, the Russians have known that that really has nothing to do with it because Iran doesn't pose any ballistic missile threat, whereas in theory, the Russians do.
Yeah.
And in what circumstance would Iran and I guess if there was a NATO war against Iran, then they could conceivably strike at Poland that, you know, in some future when they got their missiles, that can actually reach that far.
But not with nukes because they don't have any of those.
But anyway, is this I remember at the time when the when the Bush administration began pushing this and Bush claimed it was about Iran, everybody laughed.
I mean, Putin couldn't even help it.
It was sort of just one of those.
Oh, my God, are you kidding me?
Kind of things live on TV.
And then but also I think on on, you know, the TV news channels here in America, nobody took it seriously.
This is about protecting Poland from Iran.
This is all about, you know, something on the order of trying to create that real first strike capability against Russia to be able to shoot down anything that they could use as their retaliatory nuclear strike if we wanted to pick a war with them, a real one.
Yeah, that's the scary thing about all this.
The only way the whole thing makes sense is that if you have some kind of, you know, what Reagan used to call your strategic defense initiative to be able to shoot down the enemy missiles or to block them, the only reason you would want to have that is so that you have a superiority.
And the Russians understand this real well.
There's only one adversary to the United States in the world in a real sense, in a military sense, and that's Russia.
So they understand it.
And again, this is a a a silly bit of policy that only makes any kind of collaboration with Russia on the world stage more difficult.
And, you know, just it's mind boggling to watch this.
We know for years we've talked about just how mind boggling it is that these people are as hell bent as they are and have been about regime change in Iran, because how the hell are you supposed to do it?
There's no way you're going to get away with a CIA 53 again type coup d'etat.
They know better than that.
They've learned that lesson.
You know, look at 09.
They didn't even and I don't think that was so much an American op as just an example of the regime being willing to stay in power in the face of some protests like that.
And you can't just bomb them and get a regime change from the air.
You can't send in the 3rd Infantry Division to sack Tehran, not without, you know, a gigantic invasion of Europe and World War Two style thing.
So it's always been off the table.
But I don't know if I've ever really asked you, Phil, if, you know, the context of this plan, what seems like really a long term plan anyway, even if it lacks specifics for regime change in Russia, do they really think that they can outsmart the FSB and somehow replace Putin with another Yeltsin after all this?
Yeah, I think they do.
Actually, I think if you read if you read the neocon media, I'm sure you look at it as I do.
You will see that they have some really crazy ideas.
The whole idea about the regime change in Iran is that they have this this weird idea that the Greens or the counter revolutionaries are someday going to rise up and change the government there.
So they encourage that.
And they also have this crazy idea that if they push hard enough, the Russians will turn on Putin and they'll allegedly, I guess, elect some social Democrat of some kind who who loves the United States.
I mean, it's just that I don't I don't know where they come up with this stuff.
I mean, they they these people are not smart enough as nationalists to understand that in all these countries, the things that push their buttons are a lot different than than what push buttons here in the United States.
And they never quite get that.
Right.
Well, and the Russians, I don't know everything about them, but I think that's sort of the point, too.
You don't have to know much about the Russians to know that patriotism and nationalism mean a lot to them.
They've well and this is always neglected in all the stories of the Second World War, as told in the United States, they lost 20 million plus people to the German invasion.
So they take World War Two a little bit more seriously.
Even the Americans who invoke it as their excuse to do anything and everywhere.
But so this is a fiercely nationalistic society for a reason.
They've been made that way by endless invasions over the centuries.
Yeah, that's right.
And in fact, in Russia, the Russian word for for their country is the Rodina, which is which means the motherland.
And they have a very strong identification with with soil and nationality and ethnicity.
And the fact is, you know, all right, we don't have that.
But somehow the and I might add that Vladimir Putin is extremely popular.
And yet we have these kind of warped ideas of what of what Victoria Nuland passing out cookies will accomplish.
Right.
Well, and yet Ray was, as I mentioned on the show earlier, and he quoted that part of Putin's speech where he says, you know, we love the NATO sailors.
Those guys are great guys.
But, you know, we just can't imagine visiting them down at our former Navy base there in Crimea.
So we're going to go ahead and make sure and keep our base now.
And, you know, pretty honest and above board there.
You know, maybe not the most moral activity of any national leader ever, but certainly understandable from an international politics point of view.
What happened there?
Well, you know, Putin has a real clarity about what he says and how he says it, because he actually understands the issues and he believes in what he's saying.
I mean, I hate to say this, but I.
No wonder no one in D.C. understands him.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
I talked to a lot of people on a weekly basis and they all said, gee, I wish we could.
I wish we had the equivalent of Putin in this country, somebody that you could vote for, that you actually could could understand what they're saying and believe that what they're saying that they're saying it because they believe it.
We don't have that.
Yeah, I mean, he may be a gangster, but at least, you know, exactly whose side he's on and all of that.
That's exactly right.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
My pop's a Democrat, but he said he always respected Barry Goldwater, disagree with him on every single thing, but always respected Goldwater because at least you knew that he meant what he said.
He is never lying ever.
And so you could at least take to a bank that that he was doing what he was doing for the reasons that he said he was doing it, et cetera, like that.
He was a known quantity and somebody you can deal with kind of thing.
And yeah, that's something that is clearly lacking since Ron Paul left the house.
He was the last one, if you ask me.
I think I've read some facts and accuracy and you feel the accurate assessment.
Yeah, too bad.
All right.
Well, so now the now when it comes to NGOs and Pussy Riot and this that the other thing, I mean, how far can they push that game inside?
I mean, Putin's already kind of banned international NGOs and all of that.
But I mean, how effective were they ever, you know, in the first place, they ever really a threat at all?
I think they're like everything else that the United States gets involved in there.
There are there are money turning over machine.
And a lot of these a lot of these these organizations basically exist because they exist to to take money that comes out of the pockets of the taxpayer and put it in the pockets of the bureaucrats who run these organizations.
And they don't really accomplish anything.
I can't.
Some years ago, I did a study of what our interference in Cambodia with the National Endowment for Democracy.
And it seemed to me that it was very clear that they weren't doing anything but wasting money.
And I suspect that's what they do everywhere.
They they encourage people to to oppose their own governments, which produces inevitably bad results.
And it makes the government we don't want to get rid of them.
And basically, they don't ever accomplish anything.
If you call the pastel revolutions in Eastern Europe successes, I think you're delusional.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
No, every single one of them faded to black, as Justin Raimondo put it within a couple of years there by 05 or 06.
It was over.
That's right.
A revolution and all of this.
Give me a break.
All right.
So now last part of the essay here and extremely important and really bumming me out is the issue of Iranian ballistic missiles being brought up in the nuclear talks.
And I wonder whether you agree with Garrett Porter that Obama's blowing up his own negotiation here is just so five all over again.
Yeah, that's what I suspect is happening here that I think is under considerable pressure from the usual suspects to make these negotiations go away.
Hillary Clinton, of course, has even chimed in recently.
And and basically, this ballistic missile issue was not in the original brief for what they were going to be talking about.
And it's been introduced by the United States.
And the only reason to introduce it would be basically to make these talks fail.
And that's a tragedy because Iran wants to come to a deal.
Virtually, everybody else wants to come to a deal.
Right.
Tragic.
That's what I was going to say.
Thanks, Phil.
OK, Scott.
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