All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
Hey, check it out, guys.
On the phone, I've got the great Grant F. Smith.
He is the founder and the director of the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P dot org, IRMEP, and he wrote Big Israel and the Israel Lobby Interstate Government, which I swear will blow your mind.
It's like a Salvador Dali painting or something.
It's just completely surreal.
I love it.
Anyway, welcome back to the show, Grant.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
Doing well.
Thanks for having me on again.
Hell yeah.
Well, you wrote a thing, so I want to interview you about it, of course.
This one is at antiwar.com.
It's called The Israel Lobby's QME Scam.
Okay, I got to learn some new speak.
What's QME?
QME is Qualitative Military Edge.
It's a TLA, a three-letter acronym, but it's very important.
In what way?
It's important because the idea originally was that the United States and NATO needed a qualitative military edge back in the Cold War days because the Warsaw Pact had so many more conscripts that they would be overrun if the U.S. and allies didn't have a massive edge in terms of sophisticated weapons to fight them back.
It has been co-opted, adopted, used to make the argument that Israel is in a similarly precarious situation and that it needs a qualitative military edge against all of its rivals in the Middle East.
Guess what?
Just like NATO, the U.S. taxpayer is supposed to 110% fund Israel's qualitative military edge.
That's why it's important.
Yeah, but Grant, that part is obvious, but no, the part that's confusing to me is what enemies does Israel have?
Egypt?
Jordan?
Saudi?
Iraq?
Syria?
Yeah.
I mean, you know that there was a historic peace accord signed between Sudan and UAE, you know, those two countries that repeatedly tried to invade Israel.
And I'm, of course, joking because that is precisely the question.
Where are the Jordanians going to fire up their old Soviet tanks and roll across and try and take over the country?
Israel's been bombing Syria for 10 years, well, nine years, and they haven't hit back once.
No, and they could, but they don't.
And so the question really is, if the U.S. taxpayer is going to be asked for every single proposed sale to a regional, you know, let's just face it, autocracy in the Persian Gulf, does the U.S. taxpayer then have to pony up billions of dollars to match tit for tat all of those sales?
And this has been going on.
I mean, I'm portraying it as something they adopted from the Cold War, but this happened back during the Johnson administration when they tried to sell some, you know, Hawk missiles to King Hussein of Jordan.
And so the Israelis immediately came back and said, well, we need some Hawks too.
But even though these are always reported by the media as sales, they're not really sales whenever it comes to Israel.
In Israel's case, in fact, it's never actually a sale.
It's simply a freebie that the U.S. taxpayers will have to pay for.
So it's very interesting to see that this has been going on.
It's been building.
It's gotten more sophisticated.
You know, APAC back when they were lobbying the Johnson administration for supersonic F-4 Phantom jets, they didn't bandy about the idea of QME, but the Johnson administration was supremely aware of two things in that case.
Number one was that they couldn't get anything in return for acquiescing to a sale of the most sophisticated jet fighter to Israel, meaning a giveaway, because what they wanted in return was for Israel to say that they would sign the treaty on the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons.
And they knew that, you know, Israel would never do that.
So they couldn't even get anything in return for the massive giveaway.
And then the other thing they knew was none of this was going to be about balance of power in the Middle East, because they could certainly say, as they did, well, we've got the fifth fleet around there.
We can definitely defend you if there's a major problem.
And the Israelis didn't want that, of course.
They wanted the weapons.
So they knew clearly, clearly, and you can see this in all of the released documents, that the Israel lobby was going to collude with the Israelis and pressure the Johnson administration in myriad ways, with waves of people coming at them from all directions on behalf of Israel to give the weapons to Israel.
So that's been going on forever.
Yeah, I love this chart of the overall spending here.
Three hundred billion dollars, huh?
Well, that's got to be only part of it, right?
Yeah, that I mean, it's really.
We made a valiant attempt to renew Obama administration because he made a speech at American University saying our aid to Israel in terms of arms and intelligence has been unprecedented.
And so we went to a judge and said, well, you know, we want to know what the intelligence portion of that is.
And we fought for years to get the whole picture.
And that's why there are all these caveats on those charts we put out, adjusted for inflation, because we don't really know.
We know it's a lot more than that, but, you know, there's just no getting the real number.
And then I don't even want to get into what you mentioned at the beginning, which is the giveaways at the state level where we're giving them even more.
And nobody's even interested in consolidating and reporting all the state subsidies that also go to Israel, because this chart would be a lot steeper and a lot higher.
It would be a 300 billion chart if we consolidated all of those secrets and simply hard to consolidate numbers.
