10/11/13 – John Feffer – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, alright.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
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And now to our first guest, it's our old friend John Pfeffer from Foreign Policy and Focus, the Institute for Policy Studies.
Welcome back to the show, how are you doing?
Pretty good, thanks for having me back, Scott.
Well, it's good to talk to you again.
And I guess I was reading that you went traveling all around Eastern Europe and riding all kinds of things, but I didn't get a chance to catch up on all that, but maybe I will get a chance to and then I can interview you about all that.
Do you want to tell us about your trip?
Sure.
I was on an Open Society Foundation fellowship and basically I was tracking down the people that I talked to in 1989 and 1990.
So I talked to about 250 people, various activists and people who later became, you know, politicians or remained activists.
And I found quite a few of them and I sat down and talked with them to find out what happened to them over the last 23 years, what happened to their countries and what happened to many of their, the big hopes that people had that Eastern Europe would kind of go off in an interesting new direction.
Cool.
And so is there a way where you can, like for each person, you can see their old interview and their new one, that kind of thing?
Yep.
If you go to my website, which is johnpfeffer.com, you just click on the Eastern Europe part and you can scroll through.
There are about 110 interviews up there right now.
And I would say about a third of them come with the previous interview as well.
Okay, great.
Man, that's so cool.
I sure hope I can get a chance to go through that soon.
I got to re-max Blumenthal all this weekend.
I know that.
All right.
All right.
So listen, Foreign Policy in Focus, that's where you write a lot of things, fpif.org, as well as your own site, johnpfeffer.com.
And I wanted to talk with you about this one.
I wanted you to talk with us about it, Syria, what's next?
And first of all, you have a great retelling of it.
And I just love this part of the story so much.
I want to hear it again.
Tell us, John, all about how the American people rose up as one and screamed no and stopped the war.
As you know, the war did not take place.
And that's a good thing.
And for that, we should all be very, very happy.
And the reason why that happened, well, I mean, certainly there was a lot of public, shall we say apathy, a lot of public opposition to the war.
The polls indicated, and the president and Congress were reading those polls, indicated that a large majority of the American population did not want to have any kind of intervention in Syria, whether it was boots on the ground or missile attacks.
But I think that the president was not only looking at the polls, he was looking at basically the very difficult prospect of launching an attack and having any kind of success whatsoever.
And the potential spillover, the potential consequences of the attack in terms of what would happen in the region, what would happen in terms of U.S. standing with Iran, Israel's position in the region.
So there are a lot of reasons why I think the president ultimately decided that he was not enthusiastic about this attack.
It's so unenthusiastic, in fact, that he decided he would go to Congress to get a mandate.
Now, that would perhaps be the last place that you would imagine the president would go to get a mandate.
I mean, it would be more difficult to get a mandate from Congress than it would be even from the Security Council at the U.N.
This is an institution that has blocked the president on virtually every one of his initiatives over the last year.
And I think it was clear that the president knew that he was going to basically get the big N.O. from Congress.
And that's a reflection of basically his reluctance to even follow through on what had been a promise.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, I don't care.
I'm still taking credit for the American people.
But yeah, you're right.
No, it was such a fool's errand that even in Washington, D.C., some significant segment of the population there recognized what a disaster it could be, and at least how little good it could possibly do.
And I think you're right.
He went to Congress in a way saying, you know, hold me back, guys, kind of a thing, you know.
Exactly.
But if you turn it around, and if you imagine that, say, 70 percent of the American public supported an attack on Syria, that would, of course, have made an entirely different political calculation in Washington, different calculation for the president, different calculation for Congress.
They would have been responding to an entirely different situation.
So I don't want to discount, you know, the anti-war sentiment or the anti-war organizing, because all you have to do is flip it around, and you'll see that it would have been entirely different if the numbers had been different.
Right.
All right.
So now, well, we can get back to why it would have been such a bad deal, but today's news is that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has won the Nobel Prize, and then do I understand it right that they're the ones who right now are attempting to dismantle Syria's chemical weapons?
Yeah.
Yeah, well, I mean, we haven't gotten to the dismantlement phase, but, yeah, I mean, this is...
Well, a little bit, right?
They said they're drilling holes and filling things with concrete and hacking things with hacksaws, I guess.
Well, we're getting, you know, some cooperation from the Syrian government.
We're getting some information about the size of the chemical arsenal.
And you know, they've got a big deadline.
You know, they're supposed to really start in earnest in November and finish sometime in 2014.
And this is not going to be easy.
I mean, this is, even in the best of circumstances, even if we were talking about dismantling, you know, chemical weapons, you know, on a holiday resort, you know, it would be challenging to meet that deadline.
