11/16/13 – John Glaser – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, November 17th, 2013.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
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Our guest today is John Glazer, writer for antiwar.com, The Washington Times, and The Huffington Post.
Welcome back to the show.
John, how are you doing?
I'm very good.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, I appreciate you joining us today.
And we got a lot to cover.
And lucky for me, you're good on everything.
So we're going to go around the empire and cover a little bit of what it's been up to.
First of all, can we talk about the talks?
We're about halfway through the last failed Iran talks and the upcoming next chapter.
What do you think is going to happen here?
Well, right now that we're in the sort of interim period between the two sets of talks, the next talks begin next week, Wednesday, November 20th.
Right now, the fight is really being seen in Washington and in Congress.
What you've seen is that the Obama administration has been making its case to certain members of Congress to not add more sanctions and deliberately derail the nuclear negotiations.
And at the same time that that's happening, Israel is literally sending its own government officials onto Capitol Hill to counter the Obama administration's case and give them contradicting facts and quote-unquote facts and have this sort of congressional fight.
First of all, just imagine this happening with any other country.
It would not be tolerated if Argentina went to Capitol Hill and used their sway with certain members of Congress to derail a significant national security issue with a longtime rival like Iran.
It could go very bad, the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Ron Dermer, and Israel's minister of economy, Naftali Bennett, have been going on, speaking with lawmakers on Capitol Hill and trying to warn them that the deal that the Obama administration was about to sign last time around would have given Iran $20 billion of frozen assets and sanctions relief, but the Obama administration says, no, it's only about $9 billion.
So there's this constant fight between Israel, who wants to derail the negotiations and ensure that they still have a boogeyman in Iran, and the Obama administration, which seems like it's trying to reach an equitable deal and do actual diplomacy.
So this fight is going on in Congress right now.
I think the tide is turning a little bit against new sanctions.
Significant members of Congress, like Senator Carl Levin, of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Dianne Feinstein, Senator Chris Murphy, who's also on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, even Senator John McCain says, we're going to give the Obama administration a couple months before we add new sanctions.
So I think the tide is slightly turning against sanctions, and they're going to wait and see what happens starting November 20th with these new sets of talks.
So that's encouraging, but again we'll still have to see what happens in the new talks, because as we saw last time, and as you know, France derailed the last set of talks.
It was about to sign an agreement, and probably because of France's ties to both Saudi Arabia and Israel, France decided it was in its interest to be a little harsher on the Iranians and not accept a deal that virtually everyone was going to sign.
So something like that could come up again with these next negotiations, but we'll really have to see.
Now let me ask you this.
It seems to me, and I'm biased, it seems to me like this is a bad, bad PR move for Israel, when we just finished, we meaning the American people, just finished defeating a drive to war with Syria that was being led by the White House and backed only by the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee and maybe some Raytheon lobbyists.
No one else in the entire country was pushing that thing but for them, and the American people clearly said that they don't want it, and now here they are doing everything they can to stand in the way of what amounts to a peace deal, right?
A major step forward on the warming up of relations between America and Iran that have been at this, you know, cutthroat Cold War for almost 40 years now, and here they are, and I understand, you already said their motivation.
They need an enemy in the region, especially so that we'll keep backing them.
But what my theory is, is that maybe we'll just quit backing them anyway because the American people are going to be so sick and tired of Israel trying to get us in trouble all the time, lying us into war with Iraq, trying to lie us into war with Syria, trying to lie us out of peace with Iran.
Hey, maybe they'll be worse off with Iran as an enemy and still without America as an ally going forward from here.
Yeah, I mean, I think if the United States and, you know, Congress and the executive branch in particular paid closer attention to its actual interests, we would have dropped Israel a long time ago.
But as far as what Israel is thinking in this, I mean, yeah, it is a bad PR move.
Without the United States, who it constantly beats up on in a PR sort of way, without the United States, Israel will be literally alone in the world.
It will have no support, and therefore its plans to annex the West Bank and its plans to continue to lay siege on Gaza and destroy that whole society, you know, these are not going to be able to continue to be carried out without U.S. support.
So U.S. support is incredibly important for Israel.
It's incredibly important.
Israel is the regional hegemon in the Middle East, and it's trying to carry out, you know, continued apartheid in Israel-Palestine.
So those things, which are very important to Israel's survival, according to the Israelis, can't go on if it doesn't have U.S. support.
What they're banking on is that the influence of the Israel lobby and the ideological inclinations of most of Congress, and again, support for Israel is a bipartisan issue.
It's not just a right or left thing.
They're banking that that will tie the executive branch's hands and prevent the executive branch from making any rational decisions with regard to Israel, or dropping support, or lessening aid, or whatever the case may be.
So, you know, furthermore, I don't see Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, as someone who is, you know, concerned about the subtleties of PR and diplomacy.