Man.
I'll tell you what, too.
I still got a crick in my neck from shaking my head reading that book is the most ridiculous thing in the world.
I mean, not your writing, but the subject matter.
It's just incredible.
That's an ongoing story.
Yeah.
Well, you know, that that story is has not ended by any means.
There is so much going on across that state right now to subsidize Israel, because, you know, one of the main drivers is getting back to the MOU, the Memorandum of Understanding signed by the Obama administration to guarantee thirty eight billion dollars in aid to Israel over the next 10 years.
And what happens with Israel and its lobby is that they saw that there was supposed to be a declining offshore procurement element in that aid, meaning most of the aid would go to U.S. weapons makers and less and less would subsidize the Israeli military industrial complex.
And so that triggered all sorts of actions to set up Israeli companies in the United States as foreign affiliates or even headquartered here to be able to capture some of that procurement, but also some of the U.S. procurement by basically exercising power and saying, well, we're U.S. companies now, so we need a lot more of the three point eight billion every year.
And so it's touched off, you know, as you might imagine, in Virginia, a huge rush to associate to break ground with Greenfield operations, all sorts of Israeli companies setting up there because that is a major, obvious place for the military industrial complex and all their manufacturing and services.
So that story is just it's still going on.
It's not getting any attention and it's more is coming down the pipeline on that.
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Hey, guys, Scott Horton here from Mike Swanson's great book, The War State.
It's about the rise of the military industrial complex and the power elite after World War II, during the administrations of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and Jack Kennedy.
It's a very enlightening take on this definitive era on America's road to world empire.
The War State, by Mike Swanson.
Do I really have this right?
Because it sounds, well, it sounds crazy enough to be true, but I just want to make sure I understand this right.
America, the Trump government, encourages this peace deal between Israel and UAE.
These two countries who aren't really at war with each other, but what they're really doing is the UAE is dropping their demand that Israel treat the Palestinians fairly before they get official recognition, and they're going ahead and giving them official recognition.
The price of that is that the American taxpayer has to hand over a fleet of F-35 fighter jets to the UAE.
In response to that, the Israelis say, well, you can't do that.
Give a bunch of F-35s to the UAE.
Now they're a danger to us, even though we just signed a peace deal with them, and this is the price of that peace deal.
Now we need more F-35s, and we need more everything else dollars from you in order to maintain our side of the arms race against this government that we just armed just to get them to sign a peace treaty with Israel in the first place.
Yeah, it's basic double dipping, and you just can't emphasize enough the fact that the traditional balance was the Arab countries wanted to have a peace deal with Israel after.
I mean, they wanted to engage in all of these diplomatic relations after the peace deal, and the Israelis under Trump are basically pushing ahead saying, no, no, no.
That is a, it's a non-starter.
We need to sign these deals and undercut that and do as many as we can, you know, and it's completely unlinked now from any sort of fair resolution to this ongoing problem.
So yeah, you've got it.
I mean, that's it.
It's a, you know, call it extortion.
I think it's a scam because of some of the things that we haven't gotten into, such as simultaneously suppressing sections of our arms export control law, and then simultaneously trying to amend it to give the Israelis essentially veto power over this sort of thing.
So you know, they're pushing ahead.
It remains to be seen whether they can get Saudi Arabia to do this.
I mean, Sudan is not as much of a victory as you might think, but this is basically coercion.
This is the lobby pushing for the U.S. to use its influence to coerce these states into doing something that enjoys no popular support whatsoever.
If you look at some of the regional pollsters who do credible polling across the entire whatever 22 country Arab world, it's clear that justice for the Palestinians continues to be a major, major issue that people passionately believe in from the, in terms of the populace.
And so putting some of these autocrats into the column of acquiescing and signing these deals before getting anything for the Palestinians is not a popular move and could cause a lot more problems in the Middle East than it solves.
So this is a major sort of departure from history where there was going to be peace first and it remains to be seen how many more of these coerced deals can be signed in the next few months.
Yeah.
I don't know, man.
I guess, you know, it's like in high school, I remember thinking, I'm glad that this is an arbitrary totalitarian state because it's going to make a bunch of radicals out of the whole population of this school, just like me.
But then that didn't happen.
They all just got used to it.
You know?
So every time I read something like this, I'm like, everybody's going to get really upset about this.
We have to have a law where the president has to report to Congress that he swears to God that Israel's interests will always be secure no matter what decision he ever makes.
And I think, yeah, man, this is the kind of thing the American people need to hear so that they can realize just how much the car is driving the horse here or the tail wagging the dog or however you like all that.
