10/16/14 – Scott McConnell – The Scott Horton Show

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 scott horton dot org.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm here on the Liberty Radio Network live from noon to three eastern time on the weekdays.
You can find all the archives at scott horton dot org.
You can follow me on Twitter, at scott horton show.
My guest is Scott McConnell, writing over at the American Conservative Magazine.
His latest is The Middle East Doesn't Matter.
It's the spotlight today on antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Scott?
I'm doing well, thanks.
Good, good.
Happy to have you on the show again.
What do you mean, The Middle East Doesn't Matter?
The Middle East, I will have you know, is the most important thing that there ever was, right?
Come on, what are you talking about?
No, I mean, it's possible.
Like, let's just say there's a little license taken in the headline.
But it doesn't matter nearly as much as the attention we pay to it or think it does.
And we don't really have any very good strategies or options for dealing with the problems there.
So I think it would certainly benefit from what was called in another context many years ago, benign neglect.
Right.
Well, certainly, no matter what, whether people are as libertarian as me or as conservative as you are or whatever it is, this certainly has to be part of the debate.
I mean, the fact that the goalposts are as narrow as just how many people we should be blowing up per day and that kind of thing, you know, is really problematic when those aren't the only reasonable arguments to have.
There are very many reasonable ones that are unfairly restricted to the fringes of debate.
So anyway, I guess this isn't much closer than the fringes itself, this show.
But I'd like to – I'm happy to give you the opportunity to talk about this.
Well, yeah, let me go back a little bit.
I mean, after World War II, the Mideast, it was found to have like the largest repositories of oil, a huge amount of oil.
And the people who were running American foreign policy thought quite correctly, in my view, that it would be – I mean, they understood that that oil was needed if Europe was to get back on its feet and become an industrial power again, and for the United States, and they thought it would be a disaster if, say, the Soviet Union got – was able to control that oil.
And so there was a foreign policy consensus that that oil should be part of the world market and sort of part of the Western-dominated world economy.
And I think that's – I mean we did some bad stuff to ensure that, like fomenting a coup d'etat in Iran in 1953.
But I think it was reasonable to want to keep the oil away from, say, Soviet control.
But that just isn't an issue anymore.
I mean there's oil all over the place.
The United States is now an oil exporter, and nobody – there's no power.
There's no outside power which is going to control the oil in the Mideast in any sort of way.
So once you take away the oil, you're looking at a region in which there are not major powers.
There's not major economic power or technological power or anything like that.
I mean it's not to say that there aren't things of significance in the region, including like Jerusalem which is a holy city for three religions.
But there's nothing – we shouldn't be obsessed about the boundaries or the dangers there.
And we're being played.
I mean like this group, Islamic State, can do some executions on television.
And America thinks it's like a terrible major strategic problem for the United States, which it just isn't.
Yeah, I mean they really have seized the worst part of Iraq.
It's not like they've taken Kirkuk and Basra.
Yeah.
All right, well, so yeah, now there's a lot there.
But it sort of sounds like in a nutshell kind of what you're saying is the people running D.C. don't understand economics.
If they did, they would have a point of view that would recognize all the wide and diversified sources of energy all around the world as a global market in the way that you describe it, where they wouldn't really have to worry for a minute about who controls it.
I mean even a price shock for a couple of days will work itself out.
In fact, with all the futures markets and whatever.
Was that you that mentioned that, about how that works out in even the danger of price shocks?
That prices might go up but not too quickly because they already have a buffer there.
Yeah, I think one of the articles I linked to, Justin Logan's, goes into that a little bit.
Oh, right, right.
Yeah, Logan mentioned that the other day.
Right, exactly.
So yeah, now there's a guy that I interview from time to time named Michael Clare, who is some kind of liberal or progressive, writes for TomDispatch.com.
Yeah, and he's an oil expert.
Yeah, and an oil expert.
And he talks about – he sounds more like a libertarian or a conservative in the sense that you don't hear him saying it's all about stealing cheap oil for the American consumer or anything along those lines, which is sort of, I think, the assumption of uninformed liberal types.
