10/01/15 – Greg Grandin – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Our first guest today is Greg Grandin.
He is the author of Empire's Workshop, Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism, which has been sitting on my pile forever, and I curse myself for not having read yet, because, wow, what an interesting topic for a book.
But then check out this new one, Kissinger's Shadow.
Brand new out, Kissinger's Shadow, the long reach of America's most controversial statesman.
So, how do you like that?
He's got a piece at tomdispatch.com, which of course ran under Tom Englehart's name at antiwar.com as well.
Henry of Arabia.
Welcome back to the show, Greg.
It's been way too many years since we've spoken.
How are you?
Good, good.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining us today.
And, wow, what a great article.
Of course, people would have to read volumes and volumes to catch up on all of the crimes of Henry Kissinger.
So let's focus on this Tom Dispatch article here and the way you narrow down the focus to the Persian Gulf and Henry Kissinger's legacy as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor and advisor to presidents ever since the 1960s and all the way through here.
And just what a mess Kissinger himself has gotten us into.
It's a really fun read, actually, the way you trace it all back.
So the floor is yours, sir.
Where would you like to begin?
Well, I would like to begin with the infrastructure of crisis and catastrophe that he put into place.
I mean, some of Kissinger's well-known policies in the Middle East are well-known.
His betrayal of the Kurds in 1975, serving them up to Saddam Hussein in Iraq, once they outlived their usefulness in playing off Iran versus Iraq, and his shuttle diplomacy in winding down the 1973 Arab-Israeli war is fairly well-known.
But more broadly, just the way that he – I mean, he did a number of things.
One is that he built up Iran and Saudi Arabia at the same time, establishing the framework of massive arms transfers and sales.
He gave the Shah pretty much what no other nation in the world had at that time, and that was the ability to buy whatever he wanted from the U.S. military.
And, of course, using rising petrodollars, rising – the profits from rising oil prices to pay for all of this.
And that put – and the support for the secret police, SAVAK, and put, in many ways, Iran on the road to radicalization and revolution.
And then the same thing with Saudi Arabia.
He worked out the same set of arrangements in Saudi Arabia.
So, in some ways, this Sunni-Shia conflict, which is engulfing the Gulf, and which Kissinger himself warns about as the reason why the U.S. should reject Obama's Iran deal, was put into place by Kissinger.
And that's just the least of it.
He also built up Pakistan's ISI and encouraged them to go – you know, when people talk about blowback and talk about CIA support for the jihadis and political Islam, they focus on the 1980s, rightly so.
And the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan and the CIA's move to destabilize that occupation.
But, you know, Kissinger, in many ways, put that structure into place by reestablishing diplomatic relations with Pakistan after the genocide in Bangladesh in 1971, and then supporting ISI, and then encouraging Afghanistan to move into Afghanistan, to put Afghanistan into play.
This was well before the constant crisis and conflict and turmoil and radicalization that we now associate with the regime.
So, I think Kissinger has a lot to answer for.
Yeah.
Well, and even then, on the Bangladesh thing, he was kind of in on that with them in the first place, too, right?
Yeah.
He wanted to keep Pakistan as a correspondent between China and Washington, you know.
And, you know, it had to do with him and Nixon wanting to normalize relations with China.
And Pakistan played a role in facilitating that as an intermediary, as Pakistan was an ally of China.
And Bangladesh, which at the time was East Pakistan, separated by India, there was a sense it was going to go left, that, you know, there were these secular modernists that were socialist and social democratic and Marxist.
And, you know, Kissinger, I mean, the transcripts, you know, Gary Bass wrote about this in the Blood Telegram in gruesome detail, but Kissinger and Nixon expedited that genocide.
All right.
So there's so much there.
Let's go back to the beginning.
You say that, you know, Kissinger ramped up the arms sales to the Shah to such a degree, but the Shah had been put back in power, of course, by the Eisenhower administration and had been kept there by Kennedy and Johnson.
So to what degree did they really increase it?
What was the real shift between the Johnson and the Nixon years when it came to America's alliance with the Shah?
Oh, there was a qualitative difference under Kissinger in 72 with the Shah.
You know, I start off the piece with, you know, that the only person that Kissinger flattered more was, you know, more than Nixon was the Shah of Iran.
But it was in 72 that, you know, and the Shah had pretensions to be a regional leader.
He wanted Iran to be treated as equals with other Cold War allies, including West Germany and Great Britain.
And Kissinger accommodated or at least pumped up those airs and those pretensions and backed it up with arms sales.
I mean, the numbers are staggering.
I don't have the piece in front of me.
Let me see if I can find it.
You know, the numbers are just hard to grasp.
By 1975, 1976, Iran and Saudi Arabia were the recipients of some of the largest amounts of U.S. military arms sales.
You know, Kissinger, as James Schlesinger, who was Secretary of Defense, said Kissinger wanted to turn the Shah into the guardian of the Gulf.
And he did.