But then, yeah, no, they just abuse it and abuse it and abuse that privilege and keep getting away with it no matter what.
It's pretty amazing, particularly the bid for sovereign sort of decision making.
I mean, as I mentioned at the bottom of the article, I think all of these arms deals should just be cut.
There shouldn't be any more.
If you make a serious look into the employment and other contributions of our vast military industrial complex, the jobs they produce are minimal and the actual contribution to the economy are minimal.
And so this is sort of state planning at its best, prop up all of these military contractors and pretend that all these jobs are worth so much when they're relatively non-impactful on the overall economy.
So I would throw all of these deals out.
I would say forget about the F-35 sale to UAE, forget about the Israel subsidy.
And let's actually look at some of the drivers of the regional arms race.
And in order to do that, you've got to look at the part of the Arms Export Control Act that's being subverted.
And that is the part on no sales of weapons to rogue nuclear states such as Israel.
And so that's a major problem.
But geez, Grant, I don't know.
I've seen on the TV that there are no nuclear states in the Middle East.
Yeah.
Well, I mean- I said maybe Iran.
Yeah, right, Iran.
Well, actually, if you do a poll, and we did some back in the day before the Iran nuclear agreement, most people at that time believe Iran had nuclear weapons already.
And so because you hear all of this repetition, these mantras- Yeah, Netanyahu says they've been making them since 1995.
So they must have some by now.
You'd think.
But you know, what you never hear is that there is, in fact, a leading state sponsor of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.
And it's done it through constant trafficking and technology material know-how.
But that's Israel.
That's not Iran.
Because Israel actually has nuclear weapons.
They've had them for many, many decades.
And you'll never hear a pundit, particularly not from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and all of these others that get so much media time, you'll never hear them talk about the leading state sponsor of nuclear proliferation.
So- Well, I've got 10 minutes.
So go ahead.
Well, I just want to tie it back to the QME scam.
And again, it is a scam because it's basically a deception in which, again, you amend the Arms Export Control Act to give Israel basically the veto power over arms sale while simultaneously always suppressing the section that requires the president to notify Congress that a sale is being proposed to a state that's outside of the IAEA inspection regime that has nuclear weapons.
So, you know, nuclear weapons really lie at the heart of this.
And, you know, we've talked about this incessantly, about all of the transfers of material, the nuclear triggers, know-how.
People can just go back into the archives and look for those stories as we obtain the documents via FOIA.
But the important thing about this is that it's been erased from history.
Back in the day, a quarter century ago, think tanks that are still around, like the Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, did QME serious papers, and they always talked about Israel's nuclear weapons.
And they factored those into the equation and they worried, well, are our rivals going to tip some missiles with chemical weapons to balance the Israeli nuclear arsenal?
Is the U.S. always going to just put up with this when it's trying to advance, or at least on paper advance, nuclear nonproliferation?
Because as they said at Begin Sadat, this is an irritant.
And so, you know, this used to be the object of somewhat serious discussion.
But now the main proponents of so-called QME, like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, they'll never mention this.
They want to continue the recent trends since 2000 of completely whitewashing the Israeli nuclear weapons program, completely whitewashing the advancements in even possibly mounting submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and all of these things that Israel's been doing because they just don't want to have to have a sophisticated discussion about what does it even mean to talk about QME when there's only one nuclear power in the region that apparently has a triad of deterrent capabilities with nuclear weapons.
They don't want to have that discussion because that complicates everything.
It's much easier to say, no, Israel needs F-35 fighters because UAE is getting them.
Just have a simple, dumbed-down argument.
And so nuclear weapons really are at the center of this.
And in a functioning world, at least one U.S. president in the last four would have said to Congress, I'm issuing a letter because you've put forward a bill to provide foreign aid to Israel.
I've got to say that they are a nuclear weapons power.
The CIA has been saying it since 74, at least.
And so we're going to have to have a discussion about whether to release this $3.8 billion and all the secret aid this year.
That's what the law requires.
And I've had members of Congress, I've asked them, I said, have you ever gotten a letter like that?
And they've uniformly told me over the years, no, actually, we never have gotten a letter like that.
And so the Symington and Glenn amendments to the Foreign Assistance Act, and now it's incorporated in the Arms Export Control Act, requires such notifications.
And they're simply not doing it.
And one of the reasons they're doing it is because the same lobby that's asking for sovereignty provisions to be inserted into the Arms Export Control Act also approaches each president at the beginning of their term, at their most vulnerable moment, and asks them to execute a secret letter promising not to change U.S. policy of complicity and never talking about Israel's nuclear weapons.
