01/15/15 – Barry Lando – The Scott Horton Show

Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
Hey all, Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
U.S. military and financial support for Israel's permanent occupations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is immoral, and it threatens national security by helping generate terrorist attacks against our country.
And face it, it's bad for Israel, too.
Without our unlimited support, they would have much more incentive to reach a lasting peace with their neighbors.
It's past time for us to make our government stop making matters worse.
Help support CNI at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
It was 24 years ago today that George H. W. Bush started bombing Iraq at the beginning of Operation Desert Storm, the first Gulf War, or as I call it, Operation Yellow Ribbon.
Get everybody back on board for American militarism.
And like I was saying before, I was just a kid at the time.
And here's an important point.
I was for it, mostly, even though my folks were against it.
But pretty much everyone else that I knew was for the war.
But it wasn't until a year later that I found out that anyone had protested against the first Gulf War.
And as many of you guys know, I grew up and live in Austin, Texas, where there are plenty of hippies and government employees and university employees.
UT is the biggest university campus in America.
So there is no shortage of liberals around here.
And there were no shortage of protests against the first Gulf War.
And I live in this town, and I had no idea that there was any even attempted organized opposition.
It was completely blacked out of the media, of even the local news.
I mean, they may have covered it a tiny little bit.
But the entire narrative at the time was, and I remember it well, was we're all in on this.
This is America against the new Hitler, and it is pretty damn simple.
And seemingly the only people opposed that I knew of were singing, give peace a chance, but didn't have an actual argument or anything to say.
And so it just seemed a complete consensus.
And of course, that's how we stay at war is because that's the way these things seem.
But anyway, I'm joined on the line by Barry Lando, and he is the author of the book, Web of Deceit.
It's also a documentary, Web of Deceit.
And I'm sorry, let me page back up here because the subtitle is interesting here, too.
The history of Western complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush.
And that's the way I like my history, going back to Woodrow Wilson and how he ruined everything.
Welcome to the show, Barry.
How are you doing?
Fine, thanks.
Very happy to have you back on the show.
It's a very important 24th anniversary of Operation Desert Storm.
And so the first thing I would do, sir, is ask you, please, if you could, to tell the story of America's diplomacy with Iraq and Kuwait leading up to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in early August 1990.
Yeah, it's really it's an untold story, really.
And most people think that Saddam just walked into Kuwait as they said he was another Hitler and he was looking to expand his territories.
In fact, there was even a question that he was going to then from Kuwait, he was going to invade Saudi Arabia.
And that was the narrative.
And all of that was false.
But it was based on that, that the United States went to war.
What happened, in fact, was that Saddam, at the end of the war, almost a 10-year war with Iran, Saddam and his people were exhausted.
They had lost a million men.
They were broke.
The country was in ruins.
The economy was in a shambles.
And so they looked to their friends in the Gulf, particularly Kuwait, their neighbor, who had given Saddam huge amounts of credit in his fight with Iran, because essentially Saddam was saving, was there, and it was, in fact, fighting on behalf of Kuwait and the other Gulf states too against Iran, which they all feared.
And Saddam had kind of taken the lead in, they thought, in defending them.
So Saddam went to the Kuwaitis after the war ended and said, look, you know, I'm in bad shape.
I want you to forgive the billions of dollars in credit that you extended to me, because in the end you benefited from it.
And the Kuwaitis had also benefited from huge amounts of oil production too, that they had put out at very high prices because Iraq was no longer in the market.
And the Kuwaitis said, no, we're not going to.
And we're not going to talk to you at all.
They were very arrogant.
And there was also charges from Saddam that they were also increasing their oil production even further, which was driving the world oil price lower, which was even further bankrupting the Iraqis, because they also depended on oil.
So Saddam also said, well, you keep producing more oil, it's only hurting me.
And he had no idea that at the same time the Kuwaitis were saying no to him, they were talking to the Americans, the American government and the CIA, who were advising them to hold tight, not to accede to Saddam's requests, and being told off the record that the United States would back them in case they had any troubles with Iraq.
This was General Schwarzkopf, who later would be commanding US troops.
He was then the head of the US Army in that part of the world.
