10/14/16 – Joe Lauria – The Scott Horton Show

You hate government?
One of them libertarian types?
Maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers, or warmongers.
Me too.
That's why I invented libertystickers.com.
Well, Rick owns it now and I didn't make up all of them, but still, if you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go.
Libertystickers.com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right, libertarian, empire, police, state, founders, quote, central banking.
Yes, bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And, well, everything that matters.
Libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
All right, y'all.
Scott Horton Show.
Check out the archives at scotthorton.org, sign up for the podcast feed there as well, and follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
All right, introducing our friend Joe Lauria.
He is in Erbil, Kurdistan, writing now, I think mostly for Consortium News.
Correct me if there's other places I should mention too, but lots of great stuff lately at Consortium News.
Formerly UN correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.
Welcome back.
How are you doing, Joe?
I'm fine, Scott.
All right, good deal.
And again, in Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan now, and all the big news is what's gonna happen with the coming battle of Mosul.
We got the Kurdish Peshmerga.
We got the Shiite Iraqi army.
We've got some Sunni tribal militias, I think.
We certainly have some Shiite militias, like the Bata Brigade and the Mahdi Army and those guys are coming.
Asaib al-Haq and all those guys.
And then we got the Turks now are lining up for the invasion of Mosul, question mark, in parentheses there.
And of course, we have US Special Forces and spies on the ground and planes in the air.
I think Russian planes in the air over northern Iraq as well.
And so the big question is, when is the final assault on Mosul going to be launched?
But actually, I guess I should ask you first about the recent reports that maybe there won't even be a battle of Mosul at all, that the Islamic State are fleeing the city.
Well, that's what we talked about last time I spoke with you, a piece that I wrote on September 30th, Consortium News.
And there's been some developments too.
Yes, there have.
And the main ones you've touched on one of them, which was Turkey, which is really important to talk about.
The other one is this unnamed source in Russian media saying that the US, Saudi Arabia are facilitating the removal of the exodus of ISIS from Mosul right now.
That's what we talked about.
And we also, you asked me where they were going.
We discussed that.
And of course, the speculation we had was that they would go to Syria and perhaps put more pressure on Assad.
And I wrote that they could also help create the quagmire that the US seems so intent on getting Russia into in Syria.
And of course, this Russian story said that, in fact, they are going to go towards Raqqa and towards Deir ez-Zor, which was the scene of that attack by the US against 80 Syrian soldiers and killed them.
The US says it was a mistake, but it had the benefit of ending the ceasefire that Ash Carter broke with the White House and State Department, said he was against.
And then suddenly 80 Syrian soldiers are killed by a US warplane and the ceasefire collapses, which then led to this operation that was going to be a joint Russia-US operation in Aleppo.
Everyone's talking about Aleppo.
They've made this into Sarajevo now, as if nothing else is happening.
It's all about Russia killing these innocent people.
This was supposed to be a US-Russian joint operation to shoot al-Qaeda, essentially, inside this small part of Aleppo.
It's not even the whole city, about 20,000-50,000 people.
And so Russia went it alone.
And it's been heavy-handed.
We talked about that.
But these guys, if they leave Mosul, and if this story is correct, this was in a RIA Novosti report, an unnamed military diplomatic source says that 9,000 ISIS fighters and militants are being redeployed from Mosul to eastern regions of Syria to carry out a major offensive operation, which includes Deir ez-Zor and al-Palmyra, which Russia helped Syria liberate last year.
So that's what this RIA Novosti report is saying.
Of course, who can confirm this?
But it does follow what I have learned about a source I have from inside Mosul saying that they are not to be seen anymore.
So they could be leaving, this could be true.
And when is this going to happen?
I'm seeing more activity in the air, helicopters, military helicopters, lots of them, which you only saw them once in a while, three or four or five, you know, flying over above where I live here.
So something's happening.
But I think now, and this is a really big development, what Erdogan has said, the Turkish president, especially today now, another speech he made, which could delay this operation, which one date I heard was October 15th.
It would happen by starting from October 15th, sometime in the middle of October.
So is it going to happen tomorrow?
I don't know.
I don't, I don't, I haven't heard this is going to happen tomorrow.
And now Erdogan's speech, which was extraordinary, if you read some of the quotes, Turkey was asked sometime last year by the governor of Mosul province, I guess the deposed one, the former governor, because he's no longer in charge, to come and help train some of the Peshmerga troops and other, for this operation.