I mean, this guy is a messianic, bullheaded, you know, ideologue, and he...
It was Bill Clinton, back during the Clinton administration, who, I think I read, he told one of his aides, he goes, who does this Netanyahu guy think he is?
I mean, who's the superpower here?
So that's the sort of mindset of Netanyahu, and I think that it's very possible he would just, you know, destroy his most important international ally if it means he gets to, you know, continue being this bullheaded ideologue.
Now, Netanyahu himself has said, and in regards to his relationship with Bill Clinton, when he talked about how he basically completely screwed Bill Clinton in 2000, he said, oh, well, don't worry about the Americans.
He was asked by a settler, and he said, oh, don't worry about the Americans, they're easily moved.
It's absurd.
And my theory is that eventually the American people are going to come to agree with Benjamin Netanyahu about that.
What do we get out of this relationship, other than some knockdown towers and some more wars for Israel?
Yeah, it's hard to see.
And, you know, a deal with Iran could be beneficial in any number of ways, not just to avoid another prolonged military quagmire in the Middle East, which is what a war on Iran would turn into.
But, you know, we're sanctioning Iran's oil sector right now.
You know, that drives up the price of oil in international markets.
And, you know, we're exiting from Afghanistan, at least to some extent, in 2014.
Afghanistan borders Iran.
You know, they helped us install the Karzai regime back in 2001.
I mean, they were doing diplomacy and cooperation with us back then.
And then, you know, it all fell apart when Bush, right after that, described them as being in the axis of evil.
So, you know, in a sort of hard, realist sort of way, a deal with Iran would be very beneficial.
And yet, our supposed closest allies in Israel and Saudi Arabia are determined to derail the negotiations.
And so, you know, it's mind-boggling, but they're going to pursue their interests as much as possible until they feel that they can't get away with it.
And I think they're approaching that line.
Well, and that's the ironical part of all this, is that what they, meaning the government, the politicians who run the Israeli government, is in the best interest of Israel, is exactly not.
I mean, they might as well be running the USA as far as the policy being in the national interest.
And I'm reminded of the interview with the outgoing Israeli ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, where he says, yeah, we prefer al-Qaeda in Syria to Hezbollah because Hezbollah is backed by Iran.
And, of course, what he meant to say was, and that's why America prefers al-Qaeda in Syria too, because we'll side with our own enemies against Israel's enemies, if that's what they insist upon.
Right, yeah.
The policy in Syria is mind-boggling, as you describe it.
It doesn't appear to be, but, you know, thankfully the Obama administration backed off because of unprecedented public opposition to another war on Syria.
They backed off.
They got saved by the Russians who proposed, you know, eliminating Syria's chemical weapons, a process which is still ongoing and they've destroyed quite a bit.
You know, I don't think at this time the United States is going to be increasing support for the Syrian rebels.
I mean, we're still doing what we have been doing, which is trying to identify so-called moderates within the opposition.
But, you know, our weapons and our training are inevitably going into the hands and the minds of the extremists, the ones that we've officially declared terrorist organizations.
The State Department has, like Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda offshoot from Iraq.
So, you know, I think that U.S.-Syria policy in that realm is sort of on pause.
However, Saudi Arabia, another one of our, you know, close allies that's trying to work directly against our interests, they are increasing support explicitly in the absence of U.S. support.
So they're very upset U.S. hasn't been more hawkish.
So I read in Foreign Policy magazine, I think last week, that Saudi Arabia is explicitly increasing aid to the Syrian rebels.
And, you know, we don't have to think that far back.
You don't need an incredible memory to remember what happened in Afghanistan in the 1980s, which, you know, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were, through us, were sort of our proxies for aiding the insurgency in Afghanistan.
Groups that later turned out to be the Taliban and al-Qaeda, you know, shot bin Laden to stardom within the jihad community.
This is what brought on the, you know, al-Qaeda organization as we know it, and this is what eventually led to 9-11.
And, of course, you know, these are very against our interests, and yet one of our closest allies who we give billions of dollars to a year in weapons and military training and the rest of it, Saudi Arabia, is increasing support for the Syrian rebels.
These are Sunni extremists, and Saudi Arabia is continuing its long tradition of exporting a Wahhabist, you know, extremely fundamentalist and conservative version of Sunni Islam and adding some militancy in there with it.
So, you know, this could turn out very, very bad.
And, again, the stalemate in Syria is a stalemate because of outside powers.
You have Russia and Iran supporting the Assad regime.
You have the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and others aiding the opposition.
And a situation like that is a perfect recipe for stalemate and prolonged just nothing except for killing and killing and killing.
And that's what we're going to continue to see.
Well, but at least John Kerry's going to solve that whole Palestine problem, right?
Well, not quite.
You know, I think that he truly believed, he was a sort of true believer.
