Hey guys, I'm giving a speech to the Libertarian Party in Rhode Island on October the 27th and then November the 3rd with Ron Paul and Lou Rockwell and a bunch of others down there in Lake Jackson.
Jeff Deist and all them, Mises Institute, are having me out to give a talk about media stuff.
And that's November the 3rd down there in Lake Jackson.
If you like Ron Paul events and you're nearby, I'll see you there.
For Pacifica Radio, October 28th, 2018.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all, welcome to the show, it is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan and editorial director of antiwar.com.
And I'm happy to welcome back to the show, the great Gareth Porter, writes for Truth Out and Truth Dig and he also wrote the book Manufactured Crisis, the truth behind the Iran nuclear scare.
And he's got a new one here, we're reprinting like we do everything he writes at antiwar.com.
It's called A Chance for the US to Distance Itself from Saudi Arabia.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Gareth?
I'm fine.
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back.
Hey, it was great seeing you the other night.
Thanks for coming to my speech in DC.
Yes.
Very nicely done.
I was glad to be there.
Yeah, good times.
We had a chance to talk about the Khobar Towers attack again, and we're about to do that again again here in a minute.
But yeah, so this opportunity that you're talking about is this one important writer for the Washington Post got the Saudi Yemeni treatment.
And so now all of a sudden, is it really true that America's relationship with Saudi Arabia is on the table for possibly changing into something different than it has been?
Well, I think it's clear that there is going to be some change.
Now how far it goes is another question.
Absolutely.
I wouldn't assume for a moment that Congress, let alone, of course, the executive branch, is ready to actually move to something other than an alliance with Saudi Arabia.
But I think they will take measures.
There'll be sanctions against Saudi Arabia from Congress over the killing, the murder, and the grisly murder, I should say, of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi regime.
And I think that there is a strong tendency now within the Democratic Party membership in the Senate, particularly the leadership of the Democratic Party in the Senate on foreign relations particularly, to re-examine the whole U.S.-Saudi relationship and seriously consider how it needs to be altered.
I'm not sure where that's going, but there is, for the first time, a serious willingness to take a very hard look at what has happened in U.S.-Saudi relations.
And that's a good thing.
And I would simply say that this is the opportunity for people in the public sector, in the dissident sector of public opinion in the United States, to really become much more active on this issue.
I actually had a title which called for ending the U.S.-Saudi alliance, and it was changed, unfortunately, by the Middle East Eye to something much more anodyne, I'm sorry to say.
Oh, well, you know, it is too bad about your headline, but still it's a great piece.
And I think a lot of people have seen the same opportunity as you to say, hey, see, this is what we've been trying to tell you.
Now it happened to one of the Washington Post's friends, which is interesting since they always are the number one water carriers for Saudi policy and American pro-Saudi policy, which has is, you know, all wrapped up in our relationship with Israel as well.
As much as, you know, in the broad strokes and in the details, right, the Trump administration's current relationship with the new crown prince, MBS, as they call him, Mohammed bin Salman, is all wrapped up in Israeli policy as well.
Seems like there's a lot at stake and we don't have puppets in Iran anymore.
We have Iran's puppets in Iraq now.
And so we've got to be allies with somebody over there or else how are we going to dominate the whole region?
Gareth?
Well, that's that's just about it, isn't it?
I mean, you know, from the point of view of the national security state and its media, you know, camp followers, if you will, that is precisely the question that they demand be addressed.
And the assumption is that, of course, we must be the dominant power.
And that means we must have allies.
And the Saudi regime is there ready to be our ally.
And of course, we would continue that for as long as we can from the point of view of those who believe in that ideology and who have, even more importantly, as I make the case in my article, have a vested interest within the national security bureaucracy, specifically the Pentagon and the CIA.
I would add the NSA as well, but I didn't have time, energy or or all the details that I needed to add that part to the to the story.
But definitely, you know, I make the case in the piece that the reason the United States has continued this alliance with Saudi Arabia for the last few decades is not because it serves the interests of the American people.
That's for sure.
It's because it serves and has served very well the interests of the Pentagon and CIA in many ways over the years.
What we used to call the military industrial complex has morphed over the last 15 years and more into a combination of bureaucratic interests and arms contractor interests in which the arms contractors have increasingly become the dominant factor.