And now, of course, I speculated, I'm not sure if I did it on the air or not, that Erdogan would want to take part in this operation in Mosul.
And I said that because of his, the date of his invasion of Syria.
We talked about how he invaded on August 24, 2016, which was exactly 500 years to the day of the Ottomans first leaving Turkey to embark on their empire, which then lasted hundreds of years, 500 years, to attack Syria, to invade Syria.
So he invaded Syria on the same day, 500 years later, as the Ottomans first invaded Syria to start their empire.
And now Mosul is a very interesting place, because at the end of the First World War, on October 30, 1918, Britain and Turkey signed an armistice of Mudros, it's called, and that's ended the fighting.
But three days later, Sir William Marshall, a British lieutenant general, attacked Mosul, Mosul province, or Viliet.
And by 12 days later, he'd conquered Mosul.
But this was after the war had ended between Turkey and Britain.
So Turkey has argued, and argued through the first treaty of Severus in August 1920, and then the final treaty at the end of the war, 1923, and then carved up the former Ottoman Empire formally.
Turkey has been arguing since then that Mosul still belonged to them, because the war had ended, and this attack was done by Britain against Mosul after the armistice had been signed between Britain and the Ottoman Empire.
And Erdogan, with his attack in Syria on that date, I suspected that he had an interest in Mosul again.
And here he is, wanting to attack Mosul.
He's not been invited by the Baghdad government, nor by the United States.
He says, and he probably is, that Barzani, Mahmoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdish region here, invited him in.
Because Barzani does whatever Erdogan says, basically.
He's completely subservient to Erdogan.
Erdogan can cut off the oil sales, which keeps this region alive.
They're selling this oil illegally through Turkey.
If the Turks say no more oil, that's the end of the Kurdish region.
So the Turkish soldiers, there are at least a thousand, there may be more there.
And now Erdogan is openly saying that he is going to be part of this operation and attack Mosul.
Now, it might be an easy one if the ISIS has already left.
But some of the things that he said, Scott, I don't know if you've ever seen some in his arguments with the prime minister, Haider al-Abadi of Iraq.
He has said to him, you're not my interlocutor.
You're not at my level.
You're not my equivalent.
You're not of the same quality as me.
This is the kind of statements he's making.
He's saying, you're screaming and shouting in Iraq is of no importance to us.
You know, we're going to go our own way.
We're going to attack Mosul.
The Iraqis want them out of Iraq.
They're here illegally, but they're staying and they want to take part in this operation to go into Mosul.
And they say it's to prevent the Shia from going in.
You mentioned the Shia militia.
This is what the public real reason that he's giving Erdogan, or the official reason, I should say, is that they want to keep this a Sunni place, a Sunni city, Mosul, and keep the Shia out.
But it's a Turkish prize.
And you have to wonder whether this guy is really dreaming of some grabbed territory in Syria and in Iraq and getting rid of ISIS.
Now, I had a Turkish journalist who told me some two years ago, pretty much, when ISIS began, that Turkey was supporting ISIS, until which time Erdogan would take over from al-Baghdadi and be the caliph.
And this is pretty much what we're seeing happening right now.
I think he's turned on ISIS.
Now, ISIS bombed the airport in Istanbul, and now he's going to fight ISIS and get them out of Mosul, if they're not being let out already.
And he's going to try to take over this territory and have a major say inside Mosul.
I think this is an extraordinary development, both of these.
Yeah, well, I think I'm probably repeating myself from the last time we spoke too, but only because I'm bragging about repeating myself from years ago, that that's exactly what I said too, is that you see what's happening here.
He's letting these, you know, bin Ladenite jihadi Arabs do the fighting and dying in pushing the Iraqi government out of Iraqi Sunnistan.
And then all he has to do is walk right in.
Now, I guess he did wait too long to be able to absorb, you know, Fallujah, Ramadi, Tikrit and all this.
Maybe he decided that that would have been biting off more than he could chew anyway.
But certainly makes sense to me that if he's not a Kamalist, and instead harkens back to, you know, the leaders of the old Ottoman Empire in his, you know, political invocations and traditions and all that kind of thing, in power, it only makes sense that this is part of that.
And because we've known from the beginning that he's been helping the al-Nusra Front, which the Islamic State is just a break off of that, al-Qaeda in Iraq.