He thought that he could get these people back to the table and solve the Israeli-Palestinian issue once and for all.
He wanted that to be his legacy.
He probably wanted it to be on his report card for when he considers a run for the presidency in 2016 or something.
This is something that he desperately wanted to do for his own political legacy.
And I think that they're already falling apart.
Israel has continued to build settlements.
It's continued to develop plans for more security walls in the West Bank.
It's doing all these types of things.
It's carrying out what's called the Prarer Plan, which is a plan to ethnically cleanse Israeli-Palestinians in the south of Israel, in the Negev Desert, people that have lived there for ages.
And the Prarer Plan calls for the relocation of 40,000 to 70,000 of these Bedouins and the demolition of about 40 villages and the confiscation of about 200,000 acres of land.
And in place of that, they're setting up Israeli settlements.
This kind of thing is so flagrantly ethnic cleansing, and they're doing it in the process of supposed negotiations and good faith with the Palestinians.
So the Palestinians last week, their whole negotiating team, the whole team that was negotiating with Israel, which included Mahmoud Abbas and everyone in the PLO, resigned.
They said, no, we're not going to continue to take part in this because obviously Israel isn't doing this in good faith.
On the other side, you had, before the Palestinians resigned, John Kerry meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, and Netanyahu publicly saying that the Palestinians weren't cooperating, they weren't budging an inch and all this kind of thing.
So obviously, I think that John Kerry has seen the truth now, and he knows because he sort of signaled in a couple of interviews that he doesn't really like what the Israelis are doing.
He even went so far as to sort of admit that Israelis' continued settlement and continued application of the apartheid system sort of makes negotiations and any long-term deal impossible.
And so he was, he became very fed up in a couple of interviews after meeting with Netanyahu, and I think he knows the truth now, which is that unless the United States is hard on Israel, unless it's withdrawing its support, unless it actually puts diplomatic pressure on it, there will be no deal because Israel doesn't want a deal.
They want to annex the West Bank.
That's the only thing that can be gleaned for sure from their policy towards the West Bank.
You know, I got bad news for you too, John.
I was talking with Andrew Coburn yesterday on my other show about his new article coming out in Harper's Magazine about how Barack Obama and John Kerry hate each other, or at least the president has no regard whatsoever for the secretary here, and that they both know only Obama really could solve this by making real substantive threats to Netanyahu about the withholding of aid and withholding of vetoes in the UN, etc., like that.
And he'll be damned if he's going to do that and let John Kerry take all the credit.
So the Palestinians, they can just burn, because unless Obama's going to get all of the legacy over the situation, he's not going to let it happen at all.
I don't know the insides about that, but that sounds perfectly plausible.
What you've seen from Obama is that every decision he makes is really about his own political reputation.
Every decision he makes is about the legacy that he's going to leave and not about what's right or what's good or what makes the most sense.
So that makes perfect sense to me.
I'm not sure if there really is a rivalry between him and Kerry, but it makes sense.
It's just another thing working against the potential for an actual long-term deal with the Palestinians.
Most people who want the best for the Palestinians, most Palestinian activists at this point think that a two-state deal, which is what the negotiations are based on, is impossible, because Israel is too ingratiated into the West Bank.
The military occupation has gone on way too long.
There's a half a million Jewish Israelis on Palestinian land.
East Jerusalem is all but fully annexed and doesn't belong to the Palestinians anymore.
So people are advocating a one-state solution.
But this is a threat to the Israelis in the same way, because they can't maintain what they've always wanted to, which is a Jewish state.
So they either have to be a theocracy on the one hand or an apartheid state on the other.
And if they annex the West Bank, they're afraid to do that fully, because then they'll have a bunch of Muslim Palestinians on their hands, and it'll destroy the quote-unquote demographic makeup of their country, which they want to be Jewish and white.
So these are all kinds of problems, and it's an impossible thing to solve, because one side of the negotiations doesn't want to solve it.
Okay, now we've got to move on, not because we're done, but just because the clock's ticking away here.
Talk to me about the negotiations with the at least so-called Afghan government, maybe it really is one sort of, I don't know, over the Status of Forces Agreement, which is a fancy way of saying a treaty that the Senate doesn't have to ratify about keeping American soldiers in that so-called sovereign country.
Right, so the Obama administration wants to pull out probably what has leaked to the press, he intends to leave about 8,000 to 10,000 U.S. troops there in training of the Afghan forces, and also with JSOC troops to raid homes and continue to harass Afghans.
So he wants these 8,000 to 10,000 troops to stay, but the one trump card is that the Afghans don't want to sign a Status of Forces Agreement governing their presence there, which would make them subject only to U.S. law as opposed to Afghan law.
By the way, the fact that this is a sticking point, that the United States doesn't want to keep troops there if they're subject to Afghan law, and that Afghans don't want to keep troops there if they're only subject to U.S. law, the fact that that's a sticking point is an indication that both sides expect serious crimes to be committed.