Now, it's it's still it's still an alliance and both sides profit from this, obviously, in mutual ways.
But, you know, I argue that the arms contractors have increasingly surged forward as the the National Security Bureaucracy has in some ways, particularly the army is a good example of a bureaucracy that has become much weaker in some ways in its ability to determine what the arms contract contractors are going to do.
The arms contractors have increasingly been in the saddle, particularly because of the permanent war in the Middle East and North Africa, where the key factor has been the drone war.
And the drone contractors have really been driving this in ways that have made it more difficult to turn it off, particularly in Afghanistan.
So that's a very long, complicated argument.
But generally speaking, I think that it's now a military industrial congressional complex in which the contractors really hold a much stronger role, a much stronger position.
You know, I got a voicemail the other day from Daniel Ellsberg.
He was digging through the archives, listening to old interviews, and he had stumbled across the one with Richard Cummings, who wrote that great article, Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels back in 2007.
And so Dan was like, you got to put me in touch with this guy.
That's kind of pretty cool, you know, to know Dan Ellsberg is out there listening to the show.
But anyway, so, yeah, and that book was really great.
And it's all about how all of the worst neocons who you would identify as Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon's men in America at the time, Netanyahu, I mean, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Abram Shulsky and David Wunzer and Stephen Hadley and the entire Cheneyite neocon cabal, separate government, as Colin Powell called it.
They all were Lockheed guys, all of them.
The furthest one away from Lockheed, and Dick Cheney's wife was on the board of directors for Christ's sake.
But the furthest one away was Stephen Hadley, but he was a lawyer for the firm that represented Lockheed.
I guess I was never clear if he actually worked specifically on their case or not.
But every single one of them was up there pushing Lockheed products, you know.
Yeah.
Good point.
Good point.
And I really highly recommend that article.
If Daniel Ellsberg thought it was really eye opening, I think the rest of you guys will appreciate it, too.
And then I did get a really good interview out of the guy about it as well.
So anyway.
So, yeah, that's the shape of things.
It's a massively distorted war economy and the Saudis certainly have their piece in it.
And of course, you know what?
I just don't really know enough about the numbers and the percentages and how much it really matters.
But apparent, you know, and that's a separate question, how much it really matters versus how much the American politicians think it matters that we have this deal with the Saudis that they sell all their oil in U.S. dollars and demand dollars for their oil.
And that creates this petrodollar system of artificial extra demand for American dollars in the world, which helps prop our dollars up.
And then, of course, they spend however much.
I was actually told recently that it's a lot less than you think on American bonds.
I think it was David Stockman who said, you know, and I love the way he talks.
He's always like, oh, please, you know, don't give me this.
If they sold every one of their U.S. treasuries, we you know, that's how much they issue in a day anyway or whatever it is and matters not.
But it's the kind of thing that people believe in anyway.
They're like, oh, no, the Saudis, they really got us by the short ones.
So what are we going to do?
You're absolutely right.
That that is a strong popular belief, especially among sort of dissident people, critics of not just critics, but enemies, if you will, of the U.S. empire.
Right.
You know, and it was very true up until relatively recently.
But it's changing very rapidly now.
And, you know, the real problem that we have with the Saudi petrodollar connection has been that that the Saudis were reinvesting in the United States.
That was part of the deal.
And that was that was a very important part of generation of liquidity for the U.S. economy.
So so it was really vital.
It was a vital interest of U.S. economically and politically.
But that is changing very rapidly because, first of all, the Chinese have become far more important in terms of, you know, the investment of or the purchase of U.S. currency and or denominated dollars through the basically the Chinese trade with the United States and with the rest of the world.
And they have really replaced the Saudis as the key factor in that regard.
And at the very most, the Saudis hold one third of the amount that the Chinese hold.
So that much has changed.
But even more importantly, the oil, the oil economy in the entire world is rapidly shifting.
And the Saudis play a much less role now than they did five or 10 years ago.
Yeah.
And, you know, even five or 10 years ago, the great Robert Higgs, the economist said, you know, this whole thing that about the petrodollar propping up the U.S. dollar and helping make it valuable to the rest of the world and wherever is nonsense.