He was making trips to Kuwait at that time, in which he was reassuring the Kuwaitis that the US would back them up, even though the US at that time had absolutely no formal treaty commitments with Kuwait, Schwarzkopf was telling them they were going to be backed up.
Also, what happened when Saddam then began to get more aggressive towards Kuwait and make his demands publicly, and Saddam began to talk about possibly moving against Kuwait, sending his military in, because he felt, as all Iraqis did, that Kuwait had once been part of Iraq before the British had separated it.
While Saddam was making these more and more bellicose statements, US officials were being asked back in the United States, before the Congress and by the press, exactly what are our treaty commitments to the Kuwaitis?
Is there any kind of red line in the sand that if crossed, the United States would come in to defend Kuwait?
Those questions were asked point blank in a congressional hearing.
The answer from top officials in the State Department a couple of times publicly was, we have no treaty commitments with Kuwait, there is no really red line in the sand.
There's been a lot of publicity that was given to Saddam's meeting with April Glaspie, who was the US ambassador to Iraq at the time.
Saddam called her in and said to her shortly before he was planning to move, he said, what would the US do if things began to get hot here?
She also said, we have no iron in this fire, the United States wants peace to be kept, but we're not going to act militarily, essentially.
She took a hit on that afterwards for having told Saddam, reassured Saddam in that way.
In fact, she was simply repeating a policy that had been laid down by US officials for weeks before.
Saddam didn't know much about the rest of the world, he'd never really traveled much at all.
He simply couldn't figure out what US policy was, nor in fact, could the US government itself.
At that time, the communist world was coming apart at the seams, the Soviet Union, and that's where everyone was paying attention to.
They were not paying that much attention to what was going on in the sands of Iraq and Kuwait.
In fact, George Bush had even sent a letter to Saddam shortly before he invaded, not knowing it was going to invade, but reassuring Saddam that the US wanted peaceful outcomes in that part of the world, making absolutely no gesture or statement about drawing a red line in the sand, warning him, if you invade, we're going to act.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry, I've got to stop you there, Barry.
We've got to take this break.
When we get back, we'll talk more about the first Gulf War, how we got into it, and the consequences since with Barry Lando, author of Web of Deceit, right after this.
All right, guys.
Welcome back to the show here.
Where we left off, we're talking about the the sort of blundering, I'm not sure, way that we got into the first Gulf War here.
On one hand, it sounds like, as you described this policy, it was all very confused.
It was certainly confusing to Saddam Hussein, and I guess he wasn't quite sure what he was going to get away with, and that kind of thing.
But, you know, it also kind of sounds, especially when you talk about Swirskoff telling the Kuwaitis, yeah, go ahead and take a firm line, because we've got your back.
It really makes it sound much more like a real setup, where they're telling the Kuwaitis, go ahead and be brave, and they're telling Saddam Hussein, yeah, go ahead and kneecap them, see if we care.
It looks like the perfect trap, the perfect excuse to go ahead and occupy Saudi Arabia forever.
I don't think it was that Machiavellian.
The reason being is that all indications are that George Bush himself, even after the attack occurred, it took him a few days before he actually figured out that he was going to militarily react to it.
At the time it happened, he wasn't at all sure that the US was going to react militarily.
Yeah, it seemed like it wasn't until Thatcher mocked him and said, don't go wobbly on me now and be a sissy, Mr. President, that he really decided.
So why did Schwarzkopf tell the Kuwaitis to go ahead and be brave and refuse to negotiate?
I have no idea, and I think that actually that particular question, what happened with Kuwait, would make a great book, because that's really at the bottom of what happened since then.
It all started back then with that invasion of Kuwait.
If that hadn't happened, there wouldn't have been Gulf War I, there wouldn't have been 9-11, that wouldn't have happened, and there wouldn't have been the second Gulf War, and the whole tragedy of Iraq today wouldn't be played out the way it is.
The world would have been totally different, and it's a very dark corner of history which somebody ought to explore.
Now, you know, Greg Palast says that in his estimation that basically it's sort of Texas rules where if, you know, adjoining properties here where the king of Kuwait and Hussein are the so-called property owners, if there's a contract to produce out of a shared well that's beneath two different pieces of property, if you don't stay within that contract and you overproduce from a shared well, then you're dealt with and sometimes quite outside the law, like maybe you'll have a limp for the rest of your life, this kind of thing, and that those are just Texas rules, that's how it is, and that that was what James Baker was operating under, was telling Saddam, yeah, go ahead and break their kneecaps, but that they didn't anticipate that Saddam would go ahead and go all the way to Kuwait City and to the port and try to seize the entire country.