And we know that that's true.
I mean, just last week I believe it was published in the Rolling Stone that shed more light on war crimes, alleged war crimes that took place in Afghanistan.
U.S. soldiers allegedly disappeared more than a dozen men, killed them, tortured others.
And so there's more and more evidence of this, and just like every single time that something happens in Afghanistan and U.S. soldiers are accused of doing something, they get off scot-free or virtually scot-free.
So there's never any accountability for crimes committed when U.S. soldiers are under U.S. law.
But both sides expect continued crimes to take place, and that's why this is such a sticking point.
Isn't that something that they can...
I mean, it's implicit, not explicit, but it's almost explicit, right?
Well, what are we going to do about the war criminals going forward?
That is a tough one.
We're going to have to negotiate.
I know.
It's almost funny.
But, you know, this is actually kind of important, because if the U.S. and Kabul can't get to an agreement on the Status of Forces Agreement, it might result in what's called a zero option in Afghanistan.
This is the same sticking point in negotiations that derailed the U.S. plan to keep troops in Iraq back in 2011.
The Obama administration insisted on having troops there in the 10,000 or 20,000, and he wanted to do it, and he wasn't able to because the Maliki government refused to sign the Status of Forces Agreement that would exempt U.S. forces from Iraqi law.
And so Obama threw up his hands and pulled out all U.S. troops in 2011 out of Iraq.
This so-called zero option in Afghanistan is being floated around as well in the press, and several officials have referenced it.
So, you know, this is so important to Washington that U.S. troops are exempt from law in the country that they're occupying that they very well might pull out if they can't come to an agreement on this.
All right, now, PR about al-Qaeda aside, because they've already surrendered to the Taliban, basically.
I mean, they haven't given them the capital city, but they've surrendered on the policy of defeating the Taliban at this point, and the only thing they ever talked about really since Obama came into power, well, at least since the surge began ending, I guess, was, well, we still got, you know, somewhere between 50 and 100 al-Qaeda guys that we've got to track down and so on and so on.
But let me ask you this, John.
Is there any, and from a cynical imperial point of view, not from your own, because I know that you don't see one, but from a cynical imperialist point of view, a rebuilding America's defenses kind of a point of view, what interest does the empire have in Afghanistan that's worth fighting for at all?
It's hard to say.
Some people suggest that Afghanistan's, you know, rich mineral deposits are one economic case for staying in Afghanistan in a cynical imperial point of view.
Others talk about, you know, China's increasing, China, who is our geopolitical rival and is rising and, you know, is threatening Washington's dominance over the world.
China is making its way into the Central Asian sphere and making deals with Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan and all of this stands right near Afghanistan, in fact, making oil deals and increasing economic interest, signing free trade deals and so on and so forth.
And so, you know, having the U.S. have a big base there in the face of Chinese, you know, economic expansionism might be important to people in Washington, too.
But then again, I kind of don't buy either of those justifications.
I think what's happening now in Afghanistan is the same thing that was happening towards the end of the Vietnam War, which is that U.S. political leaders are continuing to engage in the war only because they find it very difficult, if not impossible, to stand up in front of the world and say, hey, we lost.
This war was a total waste.
We have not completed our objectives.
And we are turning around, waving a white flag and with our tail between our legs and we have to leave.
The Nixon administration and the LBJ administration before it did not want to do that in Vietnam.
And we know that that's one of the main reasons that kept us going in Vietnam because we wanted our credibility and we wanted to be the world's greatest military.
We don't want people to think that America can lose.
And so they kept going in Vietnam and getting 50,000 or 60,000 U.S. troops killed and 3 million-some-odd Vietnamese killed.
And they kept going, even with those costs.
And I think that's what's going on in Afghanistan.
This is political.
I don't think it's very geopolitical.
I don't think it's about imperial economic interest and so on and so forth.
I think it's mainly that the Obama administration is trying to find a face-saving way out of Afghanistan, and they don't have that option, really.
They really don't.
Right.
That's the same reason that they surged in was just domestic politics.
Really too bad.
All right, I'm sorry.
We're way over time.
Got to go.
But we'll have you on again soon because I did still want to talk to you about Libya and about the Asia pivot, which I know you've been studying a lot.
So thanks again for your time, and we'll talk again soon, John.
All right, thanks.
That's John Glazer, everybody.
He writes at Antiwar.com slash blog, and also at The Washington Times and The Huffington Post, too.
So check him out there.
That's it for the show today.
We'll be back here next Sunday from 839 in the morning on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
I'm Scott Horton.
My full interview archive can be found at ScottHorton.org.
And you can follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at slash TheScottHortonShow.
See you next week.
I'm Scott Horton.
Have a great day.
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