But we're talking about in the middle of a civil war, and that's never going to be easy to do anything, much less a complicated endeavor like dismantling an entire chemical weapons arsenal.
But, you know, I've read some pretty optimistic stuff about, I think it was a McClatchy piece that said that, you know, almost all of these are binary type weapons where they're not nearly as dangerous before they're mixed.
And that there is apparently a pretty big quantity of them, proportion of them was one chemical was an alcohol based thing where they said you could just pour it all out in the desert and just evaporate away.
And that's half of the weapon right there.
And, you know, so it sounded like they at least were pretty optimistic.
They were talking in the newspaper saying, you know, we think we're going to be able to do this.
I don't know how different, you know, what they have is compared to I know in Anniston, Alabama, they have the world's gnarliest incinerator to try to get rid of America's chemical weapons.
And it doesn't work all that well.
It's not quite hot enough.
They've had problems and that kind of thing.
So maybe that's just because the Americans have a lot worse chemicals than Assad ever did or what, I don't know, VX versus something.
I don't think the challenge is so much, you know, once the chemical weapons are identified and then the dismantlement begin, I think the challenge is determining that all the chemical weapons have been identified.
But I think, you know, it's always going to be a question whether some have been hidden away.
I mean, you know, these are not huge, you know, enormous missiles with warheads that I mean, as you point out, some of them are quite simple and they can be in a room somewhere that is hidden underground or wherever.
And you know, there's also concern that some have somehow been taken over by other non-governmental forces, shall we say.
So that's also a concern.
So I think that that's going to be the challenge, not so much the dismantlement itself, but really determining the size, the scope, and the location of all of the arsenal.
All right, so now back to the war and the red line and all that, I guess, well, there was a New York Times story said that Obama never meant to say red line in the first place.
In fact, it seemed like maybe they had discussed and said, like, whatever you do, don't say red line.
And then he just kind of blundered like George Bush and catapulted propaganda and just accidentally said the wrong thing kind of thing.
And so he was trying to back down from that.
But it's hard to back down from a term like red line.
That's something that John McCain can latch on to and repeat over and over and is interesting for TV presenters and that kind of stuff.
So it's hard for him to back down from it.
But now that he has and he's made this deal with the Russians about the chemical weapons and the United Nations and all this to get rid of the chemical weapons, he's basically given up regime change and saying, go ahead and stay at least for a little while to Assad because he needs Assad to give up the chemical weapons.
Right.
That's right.
Well, you know, the commitment on the part of the Obama administration, the regime change in Syria has always been, shall we say, a little half hearted.
You know, in some sense, Assad represents some some form of stability in the region.
I mean, this is in part why the Israeli government was not enthusiastic to see signs of crisis within Syria.
Obviously, Israel has had plenty of problems with Syria in the past, but Assad was someone they had been dealing with and it was he was a known quantity, whereas some of the other forces bubbling up there in Syria were not known quantities.
And their willingness, so to speak, to negotiate with Israel was a question mark.
I mean, the United States government looks at the Syrian situation much the same way.
Pentagon, State Department, their primary interest is stability.
They want a predictable situation.
They want a government that they may not love, but at least they can deal with, they can can negotiate with, can have some degree of of certainty how it's going to act.
And that's the case with Assad.
OK, he might be, you know, working with the Russians, he might be supporting all sorts of nefarious activities around the world, but he is a known quantity.
Certainly that's not the case with a number of the actors in the Syrian opposition.
So regime change is always a tricky issue.
And obviously, the Obama administration is very cognizant of what happened in Iraq, not all that enthusiastic about what happened in Libya.
So all of this experience adds up to a big question mark when it comes to regime change in Syria.
Yeah.
Well, you think they could have learned a lesson from their failure in Libya?
Well, you know, on the one hand, there is the geopolitical spillover, the problems that have been taking place in Libya.
All of that, I'm sure, is foremost in the president's mind.
On the other hand, let's remember that the president, in part, was responding to a particular political crisis within the United States in which he was receiving an enormous amount of pressure from Congress, but even more so pressure from European allies.
And from that point of view, regardless of what happened in Libya, I think the administration feels like what it did was in some sense successful.
It managed to prevent what it argued was a humanitarian crisis, what was likely to be a human rights catastrophe, and removed someone who was pretty unpredictable.
Okay, so the consequences have been miserable, and that should be a lesson that the administration should learn.
However, I think from its point of view, the strategy it undertook in those moments managed to satisfy a number of conditions that they felt they had to satisfy, both domestically and externally.