This is the most negligible thing like, OK, I guess it's a thing.
But what it amounts to in terms of demand for dollars in the world is nothing is not the it doesn't underpin anything at all.
And if that were to change, the U.S. would still have dollar hegemony up to some point anyway.
Well, I think that's correct.
And it's primarily the Chinese that the United States has to worry about in the future.
And what is changing here rapidly now is that the United States is no longer, of course, dependent on Saudi oil or OPEC oil.
It is in the process of becoming a major oil exporter for the first time in many decades.
So that's going to have basically the effect of canceling out the whole U.S.-Saudi petrodollar circulation agreement.
It's going to become null and void in the future.
So I think what we're looking at now really is very different from what we had one or two or three decades ago.
It's a totally new ballgame.
And I think people who are opponents of the empire need to catch up with this reality and focus, refocus their attention on what the real problems are.
The fact that the Pentagon and the CIA are continuing to hold on to to grasp this alliance with the Saudis because of their own bureaucratic interests, not because of the interests of the United States economically or of the problems of the U.S. economy.
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When you talk about consequences, and this is such a great kind of short history in this article here about American support for Saudi and what it's meant over, you know, you don't go all the way back to FDR in here or anything, but over the last generation or so anyway, some of the costs and consequences, including the fact that America has helped them, basically sided with them and their army against all you know, Iranian friendly forces in the region, Shiite friendly forces in the region, except that they don't have an army.
Their only army is Al Qaeda.
And we're backing them anyway.
Right.
And, you know, I think what the most shocking things have been, I guess Trump really did call that off in the summer of 2017.
But up until then, the CIA was really backing on those forces in a barely deniable way in Syria, right?
Well, absolutely.
They were certainly in 2013, 2014, 2012 to 2014.
There's no question about that.
You know, I think that the CIA eventually came to realize after the Russian intervention and the fact that the Assad government or the Syrian government basically wrapped up most of the opposition forces that were being aided by the CIA and its Sunni allies in the Middle East, the CIA came to the conclusion that it was really not helping anything.
And that's why I think the Trump administration was perfectly willing to end it officially.
Although even this month, they're saying to the Russians and the Syrian government that you better not go and do this air campaign against the last of the Al Qaeda fighters in the Idlib province, no matter what.
So that's kind of still protecting them, isn't it?
Well, I mean, I think there's still a Pentagon interest in, you know, continuing to have a role in Syria.
Whether that's really because it's to support Al Qaeda or the ISIS fighters is another question.
I mean, you know, they come up with any excuse that they can.
Yeah.
Well, they never called that, but they do call it, well, limiting Iran.
But what does that mean other than keeping ISIS in play or this kind of thing?
Well, I think it's again, it has nothing to do with their desire to see ISIS or Al Qaeda continue there as much as it is to justify a continued military role there.
I mean, I think this is part of a larger picture, which we could get into.
But they don't want to fight against Iranian forces in Syria.
But they might be happy to let the boys holding out in Idlib get some strikes in still, right?
Or not?
Not to have a military presence there.
I mean, that's the that's the point.
Just like I have a military presence in Afghanistan.
They don't want to give it up.
They want to have a military presence forever in Iraq.
You know, that's that's the inherent interest of the military and the Pentagon in regard to wherever they happen to set their foot.
But I want to come back to what I think is the really most shocking aspect of the U.S. alliance with Saudi Arabia.
And that is that, you know, during the basically it started, of course, with the U.S.
Saudi effort to build up and field a jihadist army against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
But after that, when the the Afghan sorry, the Saudi fighters went back from the Afghan war to to to Saudi Arabia, they then became part of bin Laden's network, which became al-Qaeda.
And of course, those fighters were were available to carry out operations both in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.
And the first thing that happened was because of the U.S. having troops stationed for all they knew permanently in Saudi Arabia, al-Qaeda was given a cause to become very popular in Saudi Arabia.
And everybody knew that everybody was aware of that in the United States and the Pentagon and elsewhere.
And what happened was that they began to carry out bombings of targets where U.S. forces were stationed.
First, the the the office of the advisers basically to the National Guard of Saudi Arabia in November 1995, which was admitted by four former Saudi Afghan fighters who were associated with bin Laden.
