10/14/13 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

Why does the U.S. support the tortured dictatorship in Egypt?
Because that's what Israel wants.
Why can't America make peace with Iran?
Because that's not what Israel wants.
And why do we veto every attempt to shut down illegal settlements on the West Bank?
Because it's what Israel wants.
Seeing a pattern here?
Sick of it yet?
It's time to put America first.
Support the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org and push back against the Israel lobby and their sock puppets in Washington, D.C.
That's councilforthenationalinterest.org All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
And next up on the show is our friend Phil Giraldi.
He's a former CIA and DIA officer.
And now he writes for the American Conservative and antiwar.com.
And he's also the executive director of the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
And so, hey, let's start off with talking about the CNI a little bit there.
What are you guys up to lately?
Well, as you know, CNI was founded about 20 years ago by former ambassadors and congressmen to basically address the issue of American imbalance in its foreign policy in the Middle East.
In the past 20 years, of course, we've moved along.
But if anything, the problem has become bigger.
We as a country are engaged in more conflicts in more places.
And CNI has also expanded its role in bringing these conflicts and the reasons we go into them into the discussion.
But basically, we want an American foreign policy that makes sense for the United States in terms of its vital interests.
And we feel that we haven't had anything like that for quite some time.
Yeah.
Well, I think it's definitely true that the problem of the Israel lobby and their inordinate influence in Washington, D.C. probably is better known than ever.
But then again, their power has been growing separately this whole time, too.
So yeah, but they've had a defeat recently.
The Syria business was a defeat.
And depending on what happens with Iran, that could turn out to be a defeat, too.
So, you know, they're not unbeatable.
And it really is up to we, the people, to assert that we really want the government to be doing stuff for us that's in our interests.
Well, you know, Alan Grayson, who he's pretty Israel and AIPAC friendly.
He had a comment about the Syria thing where somebody asked him, what about AIPAC?
And the way he responded was interesting.
He said that, well, you know, AIPAC is great and everything.
But when I'm roughly paraphrasing, AIPAC is great and everything.
But when the American people speak with one voice, then forget about it.
You know, AIPAC is nothing.
So in other words, it's sort of the default is to do what they want.
But if the American people say, uh-uh, then that's not the default.
But we go with that.
We do what they want because we have to.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, I guess, you know, the intensity of the feeling about, you know, not attacking Syria was such that I think a lot of congressmen began to feel the breeze.
And that normally, of course, does not happen.
Yeah, we got lucky on that one.
Well, and, you know, there are enough generals speaking out against it.
And the British didn't want to go along.
A lot of people wanted to get out of that thing by the time it was about to happen, right?
Yeah, I think so.
It was just one of these really bad ideas that seemed to come to the surface in Washington every once in a while.
And this time, fortunately, we were able to reverse it.
But, you know, we've had some bad ideas in the past.
And unfortunately, we weren't able to reverse like Iraq.
Yeah, well, you know, thank goodness.
As much as people try to ignore that war, they do still remember that.
They remember how easily they convinced themselves to go along with the push for it, too.
Most of them, even though they probably wouldn't admit it like that.
But that is part of it, right?
They're like, boy, this might not work out so well.
Yeah, that's the thing.
The gold standard for really being deceived as a country is Iraq.
And every time one of these new, shall we say, programs comes up from the White House, people immediately start thinking of Iraq.
So in a way, Iraq will turn out maybe to be a good thing for the United States.
Yeah, well, it's got a silver lining anyway.
But yeah, that was what I always says.
George Bush, he's secretly one of us.
He's just doing the only way he knows how to completely discredit foreign interventionism from now on.
He's got to do it the hard way, but there you go.
Yeah, sounds good to me.
Yeah, poor Iraqis and everybody else, but still.
Yeah, and it's, of course, the amount of money blown, too, has got a lot to do with it.
That's right.
That's where a lot of our deficit comes from, right?
Well, and you know, it's funny because you're, I think, the first person in journalism to report that Obama had signed new findings.
This would have been in December of 2011 at antiwar.com, that Obama signed two findings, one on Iran and one on Syria, stepping up covert action there, which you had from your CIA sources and that kind of thing.