And I think I mentioned this to you as well, Joe, that Phil told me, I think this was even as late as 2014, that he went to Turkey on vacation, former CIA officer, I know you're familiar.
He went to Turkey on vacation, he saw them raising money for ISIS in the streets.
No question about it.
And certainly, as he said, not the kind of thing that would be allowed to continue by the Erdogan government, if they did not want it to be going on.
It wasn't like this was under their nose or anything like that.
This was clearly with permission from the central state.
Yeah, no question.
I traveled with Phil once in Turkey.
I don't remember that happening.
There may have been another trip.
But yes, this is definitely, it's happening now.
What you said two years ago, what other people imagined, is actually happening right now.
And here, what is, the question again is the United States.
What are they doing about this?
I mean, they're the ones who are leading this operation.
They've cobbled together over months now, this unholy alliance between the Peshmerga, the Kurds, and the Iraqi army, with these sheer militias roaming on the outside.
Now, let me ask you, Joe, it does kind of make sense, right?
Pretend you and I are evil Council on Foreign Relations guys, and we think that this is our business to decide.
It does sort of make sense, right?
That, well, if there's going to be an independent Sunnistan, because of the results of Iraq War II, that it's much better that it's run by the Turks, in the old Ottoman Empire style, and in NATO alliance with the United States fashion, rather than Baghdadi, or somebody who, you know, would be that polarizing the Arabs, who aren't as easy to control there.
And so, maybe that is American policy to go ahead and, you know, let the Turks.
NATO will be extending its rule into northern Iraq, too, as it's now into Syria.
I mean, Turkey's, if it becomes de facto part of Turkey, any part of northern Syria or northern Iraq or Mosul, then it's NATO's territory, too, in a sense.
I think he wants to, the one question is, you know, back then, back in the end of the First World War, I was mentioning one concern that the new Turkish Republic had on the Ottomans when they were ending their rule, what the British was, that under British rule, Mosul would be a fair place for Kurds to express their independence.
They were worried about that back then, and he's certainly worried about it now.
So crushing any Kurdish aspirations for independence in Iraq, certainly in Syria, and absolutely in Turkey, is paramount in the thinking of Turkish governments going way back, that this is not only Erdogan, but he has certainly kept that going.
And so he's now fighting the Kurds in Syria, and he's controlled the Kurds here.
He doesn't have to fight them, but he's got them under his control.
And this is the main aim here.
But he's also seems to be at least extending his territory.
But I think you're quite right that the U.S. does not want an independent Kurdistan here, even though all the Kurds up here consider themselves already an independent country.
They do not think they're in Iraq.
They think they're in Kurdistan.
They don't even know the date of.
I asked a young Kurd what the date of the independence of Iraq was, which was, of course, 1932, nominally, anyway, from Britain.
They continue to control the throne here.
And he said 2003.
He considered 2003, because this is when the Kurds finally benefited.
They're the only ones who benefited from the American invasion, were the Kurds here.
But they're not going to become independent.
And having Turkey controlling them is probably very good for the U.S., too, as you say.
At least they don't seem to be standing in the way of this announcement from Erdogan that he is going to be going in.
But the Iraqis in Baghdad are going bananas.
And this could delay the operation now, is what we're hearing, for days, because the Iraqis don't want the Turks there.
And the Americans are going to have to step in.
And they probably are already mediating this dispute.
But as of now, Erdogan is completely on board to go into, march into what could be an empty Mosul, and we could have these 9,000 ISIS fighters going into Syria to make more pressure on the Russians and the Syrians and Hezbollah and the other groups.
All right.
Now, so, yeah, back to the beginning here and back to the question of whether the Islamic State has already fled Mosul.
There was this piece in Rudaw.net.
Is that how you say it?
Rudaw.
Yeah, Rudaw.
R-U-D-A-W.
And they're known as a pretty reliable Kurdish paper, right?
They're probably the best.
I mean, the standards are close to Western, which is not necessarily saying too much, but yes.
Yeah, I know what you mean, but try to get two sources in this kind of deal.
All right.
So, yeah, I mean, the headline here is convoy of ISIS Iraqi vehicles reportedly arrives in Raqqa.
And they even say, you know, they're Chevys with Iraqi plates and they're full of Islamic State fighters and their families.
I didn't see that.
That must be a recently published story.
Yeah, I actually sent you a tweet about it earlier today, but yeah, I just got it today.