Right, that's the old left-wing assumption.
Right, and yet for him, no, it's all about the prerogatives of the empire controlling those oil flows, controlling which states have which pipelines going which directions, and if we get into a fight with China, can we choke them off in a week or can't we, and these kinds of questions.
What do you think about that?
Well, there may be something to that, but I would hope that there isn't – there doesn't really need to be a fight with China either.
And if a fight to China, all kinds of things come into play, including the possible nuclear weapons from a ballistic missile.
But I'm sure there are people in the Pentagon who think about that, but I'm not sure that's what drives the American Mideast obsessions.
I mean if you consider that what drives them is media and people who care – who pretend to care about the Mideast a lot, and a lot of it is Israel-related, I would say at least half.
They're not talking about choke points in China, and I also don't think that there's sort of an inner strategy where the real deal is kind of fought out behind closed doors, and everything that goes on in the media is a kind of camouflage.
I think that we've had terror originating from the Mideast, and we have this extremely strong attachment, and maybe an unnatural attachment to Israel.
And those two are kind of interrelated, and between the two of those things, they play an enormous role in the American consciousness.
And it's not like hard to see why, because certainly 9-11 was significant, and Israel was significant.
But you can argue that these things are given inordinate weight, inordinate weight by a factor of two or three compared to how objectively important they are to America's well-being.
Sure.
Well, of course, the oil companies, they prefer being the ones doing the pumping and the skimming on any given well.
If they're American companies, they like that intervention on their behalf.
I mean, I think overall they prefer stability to all this madness, but they certainly like being the ones pumping Kurdish oil as opposed to some French or Chinese companies in there when it comes to that, just for profit's sake.
And congressmen are a dime a dozen, so that's not really a problem when it comes to that.
You look at all the think tanks, they're all funded by Exxon as well as Lockheed, correct?
Yeah, that is true.
I don't know how to break that.
I mean, I've mentioned I'm a little disappointed that Rand Paul hasn't been a little more playing a tune to a different drummer than he has been.
But it's as if ISIS figured out that if you can execute one journalist and have it seen on American TV, you can pull the whole country around by its nose.
And I think they almost encourage American intervention because it maybe fits into their narrative that they're the true… Defenders from the crusaders.
Yeah, defenders of the faith against the crusaders.
Because I think what they're selling locally wouldn't be that appealing otherwise, but if they can have a lot of Muslims killed by American bombs, that probably helps them more than it hurts them.
Yeah, it is an extremely frustrating thing.
It took 9-11 for Cheney to exploit to get us into this mess.
But then it takes the beheadings of a couple of journalists who, I mean, hey, they're Americans and they're innocent.
They're journalists, for crying out loud, right?
But at the same time, they put themselves in harm's way in a war zone and these things happen, and yet those are 9-11 attacks enough to bring us into this thing.
Just a couple of videos of a couple of individual crimes like that, as horrible as they are.
Yeah, no, I mean, journalism has long been a dangerous profession.
There's a very good organization called Committee to Protect Journalists that's been active, as I know, for like a couple generations.
I'm sorry, we've got to take this break, Scott.
We'll be right back.
And I'm sorry, I don't want anyone to think that I was saying those guys got what was coming to them or anything like that at all.
No, of course not.
I'm just saying it's not the same as an attack on an American city or something.
Anyway, hold that.
We'll be right back with Scott McConnell from the American Conservative.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
CNI stands against America's negative role in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war party's relentless push to bomb Iran, and the roles played by twisted Christian Zionism and neocon-engineered Islamophobia in justifying it all.
But they can't do it without you.
Support CNI's push to straighten out America's crooked course.
Check out the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
And click Donate under About Us at the top of the page.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Scott McConnell, former neoconservative, over there at the American Conservative magazine.
And this article is entitled The Middle East Doesn't Matter.
And so now, Scott, what is this Israel that you mention, and what does it have to do with American foreign policy in the Middle East?
Well, I think if you talk to any member of Congress about what America's vital interests are in the Middle East, they would say, I'm not sure in what order, oil and Israel, and different ones.