And yet you also have been saying for, I don't know, a year or so that, nah, they figured out that as dumb as they are, that this is even too dumb for them.
And they're sort of backing down and they'll never back the rebels, or not deliberately anyway, back the rebels enough to help them really win.
And they actually have seen the light as at least as long as a year ago, right?
After, probably not long after, maybe the day that Obama accidentally laid down that red line, which apparently didn't really mean to do.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of evidence that they really do realize how stupid these policies are.
And certainly if you listen to what Dempsey is saying over at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, you'll get a lot of contrary insights into, you know, that there are lots of people in the administration, particularly in the Pentagon and in the intelligence community, who've had problems with these programs right from the beginning.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, there's plenty to deal with.
And maybe we can go into detail later about the nature of the so-called rebellion there and who's who and what it all means as part of this.
But I think everybody's more or less getting a grip on the fact that as bad as Assad is, the opposition is not better.
Not by any measure, really.
But so, I mean, your article at Antiwar.com, Phil, says that, you know, despite all the negative things to look at here, there really is the basis for a possible deal if the Americans were willing to, I guess, pressure their regional allies to work with them and try to drag everybody kicking and screaming to Geneva or something and hammer something out.
You say it could be hammered out rather than, you know, the nightmare, which is like Patrick Coburn was saying on the show last week, that, you know, this is a lot like Lebanon in the 70s and 80s, which is a nightmare, you know, the same thing that we have now, only from now on.
Yeah, I think there's, I think there are definitely, you know, I think this thing was negotiable from five years ago.
The big mistake was the United States felt that by playing this game with the regime there, that they would produce some positive results.
And, of course, that was a fiction, what they should have been doing, instead of putting ambassadors in, taking ambassadors out, closing the embassy, opening the embassy, sending in a new ambassador who would then go around and talk to the opposition and guarantee that the government wouldn't talk to them.
You know, it was this kind of stupid game that they've been playing.
And I've been convinced right from the beginning that there was a lot of wiggle room in terms of how al-Assad, who is not the monster that he's been depicted as, how he would have responded if there had been some reasonable overtures made at that time by us.
But we didn't do that.
Well, yeah, in fact, you know, they told the rebels, basically, don't negotiate with them.
We got your back.
Yeah, that's right.
That's exactly what we did.
So basically, we created a civil war.
And essentially, you know, what I'm saying now is that I think that everybody is so tired of this that if somebody were to demonstrate a little leadership, we probably actually could work out some kind of negotiated solution that would make most parties happy, or at least most parties content.
Let's not say happy.
But, you know, that's what I'm saying.
All right.
But so who's going to lead the fight against the guy who's been doing all the fighting so far?
Because you can't bring a bunch of suicide bombers to Geneva.
They might suicide bomb something like they did today, by the way.
Yeah.
The point is, you have to work out in your own mind or, you know, what is an acceptable group to bring to the table and what isn't.
I would say that the two definitely al-Qaeda affiliated groups are outside the pale.
But, you know, there are ways to incorporate other genuine Syrians, not foreigners, who are engaged in the conflict.
Foreigners, you know, basically, they're going to have to either go or get killed.
But basically, these people are not going to be part of the settlement.
But, you know, if they came to terms with some kind of supervised election that would avoid massacres of the Alawites, massacres of the Christians, would create some kind of guaranteed protection for those groups, I think people would come to an agreement.
I think a lot of what we see in terms of the regime hanging on is the fact that they know they're all going to get killed if they lose.
And, you know, you work out a way to avoid that option and also on the other side for the rebels to avoid that option.
And suddenly things start to fall into place.
Well, you know, in fact, like you said at the beginning, the thing turned into a war.
But before that, they were really, I don't know if they were really making progress, but they were making some progress on concessions.
Hey, what if we did that?
What if we did this and hold some elections and rewrote the Constitution?
And, you know, I don't know how half-hearted or even less it might have been, but it seemed like the basis for a negotiation right from the beginning, before it turned into a war.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I agree that that's essentially what we saw.
I mean, there was wiggle room in terms of people being able to negotiate the issue.
And but unfortunately, we blew that.
