All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
Hey guys, on the line, I got Danny Sherston, he was a major in the wars and he wrote some books and he's got a brand new one out, Patriotic Dissent, and he writes for us at antiwar.com and he's got this hugely important piece, which is also huge, No Dog in the Fight.
Nagorno-Karabakh's conflict isn't about us or Russia.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Hey, thanks for having me, Scott.
Glad to talk about it.
Well, listen, man, I got a lot to learn from you today.
We all do, but let's start with this whole Eisenhower thingamajig that you and some other people are doing that we all need to know about.
Yeah, so it's going to be called the Eisenhower Media Network, we're working on a launch date, but depending on how the election shakes out or doesn't, we're looking at perhaps around Veterans Day.
And essentially we're, you know, I'm directing and recruiting about a dozen, we can call them the 12 apostles of, you know, anti-militarism, former, mostly military, retired colonel types.
We have one major general, some intel professionals, and you know, these are folks who like me, they are generally like-minded and skeptical of American foreign policy, the wars, general militarism, but people who've kind of been there and done it.
And we've got everything from sort of, you know, vaguely Republican libertarian all the way to the progressive side and being very careful about that sort of trans-partisan thing.
But the idea being that we're going to get people working in one direction and then reach out and provide a resource to producers of, you know, various different types of media to provide an alternative and independent line from, you know, the standard three-star talking heads on MSNBC and Fox.
And so most of these folks, you've heard some of the names, right?
Larry Wilkerson is a great example, you know, Colleen Rowley and a whole bunch of other folks who are in the sort of base-a-bitch mold.
He's pretty dug in over at Quincy, but I'm sure he'll be a friend and associate.
You know, folks who've been doing this work for a while, having some trouble getting into the mainstream, and you know, we're going to do everything we can to be a quasi-booking agency as much as we are think tank, organizing some of these efforts in one direction.
Because right now, the folks on this list, like me, are working in 19 different projects and we're all kind of running around, and there really isn't a like-minded agency that's similar.
You know, because even if you take Quincy or Defense Priorities, they've got a few veterans on staff, but their focus isn't national security types who are going to say, look, I'm not just a hippie, you know, I've been there, I learned something from it.
We have people who've been in the service for 35 years who now are critical of it, and we're just going to kind of continue to expand.
And we've got everything from, you know, Arabic expert enlisted types who then went to Oxford up to, you know, retired two-star generals, and we're just going to try to continue to expand that.
Great.
I mean, that's the whole thing that we need.
You know, the pernicious myth that anti-interventionism is somehow Charles Lindbergh's anti-Semitism or Jane Fonda's anti-aircraft gun treason and nothing else is, it's the most powerful thing that the War Party has going for them in this country.
And even if you're an anti-war veteran, it's all Tom Cruise, born on the 4th of July, grow your hair out, wear your dirty old flak jacket and, you know, move left and, you know, counter culture on everything instead of just this one important thing.
The one thing that, you know, he was actually really experienced in, I'm sorry, I totally based on the guy's name.
He's Ron Kovic, who is a great anti-war guy.
I don't mean to diminish him, but I'm just saying that there's that caricature.
And so, you know, what's the opposite of that?
Hey, I'm a major.
I was in both surges and I know better.
Ask me how, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, and that's the thing.
We're going to have kind of a range of folks and most of them are student high types, largely.
I mean, professors who after 30 years in the military, you know, not guys, you know, who cut the sleeves off their combat fatigues, rather folks who many were lifelong Republicans, for example, and just said, listen, it's not about, you know, hating America or any of these paintbrushes that they use to tarnish us.
It's been there, done that, skeptical of both sides and the system be broke and they're ready to talk about it.
Yeah.
And it sounds like a good group of guys to start there.
So listen, just make sure that we know all the developments about that so we can keep running tabs over at antiwar.com and the rest.
Absolutely.
You know, we will.
Okay.
Killer.
Now teach me a hundred million things about Nagorno Karabakh.
I still can't ever figure out or well, I can figure it out, but I never remember whether it's a piece of Armenia in Azerbaijan or a piece of Azerbaijan in Armenia.
So start us at kindergarten level here, bud.
Well, you know, it sort of depends who you ask.
You know, basic international law principle of territorial integrity.
It's a piece of Azerbaijan that is de facto under Armenia's control and has been since a six year bloody war from 88 to 94.
But the majority, the super, super majority has always been Armenian.