Someone had sent it to me today.
If that's true, then what I heard and what I reported back then is absolutely what is happening already.
So there might not be a battle in Mosul at all.
They might more or less just walk right in there.
I mean, there'll be IEDs everywhere, I guess, though.
Right.
Well, according to that story of a couple of days ago that I read, Baghdadi has ordered that they kill people on the way out and set these IEDs and maybe set fires.
I heard they're building ditches.
They're filling it with petroleum.
They did this in Kayaya, which is a town 40 kilometers south of Mosul that was taken three or four weeks ago.
And, you know, from as a smoke screen, they were able to escape and they might do stuff like that.
But yes, I don't think there's going to be this big battle.
They're going to walk in.
And this is what happened in in really Ramadi and Fallujah as well, right?
When it came to the big battle, they were up and gone.
They delayed as long as they could, I guess.
But then when it came to the full assault, there was nobody to fight.
Now, you know, you have to in one of the new emails that came out in the Clinton, the Podesta email file, we have Hillary Clinton actually writing to Podesta, I think, that Saudi Arabia and Qatar support ISIS.
Now, this is the first time we've gotten an official omission of that by a very high ranking person.
Well, not really.
I mean, Biden did, too.
And by the way, I should clarify that if you read that carefully, it's pretty clear that she did not write that paragraph.
She's copying and pasting something.
I mean, it's from her to someone else and she doesn't remark against it.
But I don't believe that that's Hillary Clinton's writing, I don't think.
Well, but she OK, she pasted it.
She agrees.
Yeah, close enough anyway.
Yeah.
I've never said ISIS.
I know.
We all know that they've been supporting these jihadist groups and there's so many of them.
And Al-Qaeda, Al-Nusra for sure.
But ISIS, all we had was that DIA document, which was in my book, strong enough evidence that the U.S. as well has been was involved at least then in August 2012 supporting this group, this precursor of ISIS to set up a principality in eastern Syria to put pressure on Assad.
And it was this was a Turkish, Gulf Arab, U.S. and European project.
And it warned that this could turn into an Islamic state.
And that's, of course, what happened.
The exact words that was used there two years later.
So so this you know, it becomes more and more obvious that these are tools, these monstrous groups are just tools to push for the geostrategic interests of the U.S. and their allies.
And Russia's out there trying to defeat these people.
And everything's being blamed on Russia again, of course, leaking these emails as if the contents don't matter.
It's about who reveals them is more important, of course.
And they're out there trying.
Now, they are killing civilians, but Americans kill.
Everyone is killing civilians.
I don't think they're cornered the market, unfortunately, on that.
And the war crimes charges.
And now there was apparently a piece in The Washington Post the other day in which a administration official was quoted as saying that if Putin travels outside of Russia, he might be arrested.
So they're going to go that route.
And he just canceled his trip to Paris yesterday or the day before.
So maybe he's read that.
You know, maybe that's why he canceled that trip.
Wasn't just because Hollande had said that he should stand for war crimes.
I mean, this war, you know, of course there are war crimes being committed all over the place, but it's totally politicized, of course.
The U.S. invasion of this country, Iraq, where I am, was the worst of all the war crimes according to Nuremberg standards.
The crime of aggression is the worst war crime there is.
And they committed a crime of aggression against this country without any Security Council backing and without a defense, you know, no Article 51 of the Charter of Self-Defense.
There was no justification for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Everyone seems to know that now.
And yet, of course, they're never going to stand on the Hague, anybody of the Bush administration.
But they want the Russians to be there.
Totally a politicized operation.
And they want, the Russians are trying to defeat these groups that are now more and more obviously being backed by the U.S. and their allies to overthrow Assad and get ISIS.
They don't need them in Iraq anymore.
So they're sending them over to Syria is what it looks like.
And Mosul is going to be a dud, it looks like.
It was going to probably be a very dramatic battle.
I'm glad about that, obviously, from the humanitarian point of view.
Well, you know, yeah, I think you're really on to something there that, I mean, it seems to me that the Islamic State taking over western, northwestern Iraq, that was really the blowback that they didn't want.
I mean, we would joke about this in 2011 and 2012 and 2013 that, you know, here we are, they were announcing they're using drones to attack Al-Qaeda and Iraq fighters and, you know, help Maliki.
And the joke was, yeah, we got to chase them across the border into Syria where they can do some good.