Well, so but in a sense, you're sort of saying send in Petraeus and try to redo the awakening thing, right, where you get the local Sunni imams to turn on the foreigners and the worst extremists of the suicide bomber types and make a deal.
No, I think everybody has a vested interest, actually, in getting rid of the radicals.
And I'm talking about Syrians.
I don't really care about what the interest of the Iraqis who are fighting or the Saudis who are fighting inside Syria, what their interests are, because they're not Syrians.
And I think if we go to actual Syrians and we go to actual neighbors who have a vested interest in stability on their border, we suddenly find that a lot of people have have things that they can contribute to some kind of some kind of agreement.
All right.
Now, so but if I'm the Secretary of State, Secretary of State, can I call which God, thank goodness I'm not John Kerry in this life.
But anyway, if I was him, could I call some Saudi princes and say, you have to stop because we've made a policy decision that you have to stop.
They have to do what we say, right or not?
Well, they have to do what we say, at least on the surface.
They're going to continue to play their own agenda, which is going to be, I mean, for the Saudis, this is a simple kind of equation.
It's that if you you see this this block of countries aligned basically against you and this block is Iran, that's that's next to Syria, that's next to Lebanon with Hezbollah.
So this is the Saudi perception, which is actually somewhat similar to the Israeli perception.
And so you have this this this is what's driving them.
They don't want this thing, this contiguous, contiguous block of of of hostile territory to be in the neighborhood.
So that's why they want to overthrow Assad.
They want to overthrow Assad for at least 10 years.
And the fact is that, you know, they can be convinced that there are other kinds of security arrangements and that Syria can go another way if you're going to if genuinely they're going to go along with it.
But at the same time, you don't necessarily have to do that.
You can just sort of pressure them.
The United States is the is the security and basically the security umbrella for Saudi Arabia.
And as such, it has a lot of weight.
And so there are ways to convince them.
Yeah, I mean, we sell them a lot of weapons, but our guys are their army.
They don't even have an army except for internal oppression, right?
Yeah, that's basically true.
I mean, their army is not an army in the sense that it could it could fight one of their bigger neighbors or anything like that, like Egypt or Iran.
It couldn't.
But the fact is that the United States basically de facto provides a security umbrella for the Gulf states and for Saudi Arabia against its neighbors.
And they know that.
And so ultimately, you know, we're the ultimate guarantor of their ability to continue to run an autocracy.
So, you know, they know that and they're going to accept that.
And basically, if the United States comes down with enough pressure, they're going to go along with what the United States wants.
Right.
All right.
So you you're alluding to this this kind of Shiite arc, which, of course, the neocons identified before the Iraq war and thought the Iraq war was going to help their position, which, of course, it just made the Shiite arc, you know, alliance of powers that much stronger with now Baghdad in alliance with Tehran and Damascus and and Hezbollah.
I don't know if Hezbollah has a capital city.
I guess not.
Southern Lebanon, they're triply, I guess, more than any.
Yeah.
But the difference here is that the Sunnis are in the majority in Syria.
So basically, whatever formula they're going to come up with, it's not going to be part of a Shiite arc.
And that's exactly what the Saudis have been trying to create for 10 years, that that the there be a Sunni regime.
Unfortunately, they also want that Sunni regime to embrace their horrific vision of Islam, which is Wahhabism, which is, unfortunately, part of the package.
But nevertheless, the idea is they they they see Syria as a natural break in this in this the Shiite bloc, which runs, as you note, from, you know, Iran through Iraq and then leaps over to to Lebanon.
Well, so do you think in any real deal that Assad will have to step down?
And it'll be well.
And at that point, is it going to be the decapitation of the entire Alawite government there and the fall of the government itself?
Or is it just going to be a change of kingship at the top?
Or how's that going to work?
It could go any one of a number of ways.
I mean, I think the point is that I don't think Al-Assad will want to stay in power.
I don't think he wants to stay in power right now.
I think that the whole issue for him is that his his people, his his regime, which is essentially made up largely of his of his tribe, essentially would get slaughtered if he were to go.
So the fact is, in any kind of settlement, you have to work out some kind of arrangement to guarantee the that you don't go the Iraq route and have instant genocides.