And we've treated Israel's survival as a core national interest, but we've also – that's been clearly sort of moved over a bit.
It's so to support for Israel right or wrong, or whatever Israel wants, which are pretty different things.
I think Henry Kissinger once said wisely that we are committed to Israel's existence, but not its conquest.
But we've – Israel has kept the West Bank and kept control over the Gaza Strip for now nearly 50 years.
And we are, if anything, the American government is as deferential to Israel or far more so than it was 50 years ago, 40 years ago.
So what does that mean for the Middle East?
It means that Israeli wishes are treated with enormous deference in Washington.
For example, after 9-11, Israel got the idea that the United States was going to strike back at someone.
I mean someone besides the people who did it in Afghanistan.
And I think they probably most wanted us to hit Iran, which had nothing to do with it.
But they thought Iraq would be like a good lead in.
And so there was this long parade of Israeli officials who come on, face the nation, meet the press, etc., etc.
Saddam Hussein has these weapons.
It's absolutely essential that they attack him now.
And Americans have gotten kind of accustomed to treating Israel as like the realist, tough guy, guy to really understand this exotic, tangled, violent region.
And to take our clues from what Israel says.
Now Israel is – I mean it's sort of a democracy and sort of an aggressive ethnostate.
It's both at the same time.
And for the Palestinians who live on the West Bank, it's pretty much an apartheid state.
So it's not so in Greenline Israel.
But the American Congress and much of the American body politic has bought the pro-Israel thing hook, line, and sinker.
Now in terms of the Middle East now, what does that mean?
Israel is I think one of the reasons why we're so hostile to Syria and the government of Syria, and why we treat the overthrow of Bashar Assad as like an American national interest.
When Assad is kind of a sad dictator of a cobbled together government of religious minorities and Christians and things like that, and is trying to hang on in a mostly Muslim area.
But he's also allied with Hezbollah, which is allied with Iran.
And Hezbollah is the one Arab army which has fought pretty well against the Israelis and gave the Israelis like a – I wouldn't call it a fair fight, but a decent fight.
And so Israel wants Hezbollah to be like deprived of arms and cut off so it can take it out more easily.
And so Hezbollah gets its arms through Syria.
So Syria has to be our enemy, whether or not under any other calculation Syria should be our enemy.
And same thing with Iran.
I mean Israel – Actually, let me stop you before you go to Iran there.
In 2000, say, I think 2006, Ehud Olmert, the previous prime minister, he wanted to negotiate with Syria, and Bush stopped him.
Remember that?
So, I mean, it seems like that would be based on a realistic assessment of Assad that, hey, he's the devil we know.
And as far as even disputing the Golan Heights or anything like that, he's the devil who doesn't do anything to them.
Yeah, he doesn't do anything.
So it does seem – is it just Netanyahu who's just hell-bent on trying to weaken Iran so badly that he's willing to create a much worse problem on his own northern border when Iran is still on the far side of Jordan and Iraq from there, you know?
Yeah.
I know there were nearly successful negotiations between Israel and Syria towards the end of the Clinton administration.
I'm not as aware right now of the 2006 ones because they were right around the time of the Lebanon war.
I might have the year wrong there.
Maybe it was 08.
Maybe it was more close to the end of Bush.
See, 1999, Israel almost got a deal with Syria.
And they – it's hard to say why it didn't go through.
It's a complicated issue.
It has to do with land and stuff, but also other things.
If we go to Iran, I would say Israel's large strategic fear is that there's another technologically adept modern state in the region that might – is willing to support the Palestinians and maybe keep Arab hopes alive of some sort of settlement of that issue.
And Iran would fit the bill.
But Iran is far away, and Iran is interested in other things.
But I think Israel's main strategic goal is to keep Iran isolated, perhaps to have it bombed, and certainly to prevent any rapprochement between the United States and Iran.
And there's a lot of sort of think tanks and diplomatic energy and magazines and sort of support groups on Capitol Hill which goes to try to keep Iran as a demon alive in the American consciousness.
Do you want to give odds on the chances for the final nuclear deal this fall?
