10/06/15 – Dan Sanchez – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, it's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Next up is Dan Sanchez.
He runs the Mises Academy at the Ludwig von Mises Institute at mises.org.
And you can find his website at dansanchez.me.
And he is our newest regular columnist at antiwar.com.
This one is called Seize the Chaos.
Israel, the neocons, and their bloody, blundering art of war.
Welcome back to the show.
Dan, how are you?
Great, great to be here, Scott.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you back on here.
So, let's see here.
Where was I going to start?
I was going to start...
Oh, I know.
I'll just ask you, who's David Wormser?
David Wormser is a very influential neoconservative.
He is a protege of Richard Perle, and also Douglas Fyfe.
And he played an instrumental role in the buildup to the Iraq war.
He was everywhere.
He was at the Department of State, helping John Bolton.
He was in the Vice President's office, helping Sith Lord Dick Cheney.
And he was in the Pentagon, in Fyfe's office of...
Special plans.
No, it was actually in the counter-terror team.
And that's where he was gathering all the fanciful yarn to string together, from basically trawling through the CIA's trash, to try to connect Al-Qaeda with Saddam Hussein.
I always forget that.
Because I know it was Michael Maloof, but I always forget that David Wormser, he really was all over the place.
The counter-terrorism policy evaluation group.
Can you come up with a more boring title for a little office full of liars trying to lie you into war?
And he wrote two really important memos in 1996, so seven years before the Iraq war.
And the first one is more famous, it's called The Clean Break.
And that's famous for being sort of a plan for the Iraq war, sort of the premeditated murder.
And in Clean Break, basically he's making...
It's a memo to Israel, to Netanyahu, who was starting his first premiership at the time, for a new strategy, a clean break from the past he wanted to make.
And so he wanted...
He had no use for the comprehensive peace plans that they were trying to do before.
That he wanted instead a balance of power strategy.
So instead of trying to make peace with all their neighbors, he just wanted to have a pragmatic peace with just some of the neighbors for the purpose of overthrowing and rolling back other neighbors.
So just hostility and antagonism to the other neighbors.
So at the time, the allies of choice were Turkey and Jordan.
And he wanted to use them to attack, basically, Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah.
And the first step that he wanted to take was regime change in Iraq.
And what's interesting is that that was only a means to an end.
That the chief benefit of overthrowing Iraq for Wormser was to what he said, weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria.
So like Pat Buchanan said that the road to Damascus ran through Baghdad.
And what's interesting is that the road through Damascus was just a pit stop on the way to Beirut.
Because he said that in a clean break, he said that the main reason to roll back Syria is because Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil.
And so that's something that a lot of people don't realize is that Lebanon was sort of the main objective for a lot of the neocons.
All right.
And now both of these articles, by the way, are available at my website, A Clean Break.
And the second one here, the companion piece, Coping with Crumbling States.
And both Dan Sanchez's articles are available at Antiwar.com.
The first one is called Clean Break to Dirty Wars.
And that's from June 30th.
Clean Break to Dirty Wars.
And then the latest, again, is Seize the Chaos.
And this is more about, and you guys hear me from time to time using the phrase, expedite the chaotic collapse.
Because that's what Wormser said.
What we want to do in Syria is expedite the chaotic collapse.
But as you point out here, Syria was not chaotically collapsing.
It had to be collapsed from the outside.
Yeah, and the same thing with Iraq.
In Coping with Crumbling States, he thought that both Iraq and Syria were collapsing because of their adoption of Ba'athism.
And more generally, secular Arab nationalism.
He said that due to the inherent failings of Arab nationalism, that Ba'athist states would only fluctuate between repression and anarchy.
And so it would start with tyranny, but then it would always eventually collapse.
And so he thought that Iraq was on the verge of collapsing, especially after the Gulf War.
And he compared it to the situation in World War I.
At the time, the Ottoman Empire was known as the Sick Man of Europe.
And no one had any doubt that the Ottoman Empire was going to fall.
The only question was who was going to get to despoil the corpse.
And so Wormser thought that Iraq was the Sick Man of the Middle East, basically.
He didn't use that term, but that's what he thought.
And he thought that Iraq was either going to become dominated by Jordan, which was a Hashemite monarchy, or Ba'athist Syria.