And that was reported by Antimentus and the New Yorker.
I'm looking at that right now.
So this article, it's from June the 19th, 2018.
It says how Trump and three other U.S. presidents protected Israel's worst kept secret, its nuclear arsenal.
And so first of all, if you could elaborate as much as you want about these letters, exactly what they do.
But then, isn't it interesting, the story here, where they tried to shove this in Jared Kushner's face, who by all accounts is Israel's man in Trump's White House, and how he was kind of shocked and said, like, you guys get the hell away from me.
I'll talk to you about it the day after tomorrow or something.
They had bigger fish to fry, and they didn't want to deal with the Israelis on this particular issue at that particular time.
I mean, they had all sorts of scandals erupting, and they didn't want to deal with it.
But they signed.
Oh, sure.
Because this is such a critical part, this whole infrastructure of lies to the American people and breaking the law.
I just like the anecdote about the chutzpah.
That's all.
You know?
Yeah.
Just like when Bill Clinton first met Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996.
They say he walked out of the room just like winded and said something like, who the F does this guy think he is?
And who's the superpower?
And who's the client here?
I mean, this is like, he couldn't believe it.
The way Netanyahu basically talked to him like a kindergarten student.
Here's your marching orders, Bill.
I don't know if he told him, we're tapping your phone, dude.
We got you already.
Or what?
But man.
God dang.
Yeah.
Well, I can tell you that there's no urgency for releasing anything about Israelis tapping the White House phone.
We've got multiple FOIA requests out on that, and we just can't get it.
And it's the Clinton administration, for goodness sake.
Well, in fact, wasn't this a Fox News story of the Trump years?
Correct me if I'm wrong about it being Fox.
But I think it was Fox.
They found listening devices all over D.C., especially right near the White House, that they traced back to the Israelis, right?
Yep.
Stingrays.
I mean, I think that was a Carl Cameron story or something like that.
But yeah, there was a- I mean, that was from 2017, I think, right?
Well, I don't have the photographic memory you do, Scott.
So I'll just say, yeah, I think so.
I'm pretty sure.
But anyway, it was certainly a major, you know, one of the top two or three major news sources in the country, like Fox or CNN or Wall Street Journal or something like that, whatever it was.
It was not some BS, you know?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
But the amazing thing to me is not the chutzpah and the flaps that occur between individuals on one occasion.
It's the fact that this is like the ocean, the Israel lobby and Israel are like an ocean that just wears down every administration, because here you have Obama doing the Cairo speech talking about the Arab Spring, blah, blah, blah.
And I know you have a lot more on that than I do.
But you know, there was this idea that maybe there would be an honest discussion of some of these key issues that have been, had been suppressed for so long.
But no, Obama signed the letter.
And pretty soon he was also actively suppressing any government release of information about Israel's nuclear weapons program, because there's all there are all sorts of documents.
And we got one during the Obama administration that basically said, look at all these facilities in Israel, just like the U.S. National Laboratories.
Look at what they did with Sorek, which was an Adams for Peace gift of a reactor to Israel.
They've weaponized it.
Look at this.
Look at that.
This is Obama's statement after fighting for it beginning in 2011.
And by 2012, he had already executed through his State Department and Department of Energy a government wide gag order saying no more contractors or U.S. officials can release this kind of information.
So, you know, we're blind.
We're being constantly deceived by each administration that comes in.
They don't want to have an honest argument.
They'd rather just keep this off the table.
And, you know, you have valiant attempts like Helen Thomas before she died.
She tried to pigeonhole Obama saying, do you know of any country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons?
And he dances and dances and dances.
She did that to Colin Powell one time, too, I think.
Yeah.
And other people like Sam Husseini and others, other reporters will, you know, they've got to ambush these people, whether it's Dick Cheney or Mike Pence or whoever, they've got to ambush them and say, you know, as they're coming out of their interview, we're crossing the street on a rainy day.
And they all dodged the question, all of them without exception.
And so, you know, even Joe Biden, they had some some footage on him doing exactly the same thing years ago.
Unfortunately, the footage is ruined or we'd all have seen it by now.
Those of us who circulate in the fact based world.
So, you know, it's, I guess, almost not worth anyone's time to speculate whether Joe Biden is going to sign this letter.
He's probably asking for it right now, saying, hey, I've heard there are these letters we got assigned the beginning of the administration.
Can you get that over to me right away?
Yeah.
There's a great clip of him going, I'm the most Zionist guy in D.C.
I am Zionism.