And so even in the context of that Hillary email, it's, you know, that this is a problem that the Islamic State is so big and they rule this big part of Iraq.
And, you know, for whatever reason, we're still on Iran's side in Iraq instead of Saudi's.
And this is blowback a bit too far, an actual Islamo-fascist caliphate with a guy on the balcony and all of this stuff.
And that's got to be rolled back.
And that's what it looks like has been the policy with this war, right, is that, you know, they say that they're bombing, I guess they are bombing Islamic State targets in eastern Syria, Joe, but mostly they've been focusing on bombing them in Iraq.
That same policy since 2012, kicking these guys out of Iraq and pushing them back over the border where they can be useful some more, where they seem to really be pulling their punches when it comes to what they're doing on the Syrian side of the border.
I mean, and maybe that's just a function of all they really have to work with over there are the Syrian Kurds who, you know, they're Peshmerga.
And although they got special forces embedded with them, you'd think that with their laser designators and with the YPG militias, they could be making a lot more progress than they are toward Raqqa, but they sure don't seem to be.
Hey y'all, Scott Horton here for wallstreetwindow.com.
Mike Swanson knows his stuff.
He made a killing running his own hedge fund and always gets out of the stock market before the government generated bubbles pop, which is, by the way, what he's doing right now, selling all his stocks and betting on gold and commodities.
Sign up at wallstreetwindow.com and get real-time updates from Mike on all his market moves.
It's hard to know how to protect your savings and earn a good return in an economy like this.
Mike Swanson can help.
Follow along on paper and see for yourself, wallstreetwindow.com.
Hey y'all, Scott Horton here.
It's always safe to say that one should keep at least some of your savings in precious metals as a hedge against inflation.
And if this economy ever does heat back up and the banks start expanding credit, rising prices could make metals a very profitable bet.
Since 1977, Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. has been helping people buy and sell gold, silver, platinum, and palladium.
And they do it well.
They're fast, reliable, and trusted for more than 35 years.
And they take bitcoin.
Call Roberts and Roberts at 1-800-874-9760 or stop by rrbi.co.
I don't know.
I don't want to be too conspiratorial because the truth is always way bad enough, you know.
But the available evidence we have, the U.S. has not been conducting many operations against ISIS inside Syria.
That's just, we just don't have the reporting on that.
There's been a lot more by Russia.
And Russia has been fighting other groups.
And yes, they're trying to prop up Assad because they feel Assad and his army is the only ground force with the Kurds that could defeat ISIS and these other groups.
So they're bolstering the Syrian Arab Army and Assad's rule in the short term to defeat these guys.
And the U.S. on the other side is now strengthening the extremists.
This is a classic proxy war, except Russia's directly involved, too.
So from that point it's not even a proxy anymore.
And now we have calls within Washington, and there was a Reuters story.
I don't know what happened in Washington on Friday, because I'm here in Iraq and it's quite late already, but it's still time there for this meeting.
Obama's supposed to have with his principals to discuss whether to take military action, or that was on the table, the discussion of whether to take direct military action in Syria.
Some of the ideas were to bomb the airstrips with cruise missiles so Syrian planes can't take off.
Obviously they want to avoid hitting, or at least Obama wants to avoid hitting any Russian targets.
But they're fighting together.
Just like the U.S.-backed so-called moderate rebels are intermingled with the al-Qaeda types, the Russians are intermingled with Syrians.
So if they kill Russians, if they attack any Syrian assets, we've had now a Russian general and other Russian officials saying that they will protect the Syrian assets.
They will fight back.
So Russia has thrown the glove down.
Don't hit Syria.
If you decide to take military action against Syria, we are going to fight back.
We will shoot.
You put a no-fly zone there, we will not respect that, and there's going to be war.
And that's what the Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress two weeks ago.
If you want a no-fly zone, it's going to mean war with Russia.
And the congressman's face was just incredible, the look on his face.
And for once in that particular context, thank goodness, he wasn't hawking it up.
He was saying, Senator, that would mean war with Russia, and I'm not prepared to make a call like that, you understand.
So he was actually being an adult about it, you know, considering the circumstances.
Except for nutjobs like Breedlove, a lot of generals are sensible because they know what war is, and they understand what war with Russia means.
They might have even seen the Atomic Cafe, and they understand what fission and fusion are all about, too.