And he wanted it to go to Jordan, because basically Jordan is a bought-and-paid-for Western client, dependent on hundreds of millions of dollars from the United States every year.
And so he wanted regime change in Iraq, and specifically he wanted to put one of the king of Jordan's relatives on the throne as a king of Iraq.
He called it the Hashemite option, because the royal house of Jordan, they're called the Hashemites.
And so he thought that if Jordan were to hold sway over Iraq, that there would still be a chaotic collapse, but this would expedite it, and Jordan would help manage the chaotic collapse.
And then there would be an axis.
Iraq would join Turkey and Jordan and the West and Israel, and they would isolate Syria.
So that was the endgame for Syria, and that would help hasten Syria's own collapse, which again he thought was inevitable, or he claimed was inevitable because of Arab nationalism.
But this would expedite that chaotic collapse, like you say.
And now what's funny here is – and I had forgotten this.
Honestly, it's been I guess way too many years since I read the second one, Coping with Crumbling States, that you say he mentions Ahmed Chalabi in there.
1996, he says, don't worry, my buddy Chalabi tells me that the Shia of Iraq, who will, once we get rid of Saddam, who will inherit the country, they'll just love to bow down and be told what to do by a Hashemite king, or at least by him.
That was their compromise, we'll have Chalabi instead of a king.
And that was clearly, obviously, the neocon plan all the way up through the beginning of the war, was to put Chalabi in there.
And then he'll be completely pro-Jordan, and then – well, I guess now we've got to go to the break.
When we get back, we'll find out in David Wormser's ridiculous daydream here, what was supposed to happen to Iran once America got rid of its worst enemy, their worst enemy, Saddam Hussein, and the Ba'athists in Iraq.
It's Dan Sanchez from AntiWar.com, the article today is Seize the Chaos, we'll be right back.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, I'm talking with Dan Sanchez from AntiWar.com and Mises.org.
This one is called Seize the Chaos, and it's about the neocon's plans, a clean break, and coping with crumbling states.
David Wilmser, and then, of course, a clean break is also co-signed.
I forget if coping is, but a clean break is co-signed by Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, and other prominent neocons.
The guys ended up founding the Project for a New American Century.
And, of course, they sold the thing as though Iraq is going to be such a democratic paradise under Chalabi and pro-Chalabi Shiite control that we won't even need to attack Iran because it's going to make the Iranian people so jealous of all the freedom in Iraq they're going to overthrow the government and make themselves a pro-American democracy themselves.
And if that doesn't work, we'll bomb them, and we'll go ahead and take the war to them.
But they really didn't imagine these neocons, I don't think, and especially from reading your piece, they couldn't have imagined, even though it was the most obvious thing in the world, that the Iranians would be the ones inheriting the power in Iraq.
No wonder George Bush couldn't start the war against Iran.
He found himself immediately surrounded by and fighting for the most Iran-loyal factions among Shiite power in the Supreme Islamic Council and the Dawah Party.
He had no choice but to do their bidding because his guys were completely surrounded by their guys.
They were the majority who stood by and allowed the invasion from Kuwait because they wanted to see Saddam gone so that they could inherit the power for themselves.
So, boy, did Chalabi lure these pro-Israel neocons right into a trap, it sounds like, Dan?
Yeah, it's really convoluted, the whole plan.
I mean, the original plan was that the Hashemite king of Jordan, that he would be able to use his influence over a particular Shiite cleric.
And that cleric would in turn influence the Shiites of Lebanon, of Iran, and of Syria, and of Iraq, too.
And the first three, to have them overthrow Assad, overthrow the Islamic Republic, and kick out Hezbollah, he actually thought that.
But then, of course, what my theory is, is that by the time the Iraq war came around, the Hashemite option of installing a royal despot just wasn't going to fly, because it's one thing to make that happen from behind the scenes, but installing a king at the end of a high-profile American war, that just wasn't going to fly.
And so, what I see Chalabi as representing is a sort of a democratic Hashemite option, because Wormser called Chalabi a Hashemite confidant, and so they thought that he would bring Iraq close to Jordan, and would give them all sorts of goodies, would build a pipeline from Mosul to Haifa, from the oil fields of Iraq to a refinery and a port in Israel.
Just completely ridiculous.
And as it turned out, he was just as much an agent of Iran as he was a Hashemite confidant.
Well, and of course, we saw the beginning of the redirection in 2005.