Depending how far you roll the clock back.
And as you know, in these kinds of regions, folks fight about where the history should start, because depending on where you start the clock depends on who owns it.
But basically it's been Armenian majority, hefty majority for at least 150 years.
That's a pretty strong consensus.
But based on Tsarist and then especially early Soviet, intra-Soviet politics, it ended up through this kind of divide and conquer, you know, rule of the imperialists, be they, you know, Tsars or communists.
It's been with Azerbaijan in many cases, whether it was as part of a subdistrict of the Tsarist Empire or as an oblast of the Azerbaijani SSR, Soviet Socialist Republic.
What's interesting about it is that, you know, one of the main characters crafting the current conflict, right, building the foundations for this explosion was a guy named, you know, Joseph Stalin, right, that Stalin.
And he was the, you know, whatever, secretary for nationalities in the 1920s under Lenin.
And he caused a lot of this ruckus.
And one of the reasons that he hands this Armenian majority region, Nagorno, which means mountainous in Russian, Karabakh, which means like, you know, some sort of like evil garden in Turkish, because these are the two key players in the region, he hands that little sliver the size of Rhode Island to Azerbaijan.
The Azeris are a Turkic speaking and ethnic people.
And one of the reasons Stalin does that, and this is relevant today because America does the same thing.
One of the reasons he does that is to placate the new Turkish Republic under Kemal Ataturk, thinking that they might be natural allies to this sort of isolated Soviet experiment.
That didn't work out.
But nevertheless, there it was part of Azerbaijan.
And the explosion was ready to happen as soon as there weren't Soviet troops able, or in Gorbachev's, you know, softer, gentler Soviet era, willing to tamp down the ethnic conflict, which they had been able to do for about 60 years.
So boom, 1988, big time war, Russian brokered ceasefire in 94, holds for about 22 years.
There's been fighting every couple of years since.
This one's big, though.
This is big combat.
We'll talk about that first.
What's been going on, what, the last five or seven days here?
Yeah, so this is day six.
I believe Sunday was the first fighting.
Both sides say the others started it.
We don't know for sure, but if I were a betting man, I might, you know, put my firstborn child that it was Azerbaijan that started it, or at least really wanted it to happen.
A couple of reasons for that, that I write about in the article.
Armenia kind of wins the first war, despite being about a third the size in population of Azerbaijan, and not having any oil or energy to speak of.
Some people say it's because, oh, they have a Russian big brother.
I argue throughout the article that that is a misnomer.
Russia actually sells arms to both parties, has maintained relations with both parties, and has hedged its bets and been pretty cautious here.
Because Armenia kind of wins that early war, and Nagorno-Karabakh has been de facto independent under Armenian tutelage ever since, the status quo benefits Armenia.
And the longer that this, what they call frozen conflict, stays that way, the less likely that any future settlement, if one even comes, will go Azerbaijan's way.
And so, you know, Aliyev, who is, you know, the younger, the son of the, you know, mini-Stalinist Haidar, who Justin Raimondo wrote a lot about for anti-war on, you know, he realizes that if he's going to change the status quo, he needs a game changer.
Okay, so he's thinking about military options.
That's one thing that changed.
The second thing that changed is Turkey under Erdogan is a lot more aggressive and a lot more big on this whole pan-Turkic, some say pan-Ottoman sort of solidarity.
Some of that's overblown, but when it comes to Azerbaijan and Armenia, which they hate because of the genocide denial against Armenians during World War I, they're a lot more aggressive, and some people would argue that they're giving a serious green light to Azerbaijan more than they have in the past, playing this Turkish solidarity.
And then the final point is the energy one.
So even though markets have changed and, you know, American energy independence is at least closer to true than it was in the 90s, in many cases, Washington insiders are sort of stuck in the old days where it was all about pipelines.
And so their BTC pipeline from Baku, which is the capital of Azerbaijan, bypassed in the late 90s, purposely, American-directed, corporate-owned, bypassed Armenia, a Russian treaty ally and the enemy of the Azeris, and went the longer, more expensive route through Georgia, which I know you know something about, Scott, right, you know, the whole Rose Revolution and all this, went through Georgia, you know, a NATO and EU hopeful, as part of the freedom agenda later, on its way to Ceyhan, Turkey.
And so that's BTC, Baku to Tbilisi, I'm not sure if I pronounced that right, the Georgian capital, and on to Turkey.