I mean, that's that's, of course, something that would have to be worked out.
You might have to have peacekeeping forces.
You might have to have a U.N. presence.
I don't doubt any of that.
Yeah.
Well, and in your article, you point out and link to this statement by Michael Oren, the former, I guess, outgoing Israeli ambassador to the United States, being very upfront and honest about this and that.
I mean, it's it's between the lines.
Anyway, the reason America backs the Sunni jihadists in Syria is because the Israelis have a much bigger problem.
They think anyway, have a much bigger problem with Hezbollah in Iran and obviously Syria as the key in the arch there than they do with al-Qaeda, at least for now.
And so that's why America's policy is to back our enemies against their enemies.
Yeah, and the Israelis are seeing it precisely the same way the Saudis see it, which is essentially that they think it's better to have a radical regime in Syria, which is kind of in a state of civil war, than it is to have a government there that's friendly to Iran.
You know, it's exactly the same kind of thinking.
And as you point out, of course, that the thinking on all these issues tends to be wrong five years down the road.
But, you know, it's just I think all I'm saying is that basically there's a lot of wheels and there are a lot of levers in this problem.
And until you start kind of playing around and figuring out what the real equities and what the real issues are, you can't really approach any kind of settlement.
But there's no reason why that can't be something that's ongoing.
I think the fact that we started to talk to the Syrians, but with aid of the Russians, over the chemical weapons is a sign that there are people there that are willing to negotiate.
Right.
Well, and I think we talked about this before, how the deal with the Russians over the chemical weapons is a de facto acceptance more than, you know, reading between the lines.
It's maybe not officially stated, but pretty close to officially stated that, OK, so we're we're not even trying regime change now because, of course, we have to keep him there to give up all his chemical weapons to us.
So and of course, if that's the red line where if he crosses that, then we'll bomb you.
If he gets rid of all the last bit of it, then there's no possibility he's going to cross the red line anymore.
So in other words, Obama's going to let him live.
And I guess thank goodness for that.
Not that he's any good, but at least it could be that much worse, you know, considering American intervention.
Yeah, I think I think the way we have to look at it, given the sorry record of American interventions over the last 15 years, is that basically it will turn out badly.
But the hope is that it will turn out less badly if you do certain things and then then if you don't.
So that's that's kind of the way I see it.
Yeah.
Well, now for people who want some fun history about this, there's always especially those maybe not too familiar.
I always like recommending a clean break, a new strategy for securing the realm and dealing with crumbling states.
Both of them are primarily authored by David Wumser, who was, I guess, the leash on Colin Powell and then Dick Cheney's Middle East advisor in the Bush junior years there.
And what he says in dealing with crumbling states about Syria is that what we need to do is focus on expediting the chaotic collapse so that then that way we'll have a better opportunity to shape the future and whatever, which, of course, is a is a big assumption.
But anyway, that's the way they look at it, that like Michael Ledeen used to like to say, let's turn the whole region into a boiling cauldron and then we'll see, you know, what comes out of that.
And then we'll bomb that, too, I guess.
Yeah, yeah.
Except Ledeen always accepted Israel from that that that generalization.
But the the the fact is that, yeah, Israel, Israel has long or some people in Israel have long believed that the best solution for all of its neighbors is to turn them into into chaotic little civil war zones where where everybody is fighting against everybody else.
Now, certainly that would make Israel, in a sense, more secure in that it wouldn't be confronting any Arab armies.
But at the same time, the blowback from that kind of development, the situation that develops alongside the chaos could be worse than than dealing with a guy like Al-Assad, who actually honored all his agreements with Israel and was and was fairly moderate in his relationship with them.
Yeah.
Or even Nasrallah, if the alternative is Zawahiri for crying out loud.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, imagine is it is it impossible for Netanyahu to ask himself, hmm, I wonder what it would be like if three years from now the Baathists are gone and the it's the reign of the suicide bombers on my northern border, huh?
When Hezbollah, of course, hadn't done suicide bombings in I don't know how many years and only when they were invaded and occupied.
Yeah, I mean, the whole and of course, as everyone knows now, the whole opposition in Syria is infiltrated with jihadis from all kinds of places.