Well, you know, Russia is going, speaking only about this possibility of nuclear war.
They are taking precautions.
Stephen Cohen was on the radio, I heard him, and he was revealing many changes that I wasn't aware of.
For example, all the regional governments now are under control of the Defense Department in terms of war preparation.
They are getting on a war footing in Russia and preparing for nuclear war.
And now a group of U.S. former launch, nuclear launch officers have come out and signed a statement that they cannot have Donald Trump because he couldn't have his finger on the button.
And the irony is it's Russia who's much more afraid of Hillary Clinton doing that.
That's why they would prefer to have Trump, because of his rhetoric.
We don't know what Trump would do.
He's a wild card, and he could be certainly as dangerous or more than Hillary Clinton is.
But we know her record and her rhetoric now against Russia is the feverishness of this.
I wish I was in Washington now, and I might be next month, because I want to, you know, take the temperature of this town.
But what I'm hearing is that people are, the hysteria of war is growing again.
And you might recall what it was like before the invasion of Iraq all over the U.S.
Yeah, that is what it is.
And of course, the electoral politics have so much to do with it, too, where they want to blame everything on Putin and say that Trump is his mentoring candidate and all this.
And I would point out that, you know, this isn't solid proof or anything, but it seems like a real indication to me that these Democrats, that they know they're lying, or at least that they are way, way, way out on a limb in all their accusations of Russia being behind all the hacks and all the WikiLeaks and all this.
Because if they really believed that the Russians were intervening to that degree in the American presidential election, then the reaction would be a lot more than a bunch of stupid Democrat political talking points.
It would be, you know, and not necessarily preparation for war, but you would see a lot firmer reaction from the entire American state, not complaining about it on the Bill Maher show or whatever, but actually, you know, issuing dire warnings to the Russians that they better knock it off and stuff like that.
And they're not doing that because it's not true.
They're talking out of their hat and they know it.
Well, Obama did say that they might take some retaliation against them, probably cyber warfare, if they don't do that.
But one thing the intelligence agencies have not done, like they didn't do on MH17, like they didn't do on the gas attack outside Damascus in the summer of 2013, is provide evidence.
Maybe Russia is hacking, but we don't have any evidence.
It's not necessary.
We're in an evidence-free zone when it comes to Russia.
You just blame them, and everyone believes.
The public automatically believes it.
They've been conditioned for decades going back to the Cold War about this.
So it's very easy to blame Russia, Iran.
The American press never gives the Russian side of the story.
We don't see them as human beings.
They don't get the Iranian-Palestinian side.
So these people are not human.
They dehumanize, delegitimize.
You can blame anything you want on them.
You can go to war against them, and nobody's going to say anything about it.
And that's where we are right now.
And it might is, this is a complete speculation on my part, that if Trump rebounds, and apparently this Rasmussen poll the other day put him back in the lead again after his debate performance, which was certainly better than the first, and after Hillary's emails, which apparently are having an effect even though the mainstream media is totally ignoring them in relation to the sex talks tapes.
My feeling is if it's a close election and Hillary loses by a very small margin, she can very easily make the argument that the computers were hacked by Russia, and all she has to do then is convince a few electoral college voters to change their vote to her.
Only if she wants to have a civil war.
Don't throw it to the House of Representatives then.
If Trump doesn't have enough, if they won't vote for him, if he doesn't get 470, it goes to the House.
That's what the Constitution says.
If you don't get the electoral votes, and then the House of Representatives, I think they would choose Hillary Clinton, because there are so many Republicans who are supporting her.
That's an ace up their sleeves, I think.
That's an ace up her sleeve, if it's close, to blame Russia for hacking the election and throw it to the House of Representatives.
The thing is, they're only going to be able to get away with trying that if it's within such a narrow margin.
If it's a real kind of shutout, they won't be able to try it.
But the problem is, if the Trump voters feel like the election, they didn't just lose, but they got it outright stolen from them, I would expect for some numbers of them to start killing people.
I think the Democrats know that too.
This is why the Republican Party didn't steal the nomination from Trump at the convention.
It's because they knew there'd be a riot and Bill Kristol might not get out of there in one piece.
Yeah, but I'm not talking about Trump losing by a little.
I'm talking about Hillary losing by a little and then blaming Russia and then throwing it to the House.
No, I get you.