So for a lot of reasons, the United States has started to lean over the last two decades towards the Azeri position.
The Turks are madcap as heck on this, may be infiltrating Syrian mercenaries like they did in Libya, definitely giving lots of arms, maybe even sending planes and definitely drones to the Azeri side.
And oh, by the way, last factor that's catalyzing this and pushing the Azeris to a violent conquest solution, they think, is the Israeli factor, because the Azeris are the third largest buyers of Israeli arms, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, including the suicide kamikaze drones that they've been using, including to kill a bus full of Armenian soldiers last time the fighting broke out.
So the Israeli factor trying to hem in the Iranians using Azerbaijan as like a Mossad base over the course of the last several years, all these factors kind of came together so that the geeky, nerdy niche of Nagorno-Karabakh watchers, which I think I'm vaguely part of, we've been expecting this, and there's been rumblings.
There was a big breakout in 2016 in April, which Justin called the April Fool's War.
And then this July, there was another smaller breakout of combat.
But what's important is this one looks like conquest.
And I looked at the language, Hitchin style, throughout, and there's some really scary final settlement, life and death war, blitzkrieg language coming out of not only Baku, but also Ankara, Istanbul, and Erdogan.
So it looks like the Azeris really want to change the facts on the ground through military conquest.
And that's what makes this such a big fight, and that it's gone two days longer than any breakout since 1994.
And by that, you mean they'll take ...
I mean, they already rule the place though, right?
So, but you're talking about they're going to expel the people, or the place is under Armenian control in a West Berlin, inside East Germany kind of way?
Exactly.
And it's worse than that from the Azeri position.
From 88 to 94, especially in the later part of that war, 93 was the big year, the Armenian army or the volunteer Armenian militias that call themselves the Nagorno-Karabakh army, but with Armenian military support, conquered the place, expelled most of the Azeri minority, and have been holding it as a de facto state.
So Azerbaijan is saying that it's their historic duty to reconquer this lost province, even though it's full of Armenians, and was full of them even before the cleansing.
In which will necessitate a reversed cleansing too then, and kicking them all out into Armenia?
I mean, one would expect that to happen, despite the language of, oh, they're going to have autonomy and minority rights within Azerbaijan in accordance with international law.
But every single time there's been a transfer of territory in this fight, there's been a cleansing of people, and of course, that's typical.
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Now, let me ask you about this, because I'm just looking at the bird's eye view of some political lines on a map, so that's only so meaningful.
But it seems like, you know, obviously not in the middle of this crisis, but maybe previously or in the future, you could really just have an easement from Armenia to this small piece of itself inside Azerbaijan.
In other words, the distance from the Elbe River to West Berlin in this case is not very far at all.
You could just have one short little spur, as they call it, right on the freeway to connect them.
But it seems like there's a trade there, because there's a piece of Azerbaijan that is actually also on the west side of southern Armenia.
So it seems like they could grant an easement right back, or I don't know to what degree they already have one, but it seems like a pretty significant part of Azerbaijan in the western part there that's separated by Armenia.
And it seems like you could have a pretty even trade there.
But I mean, obviously I'm too optimistic, but why hasn't that come up all this time?
Well, that would make sense, okay?
Because the big thing here comes down, that's why it won't happen, right?
But it comes down to a battle between these conflicting principles of territorial sovereignty and self-determination.
And I talk about the ghost of Woodrow Wilson here, but it would make- All the ethnic purity, but all the borders are all drawn in the wrong place for any of these nations to be ethnically anything, you know?
And again, it matters when you go back to, right?
So who says when the borders were locked in for this idea of territorial sovereignty?
FDR.
Yeah.
Right, right.
And Stalin, right?
Stalin.
Everyone at Yalta, right?
I mean, really, it comes down to that to some extent.
That Nakhchivan Corridor that you're talking about.
So if anyone looks at a map of Armenia and Azerbaijan, it's a mess.
It looks like a gerrymandered district in the United States, right?
But the Nakhchivan Corridor, which is really at the northwest tip of Iran, bordering the northwest tip of Iran, is part of Azerbaijan and it's full of Azeris.
And so currently Armenia can drive basically right into Nagorno-Karabakh because of the conquered area.
They actually, part of the problem is they conquered seven additional districts of Azerbaijan that are full of Azeris.
So the obvious solution, and it's like Israel-Palestine, there's a solution.
Nobody wants it, right?