I saw this estimate that I cite in my article of 800 Saudis alone fighting on the side of the Syrian rebels.
And there are hundreds of Chechens.
There are all kinds of people from from all over the world that are that have been have gravitated to there.
And so the question becomes, you know, is this what you want on your border?
Do you think this is going to be a better solution?
Right.
All right.
Well, so finally, this is all common sense stuff for anybody looking at this and just watching the headlines.
So and, you know, I know that they got secret information that I don't know, Phil, but I wonder if you think that Obama maybe finally gets it, that the way to undo all this problem is just go ahead and make friends with Iran.
And then you just you make friends with your enemy and then he's not your enemy anymore.
Problem solved.
Shiite are neutralized or whatever.
Right.
Even from the empire's point of view, I'm trying to look from the empire's point of view, you know?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
That's the right answer for the empire.
There's no question about it.
You know, it's in fact, once you neutralize the political problems, all kinds of other things have a tendency to change, too.
I mean, you talk about, you know, the they keep citing the fact that that Iran is not a great place to live, politically speaking.
If you're in the opposition, then it doesn't have fundamental liberties and rights.
And that's only partly true.
But the fact is that it nevertheless has a certain credibility.
But once you kind of open the door to other things, things do change.
I mean, I can only you only have to cite the example of Southeast Asia, you know, that we fought a war with not so long ago.
And and suddenly when you stop threatening them, when you stop being an existential threat to them, things have a tendency to change.
Yeah.
Well, hey, they're working out a new deal with the communist Vietnamese government right now.
Yeah, they are.
I mean, not that they're really communist anymore, but it's still the Communist Party dictatorship government there.
So, you know, the heirs of the former enemy for sure.
And here they are doing doing a nuke deal with them for crying out loud, which I guess is, you know, as long as it's a light water reactor, right?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, in fact, Iran has freer elections than Vietnam.
And yet now we forgive and forget about Vietnam.
And yet we're still on on this hobby horse about about how non-liberal Iran is.
But Iran has has freer elections than a lot of places that are American allies.
Well, this is just the crisis of American power, right?
Because they thought that with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, they just inherit the whole earth.
But then it turned out there was nobody left to scare them into America's camp anymore.
So the whole world's been spinning out since then.
And so if they don't have Iran and the Gulf states and whatever is fake enemies with each other, then who needs America at all?
Well, that's a good point.
I kind of like the the American first philosophy of the 30s.
You know, let's let's just pull in within the two oceans and leave everybody alone and have them leave us alone.
And I think that's becoming more attractive.
Yeah, it turns out if you ask them, they don't need us anyway.
Yeah, that's right.
If we would if we would just quit making enemies at everybody.
Well, so now the talks start tomorrow.
Officially, the nuke talks in Iran.
You got your hopes up at all or this is just another October nine or what?
I think there's I think there are more negatives here than positives.
I think that the the lobby is still strong enough to make compel Obama to make demands that he knows will not be acceptable.
I think that's what's going to happen.
But at the same time, you know, I have I'm I'm somewhat optimistic about this.
I think that this is an opening, you know, it's an opening in a club, the door that's been closed.
And I have a feeling it could go the other way.
I if I had that money, I would say it's not it's going to go the usual route of let's make impossible the man so that can't possibly be an agreement.
But, you know, there are a lot of people suddenly on board and and the media is talking about it and and the the positive things that are being said about these talks are all over the place.
So I don't know.
I don't know.
I would obviously love to see it go the right way for a change.
Yeah.
Well, you know, this is what our old friend Gordon Prather wrote back years ago was, hey, you want to be Obama the great?
And so I got to do is make a big peace deal, right?
You don't need a big war.
You need a big peace deal and we'll put you on Mount Rushmore.
How about that?
It's easy.
You can do it.
I like it.
I don't know if he'll go.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for your time, Phil.
It's great to talk to you again.
OK, Scott.
Bye bye.
Take care.
All right, everybody.
That's Phil Giraldi, former CIA, now executive director of the Council for the National Interest and writer at Antiwar.com in the American Conservative Magazine.
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