Yeah, especially domestically.
You know, I was interviewing Ariel Sharon's comatose half-a-corpse yesterday, and it was saying that, oh yeah, the war in Libya was a great success.
Thank you very much.
That was number three on my list.
Appreciate it.
Absolutely.
And you refer to this, well actually, now that I'm hovering over it, this is U.S. news, I don't know if this is a reference to the same thing or not.
I was thinking of the New York Times article about how the Israeli position is let them kill each other.
And what's funny about that is the policy is not let them kill each other, it's help them kill each other, right?
You know, make it worse and worse and worse, but keep it a stalemate.
They even said that in the Washington Post, and they weren't even shy about it.
Well, what we want to do, we want to arm them up so that this horrible, massive Bay of Pigs massacre takes as long as possible before we stab them in the back and leave them all completely high and dry to be killed eventually.
Really?
God dang, guys!
We have a precedent for that, and that was the Iran-Iraq war.
I mean, certainly the United States, you know, it was formally supporting Saddam in those days, supporting Iraq in order to weaken Iran as much as possible.
But then, of course, as we discovered with the Iran-Contra affair, we were secretly supporting the Iranians as well, arming both sides.
And I think the idea at that time was, hey, a pox on both those houses, if they can fatally weaken one another, that's to America's advantage in the region.
Now, of course, you know, what happened was entirely different.
They did, you know, stagger each other for years and years, but both of them emerged from that with plenty of armaments left over.
And I think that's the lesson we should learn from the Syria situation as well.
Even if we were to arm both sides, and we are largely, you know, supporting the opposition here, of course, but even if we were to arm both sides, I don't think that would lead to the kind of result that, you know, that these people are calling for, which they basically all killed each other off.
That is not what happens in these situations.
I wonder if you think it's possible that they could do another redirection and maybe not back both sides, but switch sides back to Assad.
After all, George Bush paid Assad to torture people for us for years and years.
He's a Baathist, secular, fascist, dictator, partner in the war on terror against al-Qaeda, who now we're the ones who switch sides, not him, you know, kind of thing.
But so, you know, the L.A. Times has this thing, U.S. fears radical Islamists could take root in Syria.
Well, you hear the same kind of propaganda about Libya, and David Vine is coming up on the show to talk about the buildup in Italy for further intervention in Libya, and it's just like, I was trying to warn them, I'm sure you were probably on the show trying to warn them, too, before they even declared the no-fly zone in Libya, that once you do this and get a regime change there, then the policy is obvious that you're not going to be able to let the guys that you're fighting for win, because they're a bunch of mujahideen veterans of the Iraq War, for Christ's sake.
And so that just means there's going to have to be further and further and further intervention to determine the future there.
You know, the more, the worse of a failure it is, the more of an excuse they have to intervene.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, I think, you know, the possibility of a redirect, I think it might, as I argue in the article, it might be a road that passes through Tehran.
I mean, this is the kind of big issue on the plate for the U.S. government right now, and that is the possible rapprochement with Tehran.
This is perhaps the most promising development in years.
People might remember that in the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks, the United States and Iran actually worked very closely together because, of course, Iran was not enthusiastic, shall we say, about the Taliban in Afghanistan, or happy to help the United States dislodge the Taliban.
The Iranians were as surprised as many people around the world when George W. Bush included Iran in the Axis of Evil, and that, as Ryan Crocker has said, was one word that changed history.
There was a possibility for rapprochement in those days, but that Axis of Evil State of the Union speech in 2002 basically scotched that.
So it's been more than a decade, and now we have a different leader in Iran.
We have the possibility of some negotiations going forward on the nuclear question, and as importantly, some cooperation possibly as well on Syria.
So I don't see necessarily a redirect that would have the United States suddenly kind of deciding, hey, you know, we like Assad after all, but we might see some kind of deal with the United States and Iran working together, maybe to find some kind of modus operandi in Syria that would allow Assad to leave, but leave behind much of his apparatus.
Yeah, well, I keep plagiarizing the leverage on the go to China thing, and I forget now whether they make this point about the, that's, sorry, the Nixon goes to China.
You got to just go and start with let's be friends and then work out the details from there, because if you try to work on any one set of details, the war party's going to screw you up by linking it to something else and whatever, and they always find a way to sabotage the kind of thing.
But my point about it is that going to China is what made it okay for Nixon to lose Vietnam.
The whole point of Vietnam was, oh no, we can't let the Red Menace spread throughout the Asia there, but oh geez, I guess if the Red Chinese are our friends, then it doesn't matter if the Vietnamese are communists or not, and so we can go ahead and lose that war that we can't possibly win without atomic weapons, and so bye.