Yeah, my odds would be like one in three, but three in five of an extension, and that both sides are willing to kind of live to keep kind of extending the current deal.
I'll settle for that.
Yeah, I like that.
Well, it's better – the thing is, is that only lasts as long as, say, Obama's president and say it's better to have a deal in place in case there's a new hawkish president, which is really possible.
Now, is there much of a fight in the establishment over whether we should do this or not?
Because it seems to be that even though the nuclear weapons issue is a big fake issue, it is the largest outstanding issue between us.
It's not that this has to be a great step toward peace, but it could be a little one, and it seems like either the establishment has decided they like that policy of the president or they don't.
Is it just the neocons on the outs on this, or is it all that messy?
Well, it's the neocons in Congress.
I think to the extent there's a foreign policy establishment, it wants some sort of detente with Iran, meaning like top military, State Department officials, CIA officials probably do, the permanent government.
But Congress probably does not.
I mean Congress is much more – jumps much more to, quote, campaign funds and Israel essentially.
So they're likely to be – I mean they've already shown skepticism about Obama's deal and may be able to put in some sort of enough poison pills and stuff to stop it.
And Iran wants what it can get, too, so I'm sure they're not the easiest people to come to an arrangement with.
Yeah, that's probably true.
All right, well, thanks very much for your time.
Great talking to you again, Scott.
Take care.
That's Scott McConnell, y'all.
He's at the American Conservative Magazine, the Middle East Doesn't Matter, Spotlight Today on antiwar.com.
Hey, all, Scott here.
If you're like me, you need coffee, lots of it, and you probably prefer it tastes good, too.
Well, let me tell you about Darren's Coffee, company at darrenscoffee.com.
Darren Marion is a natural entrepreneur who decided to leave his corporate job and strike out on his own, making great coffee.
And Darren's Coffee is now delivering right to your door.
Darren gets his beans direct from farmers around the world, all specialty, premium grade, with no filler.
Hey, the man just wants everyone to have a chance to taste this great coffee.
Darren's Coffee.
Order now at darrenscoffee.com.
Use promo code Scott and save $2.darrenscoffee.com.
Hey, all.
Scott here for Liberty.me, the brand new social network and community-based publishing platform for the liberty-minded.
Liberty.me combines the best of social media technology all in one place and features nightly classes, guides, events, publishing, and so much more.
Sign up now and you get the first 30 days free.
And if you click through the link in the right margin at scotthorton.org or use the promo code Scott when you sign up, you'll save $5 per month for life.
That's more than a third off the regular price.
And, hey, once you sign up, add me as a friend on there at scotthorton.liberty.me.
Be free.
Liberty.me.
The military industrial complex, the disastrous rise of misplaced power.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here.
I'd like for you to read this book, The War State, by Michael Swanson.
America's always gone to war a lot, though in older times it would disarm for a bit between each one.
But in World War II, the U.S. built a military and intelligence apparatus so large it ended up reducing the former constitutional government to an almost ceremonial role and converting our economy into an engine of destruction.
In The War State, Michael Swanson does a great job telling the sordid history of the rise of this national security state, relying on important first-hand source material, but writing for you and me.
Find out how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy all alternately empowered and fought to control this imperial beast and how the USA has gotten to where it is today, corrupt, bankrupt, soaked in blood, despised by the world.
The War State, by Michael Swanson.
Available at Amazon.com and at Audible.com.
Or just click the logo in the right-hand margin at ScottHorton.org.
We should take nothing for granted.
Hey, all.
Scott here for Whole Food Multicomplete at WholeFoodComplete.com.
Whole Food Multicomplete is an entire supplement program in one bottle, containing 100% RDA of vitamins and minerals, plus live probiotics, digestive enzymes, antioxidant herbs, energy nutrients, and more.
It's made in America using real foods and live probiotics.
No chemical synthetics.
It's soy-free, gluten-free, and independently tested and verified.
They're so sure you'll love it, they're taking 20% off your first order with coupon code SCOTTHORTON.
Satisfaction is guaranteed at WholeFoodComplete.com.