But yeah, that's what I mean, though, is, you know, if it was, if it's stolen, well, anyway, or yeah, if they can claim within that narrow margin, I could see them trying it.
But the problem is, these talking points are only working on Democrats right now, and maybe, you know, conservative establishment types.
But Republican voters are not buying this line of crap about Russia at all.
So if that was her excuse, maybe middle America would buy it, but the Trump voters wouldn't buy it.
Well, they don't care.
I mean, they don't care if it is Russia, I think.
It's what's in the content of the emails.
Another one of which said she admitted in one of her speeches to Wall Street that she's for the no-fly zone, but that it's going to kill a lot of Syrians.
Yeah, absolutely.
And she repeated it at her debate last week.
Anyway, let's go back to Russia's point of view, what you said about them mobilizing for war and all this, because at ConsortiumNews.com, where you write our friend, Ray McGovern, the former CIA analyst and former chief of the Soviet Division of Analysts at the CIA, in fact, a real expert on Russia and Russian history and Russian everything.
And he wrote a piece, roughly titled, I forget exactly, but something like looking at the crisis through Russian eyes or Russia's point of view on the current conflict.
And he was trying to emphasize this is our guy Ray from the Bronx, as he likes to remind us, as red, white and blue as can be.
And he is beseeching the rest of us Americans to please listen to him as he explains to us what the Russians think.
And this is, I think, you know, it's a real discrepancy here.
It's why it's such an important point, because I think the Americans and all their hawkishness and all their cold warrior-ness and whatever, basically, they're just bluffing and trying to sell a bunch of airplanes and trying to get ahead in politics.
And they have their corrupt system.
And there are some people, you know, in the neocon movement, especially, I guess, who just absolutely hate Russia, you know, still for Stalin murdering Trotsky or whatever they're hung up on there.
But for the most part, this is a put on, right?
They don't want a nuclear war with Russia.
They just want to sell a lot of nuclear bombers in case of one day that never comes kind of thing like the old days, because that's their racket.
And yet, from the Russian point of view, as Ray explains, the margin of error here is over and gone.
It used to be that there was, you know, what is it, 800, 1000 miles between the western border of the Soviet Union and the western border of Russia.
And now that is no longer the case.
Now NATO is all the way up to the Russian border in the Balkans.
And pardon me, in the Baltics, I mean, in the Baltic states directly on their border there.
And that, as you're saying, they're mobilizing for war.
They're looking at it like their backs up against the wall.
And this is like that time that 30 million of them had to die to defeat the Nazis.
But sometimes we got to do these things as Russians, right, boys?
And this is the point of view that they are taking toward American aggression, as it is, as it were, right now.
And this is something that I think Hillary Clinton, she doesn't even stop and think that like, holy crap, I really could, you know, lie us, monger us, hype us into a real nuclear war with Russia over here, just over politics and just over bluster, just over airplane sales, and all this, all the reasons for these doctrines that have nothing really to do with America's national interest whatsoever.
I'm from the Bronx, too.
And I totally agree with Ray.
There you go.
You guys have special insight, apparently.
It looks that way.
I think there are other interests.
I think Wall Street, and she's extremely close to all, she uses their language, some of these other emails, like that basket of deplorables.
I thought right away, a basket of derivatives.
That's where she got that idea from.
Yeah.
Wall Street had an intensely great run in Russia, when Yeltsin was in charge.
They ran the place.
They were in there with the oligarchs.
That's classic neoliberalism.
Foreign capital, local oligarchs, screw the people.
The Russians were desperate.
I was there in Moscow in 95, November 95.
Absolute disaster.
This is when Hillary's husband was the president and a busy expanding NATO.
I'm sorry, just to remind people.
That's right.
That's what they want again in Russia.
This is a huge country with an unbelievable natural resources, obviously.
U.S. wants that.
Brzezinski says they have to be stopped as a Eurasian power.
And the first way to do that is take Ukraine away from them.
Well, check that off.
They want to go back to Yeltsin's days.
Putin is no Yeltsin.
He's a hard nut to crack.
They've given up on this.
He is defending Russia, and Russia's interest, why he's 80% popularity rate.
They want to overthrow Putin.
I don't think they want a nuclear war, but they could easily blunder into one, as you said.
It is about arms sales and all that, absolutely.
But also about getting into Russia again and running their economy, the Jeffrey Sachs days, and Wall Street mania in Russia, and developing markets, all that nonsense.