And then in mid-1996, the bombing of Kobar Towers.
And of course, I've written about this at some length, and I've shown that the FBI and the CIA went into the tank and basically, despite CIA intelligence reporting that it was done by bin Laden's folks in Saudi Arabia, they blamed it on Iran.
So so they were essentially enabling the bin Laden network, al-Qaeda, to continue its operations without any hindrance from the United States.
And that, to my mind, was the beginning of the road to 9-11.
And wasn't that John Brennan that was running the CIA station in Saudi at that time?
That's correct.
John Brennan was the station chief in 1996, actually.
So he was presumably- I know that the bin Laden unit guys, they thought bin Laden did it.
And there's great reporting besides yours, which is great.
And everybody searched Gareth Porter and Kobar Towers.
But also there's a great piece in The Village Voice by good old, what's his name?
Maybe you can help me.
Rudy's Ties to a Terror Sheik is the name of the article.
And it's about al-Thani, who had helped back al-Qaeda, the Qatari sheik there.
And how, you know, the attack was staged from inside Qatar.
And then he had helped Khalid Sheikh Mohammed escape, the same guy that ended up, you know, doing, you know, being the ringleader of the 9-11 attack just a few years later.
Right.
Yeah, because there was a lot of sympathy within the Gulf sheikdoms for bin Laden.
And no question that they were being funded from those places, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and UAE and Kuwait as well.
And as you say in the article here, I forgot to just say it out loud, that bin Laden himself took credit for this to Abdelbari Atwan, the journalist from London.
That's right.
And again, you know, he did it twice in two separate interviews in October and November, as I recall, of 1996 after the Kobar Towers bombing.
He said more or less directly, he didn't announce directly, but it was very clear what he was strongly suggesting, that his al-Qaeda group were responsible for both of those bombings.
By the way, William Perry, I know the Secretary of Defense at the time under Bill Clinton, agreed with that.
But I wonder, do you know if that means that that was also the conclusion of the DIA?
I don't know that.
I should mention here that I interviewed a CIA analyst named Cynthia Storer and she said, well, she can't tell me how she knows, but she knows that Iran was involved with it and so was al-Qaeda.
Together they did it, she said.
Yeah, well, that's that's a very popular notion, of course.
It serves the interests of everyone connected with the whole investigation of 9-11 to not just blame it on al-Qaeda, but to blame it on both Iran and al-Qaeda.
But I've written about that as well.
And I think that the evidence is quite clear that the point that is most often cited, which is that Iran let the the al-Qaeda people go through Iran and didn't stamp their passports because they were Saudi.
That is BS because it's very well known that Iran never stamped any passports of Saudis going through.
That was the general practice that they had.
That was no evidence whatsoever that they had any knowledge that there was an operation against the United States whatsoever.
Yeah, I know.
I want to go back to what you're saying about the generations here.
And these are the guys that the Carter and Reagan administration supported with Saudi and Pakistan in the 1980s.
Then they came home and turned against the United States and its interests in the 1990s in response to the American occupation of Saudi in order to bomb the no-fly zones in Iraq is what they were doing there.
Right.
And at the same time, of course, supporting Israel through the 90s.
But then so Bush does the ultimate Iraq War II.
And like I was saying in my talk the other night, even though he gave all of Western Iraq to Osama and his guys, al-Qaeda, for a few years there, the local Iraqi Sunnis cleaned them up, were sick and tired of them and shot them all in the head and said, that'll be enough for you.
Thanks for all your help, al-Qaeda, for getting us in even worse trouble than we were before.
And now you're done.
And really, it was the guys that came home from Iraq War II that were the ones who, you know, the ones who had fled after the local Sunnis turned on al-Qaeda in Iraq after Iraq War II that then did these wars in Libya and Syria where Obama took their side.
And now we already have guys coming home from those wars.
And who knows what's going to happen next?
Oh, and then I know what I was going to get to with this, which is that you have there's this great article I just read this morning about the Crown Prince MBS versus the Crown Prince HBL, Hamza bin Laden, Osama bin Laden's son, who's now using and has put out six videos and all these podcasts and whatever.