You know, by 1977, the Shah had the largest Navy in the Persian Gulf, the largest air force in Western Asia, the fifth largest army in the whole world, thousands of tanks, hundreds of helicopters, hundreds of long-range artillery pieces and missiles, and, you know, F-4 fighters and F-5 fighters.
In 1978, the Shah brought $12 billion worth of equipment.
So there's a political economy here, too.
You know, the rise of energy costs and the creation of petrodollars and then the use of those petrodollars to recycle them back into the military-industrial complex.
And this is the beginning of the post-Vietnam wind-up.
So they had to, you know, where the military budget was being lowered in the United States.
So in some ways, the petrodollars from Iran and Saudi Arabia floated the military.
There's a great book, The Oil Kings, by Cooper.
I can't remember his first name.
But he interviewed Schlesinger, and Schlesinger admitted that basically Iran funded research and development, you know, in military equipment through the 1970s, just by how much money they were pouring into the defense industry.
And then, so, what's a SAVAK?
Oh, SAVAK is S-A-V-A-K, is the infamous Iranian secret police, the death squads.
You know, the intelligence structure of Iran that supported the Shah and was bloody and repressive and the horror stories of the torture that SAVAK presided over, in particular as protests against the Shah, built up steam.
And somebody like George Ball, who was a career diplomat, called Kissinger's support for the Shah an act of folly.
You know, that basically it just shut down any possible internal evolution and led to the religious radicalization.
All right, well, so that's a very important point right there.
The blowback, the revolution, the blowback, not just from the Shah being the Shah, but the escalation of American support for him and his death squads and all that leading to the revolution.
Interesting stuff.
Hang tight, everybody.
We'll be right back with Greg Grandin, author of Kissinger's Shadow, right after this.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
Now, I know it's fun to trace America's horrible interventions back to Woodrow Wilson or McKinley or Lincoln even, Washington, wherever you want.
Each intervention causes the crisis that becomes the excuse for the next intervention.
And so Greg Grandin, author of the brand-new book Kissinger's Shadow, is filling in some details on the excuses for our current interventions and their roots in Henry Kissinger's policies in the 1970s, ramping up support for the Shah militarily and for his internal secret police forces, whose clampdown, resultant clampdown, helped lead to the revolution of 1979.
And then, as you point out in here, and I have always read it was Brzezinski at the behest of David Rockefeller, but apparently it was Kissinger at the behest of Nelson Rockefeller, I guess.
They worked for different Rockefellers who had Jimmy Carter, who pressured Jimmy Carter, you have to let the Shah into America.
And maybe you can fill us in on this.
Someone was just asking me about this the other day on the Twitter there, about CIA and State Department support for the Ayatollah revolution in 79, because they knew the Ayatollah, because he'd helped overthrow Mossadegh and install the Shah back in 53.
And they told the French, go ahead and let him go home from Paris, because they figured everything would be all right.
Just like the Israelis kept their relationship with the Iranians after the revolution.
They thought it would be okay.
But then Kissinger and or Brzezinski, at the behest of the Rockefellers, pressured Carter to let the Shah into the United States for asylum.
You say in your article, I always thought it was just for medical treatment, but either way.
And then that was what led to the riot and the seizing of the embassy hostages and the real crisis of the revolution.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, I don't have specific information about the CIA.
It would make sense that if once the revolution was getting underway, that they might want to support the Ayatollahs as a way to moderate what they thought would be too leftist or secular nationalist factions.
And they thought maybe they could play one off the other.
And obviously they weren't able to do that.
Yes, Kissinger advocated and lobbied for the Shah to be let in, and that led to further radicalization.
I mean, this is not unlike what happened in Venezuela in 1959 where the dictatorship fell and the U.S. took in the dictator, who was a torturer and repressor.
And that led to one of the reasons why the crowds besieged Nixon as vice president during his campaign.
So you see those patterns over and over again.
And as you put it so nicely at the beginning of this segment, every intervention creates the conditions and justifications for the next interventions.
And that's one of the things I was trying to get in at this book about Kissinger, not that I think that he's – I don't think that you could expunge Kissinger from U.S. history and you would have a virtuous republic.
I think that U.S. interventionism is structural and goes beyond the evilness of any one man, but Kissinger does bear quite a bit of responsibility, but he's also illuminating.
During his last book tour last year when he was asked about Cambodia and Chile, overthrowing Chile in 73 and bombing Cambodia in 69 to 73, he was largely left off the hook by reporters, but one or two did ask him a few critical questions.
You know what he said?
He pointed to Obama and he said, well, how is it different than Obama's drone program, Cambodia?
How is Chile different from what we did in Libya?
And perversely, he's not wrong.
And those justifications in 69, 70, 71, 72, 73 was so far out of the mainstream, Kissinger couldn't make them in public.
But now the idea that we have the right to attack a sovereign country, to root out the safe havens or sanctuaries of enemies underwrites the authorization for the use of military force.
It underwrites the drone program.
It underwrites the global counterinsurgency.