And that's what they're looking to do, to get rid of Putin and get some Western-friendly liberal leader in charge there who will allow them in again.
They're not going to invade.
They don't want to invade.
And you cannot invade Russia like the Germans tried to do twice.
So this is scary, because you could blunder into it by wanting a no-fly zone there, and by wanting a safe zone on the ground, which he's called for again, and which, by the way, Erdogan in his UN speech a couple of weeks ago in New York called again for.
And guess what they're doing?
They're basically setting up the safe zone under Turkish occupation in northern Syria.
And he's going to get Mosul too, it looks like, in the bargain, or part of it.
I don't know how that's going to work out.
To go back to Mosul in a second.
So I think this is where we're at an extremely dangerous moment, and no one is writing about it.
CNN finally did a piece about it the other day, I couldn't believe it, about, you know, there's really bad stuff going on between Russia and the US.
Did you know about that?
That kind of attitude, that kind of tone of this article, where, of course, if you're reading Russian media or any sensible media out there, you know that this is an intense moment in the history of these two countries, and what could possibly happen, how close we are to possible confrontation.
So CNN did it, then of course the rest of the story was all Russia bashing, it's all their fault.
But at least it brought out that this is really a dangerous situation we're in right now.
You will not read that and see that in major mainstream media.
We have only wall-to-wall Trump and his dirty mouth.
I mean, this is pitiful, this is dangerous.
And she could continue pursuing this policy of overthrowing Assad if Russia has told them, do not do that because we will shoot you down, and the Americans could call their bluff.
That's what I think Hillary is going to do.
She's going to call Putin's bluff on Syria and on Ukraine.
Give them an ultimatum.
You give back Crimea to Ukraine or else, and then Syria, you back out of Aleppo, you let us overtake Damascus, you get out of Russia or else, and who's going to blink?
That's where we could be soon.
And Obama is the only one preventing that now, because as weak and as awful as he's been in so many other ways, and he also has blood on his hands with drone strikes and all other kind of imperial killings that America has been so good at.
He has stopped, he stopped the first attack on Syria over the chemical weapons and made the deal with Russia to get rid of the chemical weapons of Syria, and he's resisting this now too, it appears.
And he's sort of checked out.
It's scary.
He allowed Ash Carter to be insubordinate and you, President Obama, support, and I'm going to end it, basically.
And he did it by bombing those and killing those Syrian soldiers.
So he's checked out.
He's got a couple of months left, and it doesn't seem like he cares, but he better stop this train that's out of control right now in Syria.
But even if he does, Hillary gets in, and if she continues on this path, it's going to be a real showdown with Russia and Syria, and then Ukraine is the other hot spot.
But Syria is really extremely dangerous if it comes down to that.
Will Russia back away to save the world from nuclear holocaust, or will they stay their ground and not be humiliated and try to defeat terrorism there so it doesn't attack Brussels and California and Russia and other places?
That's why they're there.
If you listen to Putin, he explains why they're there, but you never hear that in the Western media.
It's just Russia trying to get back their glory, their imperialism, and this nonsense.
It's a projection of exactly what the US is doing in the world.
All right.
Well, listen, thank you very much for coming back on the show to talk with us, Joe.
I sure appreciate it.
You're quite right.
You're quite welcome.
All the best.
You too.
All right, y'all.
That is Joe Lauria reporting out of Iraqi Kurdistan there and writing for consortiumnews.com.
That's The Scott Horton Show.
Check out the archives and sign up for the podcast feed at scotthorton.org.
Help support at slash donate and follow me on Twitter at scotthortonshow.
Thanks, guys.
Oh, I mean scotthorton.org slash donate.
You know what I mean.
Yeah.
Bye.
Thanks.
Hey, all.
Scott here.
On average, how much do you think these interviews are worth to you?
Of course, I've never charged for my archives in a dozen years of doing this, and I'm not about to start.
But at patreon.com slash scotthortonshow, you can name your own prize to help support and make sure there's still new interviews to give away.
So what do you think?
Two bits?
A buck and a half?
They're usually about 80 interviews per month, I guess.
So take that into account.
You can also cap the amount you'd be willing to spend in case things get out of hand around here.
That's patreon.com slash scotthortonshow.
And thanks, y'all.
Hey, you own a business?
Maybe we should consider advertising on the show.
See if we can make a little bit of money.
My email address is scott at scotthorton.org.