And he's using MBS as the perfect foil since MBS is just, you know, straight up just, you know, completely as decadent as can be and is in the pocket of the Israelis and the Americans as he could be and just blatantly denounces Wahhabism and whatever.
So whatever reforms that all of us we would like to see in Saudi, he's been attacking the religious right in the most ham-handed way and making such a poster child of American subservience and decadence out of himself that this could really fuel some some, you know, maybe even as Daniel Lazar is writing in Consortium News today, this really could mean the end of the Saudi regime and the rise of a bin Ladenite state there for real.
Well, look, I'm glad you've raised that point, because, you know, what this underlines is the fundamental fact that the United States has to come to grips with, has to come to recognize and do something about it, which is that Saudi Arabia is essentially a Wahhabist state.
It's a state based on a religion of Wahhabi Islam, which is so totally backward looking that it really is completely out of sympathy with any modernization in a cultural sense and a political sense in Saudi Arabia.
And it was because of the powerful currents of support for bin Laden as a bringer, somebody who was returning to Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, it was because of that powerful current of support that the Saudi government was so afraid to have the United States investigate the two bombings, particularly the Cobra Towers bombings, and find out the truth that that's the Al-Qaeda network was behind it, because they thought that then they would be implicated with the United States in bringing bin Laden to justice.
And that that could cause such enormous outrage and a political uprising against the regime that they could not possibly allow that to happen.
So that's why they covered it up.
And I think that there must have been at least some level of awareness in the intelligence community about that fact, but they went along with it anyway because the CIA and the Pentagon had too much at stake in their relationship with Saudi Arabia.
At least that's the only way I can explain it.
You know, so let me ask you this.
When you have and you have in your article here from State Department cables leaked here where the Hillary Clinton State Department, that is the Obama administration in the first term there, said, look, the Saudis are still the greatest financiers of terrorism in the world.
And so is that the Saudi government or that some Saudi princes?
And how do you differentiate between the official policy of the kingdom of, you know, not supporting Wahhabism, but supporting arms, armed, you know, fighting groups all around the world?
You know, at the same time, they're supposedly our partners in the terror war and all of that.
Well, I think what Clinton's comment there was aimed at was the reality that the funding for these armed groups, including ISIS and Al-Qaeda related, directly Al-Qaeda related groups, is still coming from Saudi Arabia.
There is also funding, of course, from UAE and Kuwait and probably Qatar as well.
But Saudi Arabia is still the main source of the funding.
And the U.S. government, Treasury Department specifically, which is working primarily on the issue, believes on the basis of their knowledge that the Saudi government is not doing as much as it could do to shut that down.
And that goes back to the reality that we talked about a few moments ago, that the Saudi government still has this fear of the Wahhabism that permeates the clergy and a large part of the, you know, people who count in Saudi Arabia.
Yeah, they really put themselves in this ironic position, right, where they're so dependent on the religious authorities to tell everybody that they have to obey and never fight back.
But then that really gives all the power to the religious authorities.
Exactly.
And turn that right around on them.
So, you know what?
I keep thinking about Jimmy Carter.
I have the clip somewhere here, Jimmy Carter toasting the Shah of Iran and saying, you know, you are such a great monarch, doing such a great job.
And your country is an island of stability in a region of turmoil.
And you're just the bee's knees.
Congratulations to you.
And then like a few months later, the whole game was up and over.
And the Ayatollah reigned.
You know, you can you can make the same kind of analysis about Saudi Arabia without any question.
A situation is different in many ways, but this is a regime that is extremely unstable in the sense that it's it's very narrowly based.
Obviously, it's family based.
It has very serious problems socially, economically, demands for change within the country.
MBS has proven himself to be extremely unstable as a personality.
And there's lots of people who want to get rid of him in Saudi Arabia.
And so there's no question that this is a moment that bears making a parallel with the Shah's regime at the end in 1979.
All right, you guys, that's a great Gareth Porter.
This one's at Middle East Eye.
You can also find him at Truthout and Truthdig and at Antiwar.com.
This one is there today.
A chance for the U.S. to distance itself from Saudi Arabia.
Thanks, Gareth.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, y'all.
That's Antiwar Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
Find my full interview archive, more than 4,800 interviews now going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org.
Thanks.
See you next week.