Zalmay Khalilzad was the first one to say, no, we need to redirect back to the Sunnis, and they put that off for a couple of years.
They had to at least get Saddam lynched and buried first, and then they turned around and they backed the awakening.
And then you bring up here the redirection of the article by Hirsch, which I'd ask you to explain that, and then as you say here, they really doubled down on that same policy after the Arab Spring broke out.
Basically, oops, we gave two-thirds of Iraq to Iran, so now let's take out all the rest of Iran's allies as our consolation prize for our massive own goal here.
Yeah, if it wasn't such a bloody tragedy, it would be hilarious how, to the extent that Wormser's plans backfired.
Because he envisioned that Iraq would join a pro-Israel alliance, including Turkey and the West and Jordan.
And it ended up being what they call a Shiite crescent, where Iraq was closer than ever to exactly the people that they wanted to isolate, was closer than ever to Iran.
And so they thought that it was part of a Shiite crescent extending from Iran through Baghdad into Syria, because Assad is technically a Shiite, even though he's very secular, and into Hezbollah's turf in Lebanon.
And so what the redirection was about was trying to undermine and counter that menacing Shiite crescent.
And so they found allies in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, and still including Turkey and Jordan.
And so they did expand the axis, but by including these Gulf states, and they had their own reasons for hating the Shiite crescent, because the Sunni Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, they have a lot more in common with ISIS and Al-Qaeda than they do with Iran and Syria.
And so they became allies of convenience, and the United States helped orchestrate this redirection of policy of actually funding Mujahideen, extremist Salafist Mujahideen in Lebanon and Syria and Iran to try to undermine these regimes.
Even though it was Salafists, it was jihadists just like them who knocked down the Twin Towers.
The whole reason why we're over in the Middle East in the first place is because of 9-11.
But as early as 2007, the redirection was underway, and they were supporting Mujahideen.
And then like you say, in the Arab Spring, then the redirection went into overdrive, and they started backing jihadists in Libya and backing jihadists in Syria, trying as hard as they could through really supporting the insurgency to overthrow Assad, even though as they recognized, as was revealed in a DIA report, that the American government fully realized that doing so could result in a Salafist Principality, they called it, basically what became ISIS.
They foresaw that something like this could happen.
And sure enough, just by 2014, just last year, ISIS took over all of northwestern Iraq, and then Al-Qaeda is taking over much of Syria, Syrian Al-Qaeda, which is Al-Nusra Front, and ISIS is taking over much of Syria, and they're still doing the same policy.
They're still pursuing the redirection, funding these Islamists.
And what's fascinating about Wormser's piece is that it reveals the logic behind that, that Wormser, even back in 1996, he addressed the whole issue of Islamic fundamentalists versus Ba'athists, like Assad and like Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi in Libya, and he just flat out rejected any kind of, even a temporary detente with the Ba'athists and the Arab nationalists, just for the sake of rolling, or as a bulwark against the fundamentalist tide.
He rejected that.
He wanted first priority to be Arab nationalism and fundamentalism that can be dealt with later.
And so you would think that, OK, that was in 1996, well, the logic, the calculation must have changed, at least for America, after 9-11, but it didn't.
It certainly didn't for Israel.
And so I have these quotes.
One of the quotes that you play a lot in your show, which is just key, Michael Oren, where he makes it crystal clear that Wormser's priorities, that number one enemy is Arab nationalism.
Well, here, let me go ahead and play it here.
If we have to choose the lesser of evils here, the lesser evil is the Sunnis over the Shiites.
It's an evil.
Believe me, it's a terrible evil.
Again, they've just taken out 1,700 former Iraqi soldiers and shot them in a field.
But who are they fighting against?
They're fighting against a proxy with Iran that's complicit in the murder of 160,000 people in Syria.
You can just do the math.
And again, one side is armed with suicide bombers and rockets.
The other side has access to military nuclear capabilities.
So from Israel's perspective, if there's got to be an evil that's going to prevail, let the Sunni evil prevail.
Again, that's Michael Oren, the former ambassador, Israel's former ambassador to the United States there.
And we're going over time anyway, so I thought I'd go ahead and play the clip as long as you're going to mention it.
Sure, yeah.
And now he's a member of parliament.