But the obvious solution would be give back the Azeri districts, create a corridor at the narrowest point, which you can see on our map, that lets Armenia touch and connect to its Gaza, its Nagorno-Karabakh, and then give back those Azeri districts plus another corridor along the Iranian border that connects the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, which is really part of Azerbaijan.
It's not an autonomous republic at all.
And then everyone could potentially be happy, but everyone takes sort of a macro position in its goals and ambitions.
And one of the problems with today's fighting is until yesterday, the current fighting, I mean, until yesterday, which we're talking Thursday, October 1st, neither side was willing to even engage in negotiations with the Minsk Group, which out of the OSCE is responsible for supposedly solving and monitoring this, and that's Russia, France, and the United States.
Nobody wanted to talk.
Armenia has now said they will talk, but one could argue that's because Armenia is on the losing end, not only on the ground fighting, but if you look at their capacity, beyond the fact that the Azeris have three times more people, they spend seven and a half more times in their military, and they've imported 20 times more arms in the last several years, and they have no oil.
As for their patrons, the idea that Armenia has Russia is a big if.
Russia has never really stood by Armenia, despite the fact that they are treaty allies.
Russia is only required as part of the CSTO, Collective Security Treaty Organization, to defend Armenia if Armenia proper, not Nagorno-Karabakh, is invaded.
For the most part, Azerbaijan, besides some artillery barrage, has been careful about that.
Russia wants no part.
Despite having a military base there, despite being in the CSTO, there is zero evidence in the last 30 years that Russia wants to really get involved militarily.
Azerbaijan, on the other hand, has much more active backers in Turkey, Israel, and who knows, maybe the United States, although probably not directly militarily.
Not only is Armenia the weaker hand militarily, economically, population-wise, but their big brothers are more apt to come to the schoolyard, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I'm afraid it does.
In the headline there, of course, and as you've mentioned, Russia plays in, not just on the ground there, but in American media, in the whole narrative about, well, of course, Putin is the grandmaster behind every thunderstorm, so anyway, apparently this is all his doing, or he's playing, I guess, could you contrast for us the role he's actually playing with the role he's accused of playing in the Washington Post?
This is the whole problem.
Nobody knows anything about Nagorno-Karabakh.
The number of different folks who reached out to me in the last five, six days and said, nobody knows about this, but we thought you might, because you're a hyper-geek, and I was like, I'm not sure if I should be insulted or pleased.
I chose to be happy.
No one knows about it.
No, wait a minute now.
You were a professor of history at West Point, so that's kind of a geek, but also, you know, you're an academic historian, so that's good.
No, absolutely, but this is kind of a far-flung and a little bit of a distant topic, okay?
It's relatively obscure, whether it should be or not is debatable, but most people don't understand it.
Most Americans and Westerners choose to see it through one of three lenses.
Either it's a religious war, clash of civilization style, because there's Christians in Armenia and Shia Muslims in Azerbaijan, which brings in the whole Iranian factor.
It ain't that, okay?
And there's a lot of reasons.
Iran doesn't fully back Azerbaijan.
In fact- Apparently not if the Israelis are arming them.
That's right, and also, Azerbaijan has been more secular, and beyond that, people don't realize Iran's not a homogenous joint.
About 20% of their population is Azeri.
There's more Azeri people in Iran than in Azerbaijan, in fact, by a factor of almost two, and they're worried about their rest of Azeri population against the Persian majority, so they have not normally backed Azerbaijan, at least actively.
So the whole Shia versus Christian thing is awash.
The second way is just classic proxy war, that it's just like Syria or Libya, and the reality is actually, for the most part, up till now at least, most of the patrons have behaved themselves.
Most of the benefactors have shown restraint, especially the Russians and the Iranians.
The ones who haven't shown restraint are the Israelis and the Turks, and less so now.
And the final one is that it's just a classic confrontation between Russia and the United States.
This is Georgia, this is Ukraine, this is Belarus, this is, you insert color revolution here, and that's what's going on.
And the reality is the opposite.
Russia has oftentimes actually attacked Armenia verbally, lambasted them for being too aggressive in the past, like they did in 93 with the conquest.
They have always backed out of providing real military support besides selling arms, but Azerbaijan gets 80% of its arms from Russia too, so they're arming both sides.
And Putin has said that if I don't arm both sides and keep some sort of balance, that other people will.
And he may not even be wrong about that.
I'm not a big fan of gun running, but his position isn't wrong, and we see that through the Israeli arms purchases.