I'm Joe Zionism Biden or some kind of drafting his own letter.
No daylight.
Do you hear me?
No daylight.
I was going to say right before Showtime, I was actually doing just some touch up work on the book.
And I was right at the part where I was listing all of the most important think tanks who were the force, the neoconservative force outside of government, you know, quote unquote, during the run up to Iraq War Two.
And it was it was all the neocons who did it.
It was in the neocons who are they?
It's the vanguard of the Israel lobby in America.
That's who they are.
And they controlled the American Enterprise Institute and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, the Project for a New American Century, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
And I might as well say AEI three or four more times because that's how influential they were at that time.
And these were the guys who lied us into war in concert with the neoconservatives at the National Review and the neoconservatives at the Weekly Standard, all of whom had guest spots on Fox News.
And of course, all you could hear there was no room for anybody else.
Krauthammer at The Post and Crystal at The Times and on, you know, of course, David Brooks and Thomas Friedman, all these guys representing Israel's interests over those of the United States.
And, you know, I mean, that's why even even Philip Zelikow, who worked for Condoleezza Rice, said, oh, why'd we do Iraq?
It was for Israel, of course, you know, it's something nobody likes to really mention.
You know, just like the nuclear weapons.
It's kind of an inconvenient truth.
And you know, this is something that just can't be repeated too much.
And of course, there's that great quote saying, you know, for some reason, these 60 odd people have been transported to a desert island for a while.
There would have been no Iraq war.
Yeah.
Seymour Hersh said, hey, it's nine guys who did this.
I can go down the street and round them up for you.
You know.
Right.
So, you know, I guess, you know, everyone wants to fight the last battle and is on the lookout for this happening again.
But it's not going to happen in the same way.
History doesn't really repeat like that.
But I think, you know, there's really been no accountability whatsoever for the people who were right and the people who were wrong, the people who were wrong.
And it's just.
Well, it's the same people who did Iraq.
They were the same ones.
And now here they come again, insisting, I've got to go after Assad in Syria.
The same people who gave Baghdad to Iran's best friends now want to take Damascus away from their other best friends.
And so and they're not giving up trying to fix their mistake by making another worse one.
Exactly.
And that's why I just think people really got to pay attention to this next few months and what's happening, because those are the sorts of things that can suddenly be honest.
And so just by understanding the scam that's QME, you can also better understand the scam that occurs on a much broader level.
Right.
And by the way, I'm not saying that Trump got us out of Syria.
He's got troops in East Syria, but he stopped the direct support, the CIA direct support for the jihadists, although he's still providing cover for the Turks to support him.
So shrug.
But anyway.
I'm sorry.
I'm over time, Grant.
I got it.
All right.
Got it.
Thank you so much for this.
And it's such a great piece, as always, of course, and all the links and everything you need to know.
It's Grant F. Smith at Antiwar dot com.
The Israel lobby's QME scam.
And also, of course, check out his Web site, Earmap, I R M E P dot org.
And you know what?
I'm sorry.
I don't care.
I'm over time.
Give me 30 seconds on all the videos you did instead of the Israel lobby conference this year.
Grant.
Yeah.
So we've got an offshoot of the conference.
It's called Transcending the Israel Lobby at Home and Abroad Extra.
And you can see all of these videos of people who have been related to the conference over the years at Israel Lobby Con dot org.
We've got Ali Abunimah coming up on November 18, talking about Palestine propaganda and the president.
He's a voice you don't hear enough of.
And Walter Hickson.
We've got Don Wagner from America, from Jewish Voices for Peace, Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb and Alan Brownfeld from the American Council for Judaism.
Awesome.
Brownfeld is incredible.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Tons of incredible people.
And we're keeping that going.
We're still you know, we're going to talk about whether we can actually pull off the march event.
It's still on the calendar.
March 3rd.
It's still open.
You know, we've got our fingers crossed we can do that National Press Club event because it's a really important conference.
And so hopefully, you know, keep your eye on that page, Israel Lobby Con dot org.
And I just got to say this, too, because it keeps coming up over and over again.
People always ask me, what was that thing that you said?
What was it again?
It's Jim Loeb, like your earlobe.
Jim Loeb, neoconservatism in a nutshell.
And I love it so much because I just love Jim Loeb so much.
And he goes, you know, I'm just going to try to briefly sketch a little outline of a thing.
And then he tells you everything you need to know about the neocons.
It's just perfect.
Neoconservatism in a nutshell.
And with that, I got to run.
Thank you, Grant, so much.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
See ya.
The Scott Horton Show and Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APS Radio dot com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