But what's also interesting about Kissinger's crazy defense is it illustrates the 40-year history.
Kissinger is invoking today's endless wars and regime change to justify what he did 40 years ago.
But what he did 40 years ago in some ways created the context and momentum for today's endless wars.
So that perfect circle of U.S. militarism is right there in Kissinger's justification and militarism.
Yeah, you know, it's funny, you read in the Glaspie memo and Saddam Hussein is explaining on the eve of his invasion of Kuwait that, well, hey, man, I thought we had a deal and I borrowed all this money from the Kuwaitis and the Saudis to fight this war basically for them, to contain the Iranian revolution this whole time.
And now they've got the price of oil so low, including overproducing from shared wells on the border.
They've got the price so low, I can't possibly pay them back the money that I owe them, which is ruining the whole economy here in Iraq as well.
We can't reinvest nothing.
We gave up everything.
And so he's just complaining about the consequences from the last war when, oops, we have a revolution in Iran, now we've got to do something against it.
And that reminds me of the WikiLeaks, thank you Chelsea Manning, where the Saudi king is reported to have said, I don't understand it, it was always you, me and Saddam against Iran, but now you've given Iraq to Iran on a golden platter, not even just a silver one.
But anyway, it's just back and forth with all these very same things and the consequences of one, Saddam Hussein then invades Kuwait, and they go, oh no, you can't do that.
And that becomes the excuse for the Americans to occupy the Arabian Peninsula, wage the first Gulf War, and then the blockade and the no-fly zones, which of course led to the conditions of the terrorist war against us and all the excuse-making after 9-11 and on and on.
And Kissinger supported all of that.
Kissinger, going back and looking at what Kissinger said during the first Gulf War was interesting.
Gene Kirkpatrick, there was a bunch of Cold War conservatives that came out against the quote-unquote liberation of Kuwait.
Kirkpatrick said, what does it matter who pumps the gas?
And Kissinger was the first out of the box to attack what he called the new isolationists.
And he was one of the first people to equate Saddam Hussein with Hitler back in 1990.
And Kirkpatrick backpedaled.
And within a few weeks she was supporting the buildup and invasion.
So Kissinger was an early supporter, not just of going into Iraq, but if you read his op-ed in August 2002, he wanted to go into Yemen and Somalia as well.
So in terms of the militarization of the Middle East, he's been a constant force accelerator.
Hey, by the way, I think he's not a signatory to all the Project for a New American Century documents calling for regime change against Iraq in the 1990s.
I assume he was obviously on board with the status quo of the permanent blockade and sanctions and all that.
Was there any real quarrel there between him and the neocons?
I think they had real political differences over Israel.
But I think that focusing on Israel misses the way Kissinger, and one of the arguments of the book is that misrecognizing Kissinger as a realist as opposed to the neocons misrecognizes a fundamental aspect of US militarism.
Kissinger was a high subjectivist, an idealist.
You can go back and read his stuff.
He believes that reality doesn't exist, that the only meaning we can draw from reality is the meaning that we give it through our actions.
So there's a lot of similarity between the neocons' will to power and Kissinger.
There were political differences.
There were political differences about the Soviet Union and Israel, which manifest themselves in rivalries.
Kissinger didn't sign, wasn't part of the new American century, but throughout the 1990s he was constantly riding the Clinton administration to bomb and bomb some more in Iraq.
He would say it's not about weapons of mass destruction.
It's about being able to break the back of somebody we've said we will not negotiate with, and we have to be able to match our military power with our objectives, or we will look like we are weak and impotent.
So when 9-11 came, he was ready to go, and there was a convergence of him and the neocons.
It's funny, because it was actually just in the news, I think one week before the September 11th attacks, that this guy is under investigation for war crimes.
It's kind of scandalous.
His reputation was getting bad enough, even in mainstream media, where these kinds of things could be talked about.
If I remember right, it was a criminal investigation in Chile or something.
And then one week later, oh, Henry Kissinger, you're an expert on terrorism.
Yeah, he sure as hell is.
Go ahead and tell us what to do, Henry.
Yeah, that's the thing about Kissinger.
Even if we want to grant Kissinger the achievement that his defenders want to, detente, Kissinger takes actions in the Middle East and Southern Africa that undermine the possibility of detente maturing.
He basically helps create a world in the third world that makes the neocon vision of permanent militarism seem like a reasonable response.
So even if we want to say that, oh, he believed in interdependence, and he was willing to negotiate, but he creates the conditions where that kind of diplomacy is no longer possible, and by the time you get, you know, the arms build up and they're pushing, you know.
So that's Kissinger.
All right, everybody.
That is the great Greg Grandin.
The book is Kissinger's Shadow, the Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman.
Brand new out.
Find it at Amazon or your local bookshop, etc.
And read them at tomdispatch.com.
Henry of Arabia, really great article there.
And of course, it's also under Tom Englehart's name at antiwar.com.
Thanks again, Greg.
Really appreciate it.
Thanks so much, Scott.
Always great to be on.
Hey, all.
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