But Russia has shown incredible restraint for the most part throughout this process.
Russia looks for a way not to get involved.
In other words, throughout the conflict, Russia looks at this thing and says, oh, what a mess.
And we want to keep Armenia in that CSTO, we want to keep them in the Eurasian Economic Union and out of the EU.
All that's true.
But how can we do it without ever actually having to put our feet into the Nagorno-Karabakh mess of a water?
And so they always start with, we don't want to get involved, and then they come up with the justification later.
And so they always find a loophole and say, listen, actually, Azerbaijan's not really attacking you because Nagorno-Karabakh's not technically recognized as part of Armenia by us or anybody else.
So it's not that.
The only degree that it is, as you mentioned in your really, really good article slash speech, you know, the new Cold War is all America's fault, which I cite, is when it becomes that, when it becomes East versus West, it's usually because the United States and Europe try to expand the definition of what Europe is by pulling in one of these Caucasus republics like Georgia or trying to pull Azerbaijan in a little more tightly.
So unless we provoke Russia by trying to get really into their literal backyard, because they touch Azerbaijan, for the most part, Russia has shown restraint.
And oh, by the way, so have the mad mullahs supposedly down in Iran, both of whom touch Azerbaijan and Iran touches both.
You know, I had a debate at Texas A&M in 2008, right after the Russia-Georgia war, where my opponent, you know, objected strenuously to my characterization of America as an empire.
And I was saying, well, wait, weren't we just arguing about how we have a border dispute with Russia in the southern Caucasus mountains?
We're not talking about the Rio Grande here, dude.
We're talking about as far as you can get from anywhere without being on your way back again.
You know, I can't even begin to emphasize how much I agree with you on that.
I mean, this is ludicrous.
The reason I titled it No Dog in the Fight, the article I mean, is not because I don't care about Nagorno-Karabakh.
I'm not just a geek, I'm like a vaguely empathetic person.
It does, I do care about these conflicts for a number of reasons.
The question is, can America do anything to make it better?
And from my read of history, and yours as well, I think, recent history, every time we really try to put our hands into an issue like this, we make it about something else.
We make it about us, and we make it about Russia, and sometimes we make it about energy, and it always catalyzes and accelerates the conflict.
And so, while of course I want to see a peaceful resolution, I just do not see America as an honest broker, whether it be in Palestine, or here, or anywhere else.
And what I will say finally, and I mentioned this in the Wilson bit about Wilson's ghost, the thing that's interesting, and Justin wrote about this and so have you, the U.S. decides whether it favors territorial integrity principle, or self-determination principle, very inconsistently.
Although, as I write, sometimes being inconsistent can be completely consistent, if you're consistent in your inconsistency.
So, I'm fooling with the language here, but what do I mean?
If the Kosovars want to carve a Kosovo Republic out of Serbia, then we support self-determination, as Russia's on the other side of that.
And what's interesting is Nagorno-Karabakh, those folks, the NK Armenians, have the exact same argument, essentially, as the KLA, as the Kosovar Liberation Army.
But we don't support NK's self-determination.
And then you could take that same principle and apply it to things like South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia, which you've written about, or Crimea in the Ukraine, and their vote.
So, in 1991, the Armenian, the people of Nagorno-Karabakh voted to accede themselves, like Kashmir, except they actually voted.
They voted to accede to Armenia.
That was essentially ignored by the international community, including the United States.
It was not accepted as real.
And so, we are consistent in that sense when it comes to the Crimean vote, because it goes against the Russian position, or what we consider to be the Russian position, which is way less clear when it comes to NK, Nagorno-Karabakh.
So, you know, Wilson wasn't consistent in his application of the self-determination that he voiced on, I think, January 4th of 1918.
And you only have to ask people like Mao and Ho Chi Minh, who went to Versailles looking for their own national independence and self-determination, to know that he didn't follow it.
But it's gotten pretty obscene.
And if you ring a circle around Russia and look at every conflict zone that touches them, we call them the frozen conflicts, America's position on self-determination versus territorial integrity is almost solely based on how Russia feels about it.
We feel the opposite way.
And sometimes we presume Russia feels a certain way, and then we take a position accordingly, even when Russia is pretty restrained and washes its hands of the situation.
Yeah, it's amazing.
And you know, it's funny, too, that they really don't seem to see how hollow all of their arguments about morality and about peace and about independence and about democracy ring in the ears of the people of the world.