And then, so my thing is, instead of having to take the Sunni side in the Sunni-Shia civil war in the region that the United States created with the Iraq war invasion where we fought on the Shia side, as you just said, we could just do the go to China thing and make friends with the entire Shiite crescent, whatever, whatever.
I know they have to divide and conquer and have one enemy or another, they think, but it seems to me like they could just be friends with everybody.
You know, the State Department.
Just be friends with everybody.
Why not?
Well, they could be.
I mean, why do we have to force all these guys to kill each other all the time?
I would certainly endorse that, but from the State Department's point of view and the Pentagon's point of view, you know, there is an overarching reason for a rapprochement, and the rapprochement with China, of course, has less to do with the Vietnam War and much more to do with isolating Russia as much as possible.
So it was to drive a wedge between the two principal communist powers in the world.
If we were to, for instance, have a rapprochement with Iran, well, then there would be some other overriding geopolitical reason.
It might be to secure our kind of anti-China alliance, for instance.
We've been putting together as closely as possible a kind of ring around China, a ring of our allies that essentially contains China's influence.
Certainly Iran could be a puzzle piece in that.
But I don't really expect the United States to basically take what had been Turkey's foreign policy over the last decade, which was to be friends with everybody.
He's in a particularly vulnerable place in the world, and that was the reason it decided to adopt that particular foreign policy.
The U.S. has unfortunately pursued its exceptionalist foreign policy tradition, and that has meant for the most part that it doesn't feel it needs to be friends with everybody, and in fact can be extremely selective about who it wants to be friendly with around the world.
Yeah.
Boy, that is sad, isn't it?
The only way the U.S. state could make friends with one of its enemies, but face it, they're only our enemy because they declared independence from our empire.
It's not like they picked this fight with us or anything.
The only way that we could ever really heal things is if we can somehow use them as a weapon against somebody else.
Maybe we can forge an alliance between them and India and use them against Pakistan and China.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Well, that's the kind of logic of geopolitics that permeates U.S. foreign policy.
We have, for the most part, a team of realists who make those calculations, and unfortunately the kinds of idealists that we've had have not been the kind of idealists we necessarily like.
George W. Bush and some of his neocon team were, of course, idealists in some respect as well, kind of defying the geopolitical logic in order, for instance, to so-called promote democracy around the world.
So trying to fashion a new kind of logic for the State Department and for U.S. foreign policy, well, I mean, it's something we've been trying to do with foreign policy and focus for 15 years, you know, putting forward the kind of arguments that we believe are necessary for a kind of multilateral, peaceful, economically just, and sustainable foreign policy for the United States.
We've seen some progress in some places around the world, but I can't say that there's anybody inside the State Department that has adopted our platform en masse.
Yeah.
Well, let me ask you this, John.
You think a libertarian could sell non-interventionism to liberal internationalists, a libertarian like me could sell non-interventionism, just hands off, forget about it, no more collective security, no more none of that, in place of a kind and just and multilateral foreign policy like you just described that you can't seem to get either?
Uh-huh.
Well, I think there is some support for that, and there always has been some support for that within U.S. political elites that has stood in kind of distinction to liberal internationalism.
But the problem is that at the moment, the United States is so embedded in liberal international institutions, whether we're talking about political institutions like the United Nations or economic institutions that are, I'm not just talking about the World Trade Organization, I'm talking about a myriad of economic institutions that set the regulations for trade and for economic cooperation.
Because the United States is embedded in those institutions, it's relatively difficult to put forward a strict isolationist position.
On the narrow question, however, of non-intervention, non-military intervention, I think we might have more success, because we can make the economic argument, we can say, okay, we can be part of the U.N., we can be part of NATO even, we can be part of these economic institutions.
However, economically speaking, we're bankrupting the United States by having basically an aggressive forward-based military position that encourages military intervention, that encourages the kinds of involvement that we've seen over the last 50 years.
Using that economic argument, I think we could have a little bit more success, especially right now, given the budget constraints in Washington.
So yes, on that narrow question of non-intervention, non-military intervention, I think we can be successful in basically arguing down the positions of the liberal internationalists.
All right, well, listen, I'm sorry that we can't keep going, but we're all out of time.
But it's good to talk to you again, and I am going to catch up on your journey there through Eastern Europe, catching up with your old interviewees from a generation back at the end of the Cold War.
That must be really something.
I can't wait to look at that.
John Pfeffer, everybody, fpif.org and johnpfeffer.com.
Thanks very much.
Thank you.
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