And what's amazing about that clip is that, like you mentioned before, that when he talks about the Sunni evil, he calls, when he references a specific mass execution that ISIS did.
So he was specifically referring to ISIS when he was saying, let the Sunni evil prevail.
He was saying, let ISIS prevail.
And what's horrible about that clip, too, is that he is putting all the blame of all the deaths at that point in the Syrian civil war on Assad, as if he just massacred all those people.
But in reality, I think I even read over half of the deaths are Syrian military deaths, fighting the Islamist-led insurgency.
And then another big portion of it are the Islamists itself.
And so it's only a particular portion of that that Assad has killed civilians, don't get me wrong, and that's totally evil.
But he's completely distorting the record there to try to make Assad look like an absolute demon and make him seem much worse than ISIS and al-Qaeda.
And he makes it sound like Iran is sitting on a pile of atom bombs and is giving them out to Syria and to Hezbollah.
Right.
And like you and Gareth Porter have covered, that's just nonsense.
That's just all fabricated nonsense.
So, okay, now, there's Michael Oren.
That's explaining the Israeli position there.
And you link to this Jerusalem Post article as well, where he says, hey, from the very beginning, we wanted Assad gone.
There are other quotes where Jody Ruder in the New York Times quotes an Israeli military strategist saying, well, we just want neither side to win.
You know, like Kissinger said about the Iran-Iraq war, make sure both sides lose and just keep them hemorrhaging to death, I think, was the way that they put it there.
But, of course, it's the civilians doing most of the hemorrhaging.
Right.
And wasn't there a famous quote, some Israeli official said, let them both bleed or something like that?
Yeah, that's the one from the New York Times.
Yeah, let them hemorrhage to death, actually, was an even more accurate way that he put it there.
And so now, yeah, I think that it is very important to note, as you did there, I want to go back to what you said about how Wumser says, more or less, yeah, but what about Al-Qaeda?
Well, never mind that.
The Ba'athists are worse.
We've got to get rid of them.
And then, as you say, even after all the attacks of the 1990s and September 11th and the beginning of the war and the overthrow of Iraq and the destruction, the absolute catastrophe from the neocons' point of view, too, of giving two-thirds of Iraq over to the Iranians.
And now, I guess it makes more sense that, you know, since the Ba'athists in Syria are actually it's a minority ruled dictatorship like in Iraq, but this time they're backed by the Shiites and the fighters are among the Sunni majority who are trying to overthrow them.
So as Obama told Goldberg, that's right, Jeffrey Goldberg, this would be a great way to take Iran down a peg.
He didn't mention, they're often way too polite to include Iraq in the Shiite crescent.
He didn't mention, you know, as a consolation prize for the disastrous policy of the last decade, which you lied us into, Jeffrey.
But anyway, he said, that's right, Jeffrey, if we got rid of Assad, that would be a great way to help diminish Iranian power in the region.
And obviously, you know, meaning in support for Hezbollah and all the rest of it.
So even Obama, you know, is on the record in the Atlantic explaining that this is basically the policy.
And then I have to admit, I first saw these quotes in your article before I read the New York Times thing.
So I already knew what was in there.
And then I read the New York Times article, Dan.
And the New York Times article is, as Syria reels, Israel looks to expand settlements in the Golan Heights.
And again, this is by Jodi Rudin as well.
And man, there's some shocking quotes in here.
I'm actually pretty surprised at some of the stuff that they included in this article to explain to us New York Times readers, us poor, pitiful souls.
This is it's it's pretty bad.
Even after I already knew it was in there, I was still kind of shocked reading this article.
So and this takes us back to Michael Oren, the former ambassador whose audio we just played here.
Explain this.
Michael Oren really said, Wormser would have been so happy or would be so happy to hear this saying that, well, you know, the Golan Heights, it's not like it's going to be a part of any kind of peace deal now because, you know, who would we have peace with?
Because the thing is that, as I'm sure most of your listeners know, that Israel conquered the Golan Heights from Syria in 1967.
And it's always been an issue that it's by the international community, it's considered illegally occupied.
And and so that's always been put on the table by different factions as different parties as potentially part of a peace deal with Syria.
And as we discussed that Wormser hates the comprehensive peace process and in particular the component of it of land for peace.
He hates land for peace, even if it's land that was, you know, illegitimately conquered.