I mean, how hollow must have all of this propaganda sounded even at the turn of the century, that after 20 years of terror wars and back in the Saudis, after they cut a guy's head off and crucify his corpse to set an example for everybody else, if they dare be born Shia and have a voice at all or whatever their problem is, after all of the chaos of all of the wars and the refugee crisis and all of these things, after the absolute inconsistency of breaking off South Sudan and breaking off Kosovo and supporting terrorists in Syria and condemning anyone who dares to resist what we're doing, even when what we're doing is absolutely wrong in the face of it, and then they want to talk about freedom and independence and especially democracy.
Yeah, democracy, like in Saudi Arabia.
And nobody notices that the people in D.C. think, I guess.
Yeah, I mean, they're either completely delusional or they're like so cynical or they've started to believe their own lies.
But you mentioned democracy and ethics, and it's just so interesting because as we've leaned towards the Azeri position since the late 90s, the oil 90s, the pipeline 90s, I mean, the Aliyev family, these dudes are venal autocrats, father Haidar, son Ilhan, who's in charge right now.
And like, you know, I played with the language in the article.
An inconvenient truth, ha ha ha, about Al Gore's career is that he presided over the signing ceremony for, you know, like six corporate conglomerates shaking hands with Papa Aliyev at the very same time that this guy was consolidating control in a mini Stalinist state where his picture and now his son's picture are literally everywhere, North Korea style.
And it's like, we're going to take that position.
And we think the world, the region, the people aren't going to notice that it might just have something to do with Russia and, you know, all those Caspian Sea oil reserves.
Like, people aren't going to notice that when that's utterly clear.
And so we'll work with anybody and we'll throw anybody under the bus.
And I'm not saying Armenia is like a picture perfect.
Well, that's why Bill Clinton backed the Taliban in Afghanistan, helped Saudi Arabia, again, the head choppers, and helped Pakistan, again, one of the most intolerant regimes in the country in terms of, you know, putting people in prison or even killing them for changing their religion and stuff like that.
And helped them to back the Taliban, you know, the ultimate of Islamic extremist fundamentalist evil and wanted, and they said on the record, no problem on C-SPAN that we're doing this.
We want, we don't want to see a peace deal with the Northern Alliance.
We want to see the Taliban win outright so they can guarantee the security of our pipeline out of the same region, the Caspian Basin, from Turkmenistan down through the port of Karachi.
Which I'm not saying that's why they invaded was to create that pipeline all along after September 11th.
But I am saying that's why they helped the rise of the Taliban in the first place.
Look, you're, you're dead on.
And those late 90s Clinton years, whether it was Kosovo or, you know, policy with Pakistan and Afghanistan, it's no accident that those were also the years that this conflict, you know, saw a bit of a sea change in the way the international brokers, particularly the West and the United States looked at this conflict.
And then, you know, just a couple of years later when 9-11 hits, suddenly, you know, there's this narrative that, oh, let's flip it all on its head.
Azerbaijan is actually a great ally in the war on terror because they torture folks.
You know, they're relatively secular.
I mean, they're autocrats, but they're relatively secular despite their Shia Muslim faith.
So, you know, we'll work with them because now suddenly with the Northern Corridor and the supply into Afghanistan and this idea that, you know, we need, you know, I don't know if we've actually used Azerbaijan for this.
I can probably do some research, but we need allies who will torture folks for us or at least are willing to sort of do our bidding and be tough on terrorists.
So, you know, it's a mistake, I think, and you brought it up.
It's a mistake to point all of this at, you know, just energy or just the 9-11 global war on terror factor.
The Clinton administration started a lot of this, and that's definitely true in the Caucasus, of course.
Yeah.
Well, and the Likud has had a long time relationship with Azerbaijan here.
I remember back in 2000, and I think it was seven, that Arnaud de Borgrave reported, and I interviewed him about it, that the Israelis had built an airbase there and had fighter bombers ready to go to try to start a war with Iran in the failed attempt to start a war with Iran of 2007, where Bush ended up telling Ehud Olmert, forget about it, man, we're not doing it.
And they backed down.
But now I know, as you report in here too, that they're selling weapons to the Azeri side.
So what all can you tell us about that?
Yeah, so one of the interesting things is I get a lot of different news updates in my inbox, and I get some Israeli mainstream sort of papers, although everything's sort of the right there, and they're reporting on the Nagorno-Karabakh flare-up a lot more than our media.
Okay?
So our media does put out, most places are putting out one or two reports on it a day since the fighting started, but it's like all that in Israeli papers.
And that is largely because of this long relationship.
I mean, it is literally no accident that Azerbaijan has not completely incorrectly been called a Mossad base by the Iranians just over the border.
They literally are using these Israeli kamikaze drones, as they're called, to hit the Armenian positions.
Like I said, they blew up a bus last time around, killed a bunch of folks with one of those drones.
They're making like $137 million-ish annually in arms from the Israelis, which makes them the third largest buyers, I think, after India, who has been using them in Kashmir quite a lot.
But if a war with Iran starts, one of the things that folks in the West think to themselves is, well, they're kind of far apart, so unless Israel uses nukes or whatever, they don't have the basing capability, expeditionary-wise, that the United States does.
But that Azeri connection to Israel, it's like a secret in the United States.
It seems like nobody really either knows about it or reports on it, but Israeli media does.
It's an open secret there.
It's not even a secret.
And so I think that that's an important factor.
And whereas Trump, of course, has never heard of this conflict, and I don't think particularly wants to get involved.
In fact, I say that maybe unwittingly, he said basically the right thing in his first quote about it.
Like, oh, we'll see what we can do, is basically what he said, which is true.
We'll see what we can do.
Like, probably nothing.
That's actually the right behavior.
But the problem is that this whole Likudnik factor, if someone makes the argument to him, if Bibi makes the argument over the phone with his Girl Talk phone buddy, Mike Pompeo, who knows where this goes, especially with a sick president and all that.
But there is a big time connection between the Turks, the Israelis, and to some extent the United States with the Azeri position.
And one of the things that's been in Israeli media a lot is the Turkish connection.
In fact, I read a few reports where reporters were basically saying, oh, wow, look, like Turkey and Israel are on the same side again.
We've had testy relations for a while.
Maybe we're going to go back to the good old days when we were kind of unofficial allies.
And maybe Azerbaijan will be the thing that brings us together.
You know, they're going to stay together for the kids in Baku.
But I mean, that's been the Israeli media, and I don't think anyone's really reading it here.
New glue for the alliance.
But I do read those papers, and it's fascinating.
Yeah.
They're always looking for the new glue for the alliance, as Trita Parsi reported about demonizing Iran back in the 90s.
This is how ...
We've got to always have somebody to claim that we're working with the Americans against, or else what use are we to them?
Yeah, absolutely.
Anything and anything they can use to sort of pull the United States to their position and make sure that war with Iran is kind of a hair-trigger away.
We usually get cold feet, like you said, Bush did during the July and August war in Lebanon when the Likudniks were ready to roll.
And he kind of got cold feet, and we usually often do.
But it's only a matter of time.
And Azerbaijan is in a perfect location.
Perfect location, not just because it touches Iran, but because it touches the Azeri majority portions of Iran.
And so it is no accident that when I was at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth as a major, I wrote about this in the article, the scenario, the recurring scenario that we used for the entire year was this.
And tell me this doesn't align with what Israel might want to do in terms of breaking Iran apart by working with its rest of minority.
The scenario was, and it's not exact, that the Azeri portion of northern Iran broke away from Iran and formed a new quasi-state called Ahuristan.
Ahuristan, though, got out of control, this is the scenario, and rolled its tanks to invade Azerbaijan to try to take over oil sources to make itself a viable entity.
At which point, the U.S. Army, which we were planning for, decided to intervene with a number of infantry divisions, including tanks, through the port of Poti on the Black Sea coast of Georgia, through Tbilisi, into Azerbaijan so that we can align ourselves along the internationally recognized border, hold off the attack, and then go on to a counteroffensive against the Ahuristan breakaway Azeri Iranians.
Dude, that's what we studied, that's the game we played.
All of our classes and all of our wargaming for an entire year was basically built on that scenario.
And while Israel was never mentioned and Russia was never mentioned directly, it is, I think, instructive that that's what the majors, the staff planners for the United States Army were training on in 2016 and 2017.
This is not that long ago.
That's completely crazy.
Did anybody, when you're doing this, did you talk about how crazy this is and how we sure are far from home, fighting over here on the eastern shore of the Black Sea?
One of the things about the Army is that you get these assignments and everybody's stuck in their own career and your thinking gets very operational and tactical.
So we spent, like my class- Or even just academic too, right?