And so what has happened is that by precipitating and expediting the chaotic collapse in Syria, you know, they've given themselves an excuse to just completely take the Golan Heights off the table because, well, you know, you're just mired in chaos now.
You're not going to be able to keep it secure and you're not going to be able to do anything reasonable with it.
And so that's what I mean by the title of seize the chaos is that, you know, they create Israel and the neocons create this chaos.
And then they seize on it as an excuse for, you know, furthering their strategic goals.
And Oren, when he says that when he makes the case for the settlements, he outright makes a Liebensraum argument, like what the Nazis used as a living space argument, saying that, well, we need places to build.
And, you know, the world doesn't want us to build on the West Bank because that's illegally occupied also.
So, you know, we got to build here.
And like you say, they're just it was so blatant.
And it's really a surprise that The New York Times would actually include that.
Yeah, I mean, it's really something else, especially from the guy who's on the record, you know, promoting the jihadist side of this war.
And as you mentioned, and there's a link in here to and people are shocked by this when I tell them, they say, I hadn't heard that.
What are you sure?
And I say, I'm sure.
Check out the record there of Israeli medical care for the Al-Nusra Front.
It's not just in spirit.
It is actual aid and comfort to America's enemies provided by the Israelis creating this situation.
And then, as you say, using that as the excuse.
And, you know, I'm sorry.
I don't know.
Everybody knows this.
It should go without saying, but maybe it doesn't.
That it was America and the allies defeat of the Nazis at the end of World War Two when they founded the whole international system.
And they said, yeah, we know this is where nation states come from.
But from now on, it's illegal to invade your neighbors and conquer them and move your civilian populations into their land and conquer it and take it.
All frontiers are basically hereby closed other than, you know, if you want to negotiate.
But we will not have this kind of, you know, this is illegal.
And why?
Because Hitler did it and and gave killing the natives and taking their property a really bad name for all time.
That was why.
Right.
Right.
Exactly.
So and never mind the, you know, all the different levels of fait accompli here, I think.
Well, it's it's a fact that all the all the Arab states and the PLO and PLA and everybody else have said that they would recognize 67 borders.
And they could live in peace if they would just make peace with their neighbors.
It doesn't have to be this way at all, except now.
That's OK.
They want to conquer more territory.
That's why we can't have a treaty with them is because it's illegal.
There's a law that says we can't have a treaty, provide any country into NATO or anything like that, a defense treaty, if they don't have permanent and resolved borders.
And the Israelis refuse to declare permanent borders because they ain't done yet.
The Persian Gulf is real far east from here, man.
Greater Israel's got a long way to go.
And what's what's so reckless, what really strikes me is just so unbelievably reckless about this, their policy.
Not only for this, just for the sake of Americans and for our troops that end up going through these wars and for the sake of the people who are actually bombed over there, but for the sake of the security of the people of Israel, too, that they are so hell-bent on adopting Wormser's priorities of secular Arab nationalism is enemy number one and fundamentalism is a distant second, that they would, ideally, they would like a Hashemite king or some kind of stable sock puppet ruling all of the Levant.
But, failing that, they would rather have complete chaos, just complete extremist attacking armies and militias, fighting militias, just be completely surrounded with chaos than to have even a single Arab nationalist state with independent rational leadership and a competent military.
They don't want that at all, because that would, you know, that they would, you know, might create some kind of obstacle, some kind of real obstacle to its regional ambitions.
But in terms of the Israeli people, you know, forget grand geopolitical strategy.
In terms of the security of the Israeli people, I can't imagine how they could be actually more secure, surrounded by chaos in that way.
I just don't – it's unfathomable.
Well, it's just like the difference between the American people and our government and the Israeli people and theirs.
What's in their state interest and their military industrial complex's interest is not necessarily in the interest of the people there at all.
But, you know, the worst are full of passionate intensity and all that.
Thanks very much, Dan.
Great piece of work here.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
And thank you for everything you've taught me.
I'm a regular listener, avid listener.
That's nice to hear.
Talk to you soon.
That, everybody, is Dan Sanchez.
He's at Mises.org.
He runs the Mises Academy there, the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
And here he is at Antiwar.com.
Seize the chaos.
Israel, the neocons, and their bloody blundering art of war.
Check out his previous piece, Clean Break to Dirty Wars, Shattering the Middle East for Israel's Northern Front.
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