You're sitting at a desk pretending, so- Like my 15 other classmates in this planning scenario, most of them, I was thinking about it for sure, that's what got me into this.
But most of them were so worried about what's the tonnage capacity and the depth of the port of Poti, because that's literally the kind of questions we had to answer, right?
Not why are we there, but how do we get there?
So there was very little talk about it.
But I will say that my civilian instructor, who was a retired military foreign area officer and a very bright guy, he was kind of like our MC or OC for the training.
He was really bright and really thoughtful, and I liked him a lot, I stayed in touch with him.
And he, throughout it, would kind of ask us challenging questions like that, like what's this all about?
Why are we training on this?
He didn't create the scenario, every class did it.
He was just, that's his job, it was his post-retirement job, second career.
But yeah, he raised some questions, and he's the one that got us to study Nagorno-Karabakh, because it was only vaguely part of the scenario.
The only extent to which it was in the scenario was we were told to avoid it.
So all of our transportation routes and stuff, we were supposed to not touch Nagorno-Karabakh because we didn't want to get tied into it.
But that was it.
But he was an interesting dude.
So he did kind of raise some of these questions, but it largely fell flat because the students, the other majors, their question is always the same as a fifth grader's question.
Is this going to be on the test?
And the truth is, no.
The test is, are you able to figure out the logistics of deploying fighter squadrons and tanks into the region?
That's the test.
That's the training.
The why, we don't really talk a whole lot about that at the mid-level and the military, but frankly people talk a lot about it at the high level.
Okay, so let me ask you, well what about, okay, so the kind of training that you are doing, do you practice doing that to the Iranians?
Because I guess I've been under the impression for a long, long time that we'd have gone to a war against Iran a long time ago if it was up to the Air Force and possibly even the Navy, but you have the Army and the Marines who say, we don't want to lose that many guys in that short of a period of time, no thank you.
And I wonder whether that really is the consensus or not.
Like maybe actually we are going to kick their ass one day, just not yet, or what?
What's interesting about that is, at first there was very little questioning of the scenario, right?
We're doing it because we have to do it.
Nobody was wondering, I think we were taking the 4th Infantry Division and like the 1st Cavalry Division were like our main lead elements that were going in, right?
When we started actually war gaming the battle, okay, with Ahurastan, now part of the reason the scenario is built that way is because we couldn't say we were fighting Iran, so we had to make it like a breakaway state that wasn't directed from Tehran.
Tehran had basically collapsed in this scenario, but let's be real, we were fighting a force that was attacking out of Iran into Azerbaijan and then we were counterattacking I think a 100 mile corridor security zone into Iran, okay?
When we did that, what we found out in our war games with the Red Team is a lot of our tanks and stuff started getting blown up.
Even a lot of our Air Force, which was more effective and better able to forward deploy more quickly, ran into some trouble by being far from home.
There was a lot of frustration in the room when our best laid plans of MICE and men and majors were getting kind of stymied and the problem with our army is that if you put two or three divisions through the Caucasus into Azerbaijan, they are kind of far from home and they're even kind of far from most other military bases and it ain't easy to deploy the tonnage of a U.S. Army Armored Infantry Division to reinforce.
So if the vanguard of the 4th Infantry Division or whatever we were using, I think it was the 4th, gets beat up, there ain't a whole lot of tanks coming behind them.
So the problem with the ground war is that we fight without much of a reserve because we're so far from home and if you lose a few brigades or they get bloodied up, it takes a really long time to get somebody from Fort Riley over to the Black Sea and then by land on these terrible roads, which we had to study, into Azerbaijan.
And so yeah, but the problem is nobody took that and then said, wait, maybe this whole thing is like a ludicrous adventure.
The question was, well, no, no, how do we fix it so we can get an A kind of thing?
Now again, my instructor was thoughtful and would challenge us and he was a great dude, but the question is that even if you have an inspiring teacher, the idea that it's going to be Michelle Pfeiffer and she's going to change your lives by teaching you karate is not correct most of the time, especially in military schools.
Yeah, I bet.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I wish I understood enough about this to ask you more and better questions, but I think you've done a great job catching us up as far as you could here.
And I'm going to reread this whole thing and I really encourage everybody to go and check this out.
It is kind of like having Justin back for a little while here.
No dog in the fight.
Nagorno-Karabakh's conflict isn't about us or Russia by Danny Sherson at antiwar.com.
Thanks bud.
Hey, thanks for having me.
We'll talk soon.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