They anticipated more of just occupying the northern oil fields for a while for punishment, that kind of thing.
I don't think they even had that clear view of Baker at the time.
In fact, all his attention was being paid to what was going on in the former Soviet Union, the wall coming down, all that dramatic stuff.
You know, the Iraqi affairs were being handled by second and third tier in the State Department.
They weren't focused on what was going on there at all.
I see.
And then, so now after Saddam goes in to invade and occupies Kuwait, then, as you mentioned, they came up with this scam that he was about to invade Saudi Arabia, including they lied to the king of Saudi Arabia about what the satellite pictures showed, which was proven back at the time, but I guess too late to really have the effect, and that kind of thing.
And I only just recently learned, because, hey, I was in ninth grade at the time, and I was paying close attention as much as I could, but I certainly had missed this controversy where Robert Novak on Crossfire on CNN, the crusty old conservative, was calling out Bush and saying that he knows, and I don't know if he was actually involved, or he just knew that Saddam had made multiple peace offers behind the scenes to Bush, and that Bush was refusing to accept it.
And Robert Perry brought this up in the context of what a scandal it was that the liberals on the Crossfire panel then started calling Robert Novak, Neville Chamberlain, selling out to Hitler at Munich and all of this, when here was a chance that, as you said, could have averted this entire catastrophe that's played out since.
Can you tell us about that?
Well, as far as I know, it was after the invasion occurred, and after Cheney went to Saudi Arabia, got the Saudis to accept U.S. troops coming in, and then the U.S. troops actually started coming over and demanding that, you know, and the demand that Saddam turn around and get his troops out.
It was only when Saddam realized how serious it was that he started saying, okay, let's talk.
And by that point, this was now into, you know, into the fall, by that point Bush had got himself so riled up that he was not going to let Saddam off the hook.
He was determined to destroy Saddam Hussein, basically to destroy his military forces and, you know, to destroy him as a power in that part of the world.
So he wasn't going to let him out, and there were several occasions when Saddam did try to negotiate with the United States right up to the time that the U.S. invasion took place.
Saddam was trying to say, hey, let me out of here, and I'll go home, but Bush was not going to go for that.
All right, and now briefly, can you tell us ballpark estimates of how many Iraqis died?
I know it was 120-something or 170-something on the Allied side, but what about Iraqi casualties?
That was almost never discussed.
Well, the big casualties came not so much.
I mean, you had the Iraqi, you know, several tens of thousands of Iraqi troops were killed, including some of Saddam's best soldiers, but what the real casualties came afterwards, when the people of Iraq, southern Iraq, the Shiites and the Kurds in the north, rose up as Saddam's troops were being destroyed and pushed out of Kuwait and the U.S. was moving forward.
They rose up in answer to an earlier call by George Bush for the Iraqi people to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Well, they did, and then, you know, as is well known, the United States troops stopped in their tracks and stood and watched.
Literally, they could see what was happening.
It was just a few kilometers away as Saddam's forces destroyed not just tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed.
Shiites slaughtered, Kurds slaughtered as the U.S. forces stood there and did nothing.
And Bush acted like he had never made any calls to them to rise up at all.
When he was questioned about it, he said, I never said that.
But I've heard audio of it.
There are leaflets which the U.S. dropped over Iraq as they were driving the Kuwaitis, the Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.
The U.S. flew leaflet sorties over Iraq, dropping leaflets, encouraging the Iraqis to rise up.
Oh, I didn't know that part of it, but I certainly have the audio of Bush senior right here.
It's just 13 seconds.
There's another way for the bloodshed to stop, and that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands, to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.
And now that's really important, because if you take for granted, Barry, the war itself, but you want to pick up at the aftermath there, it seems like if they had not negotiated for Saddam, yeah, go ahead and keep your attack helicopters.
You know, I don't think they would have necessarily had to fight for the Shia if they had just not basically set them up for such a slaughter.
And I think, as you explained on the show a year ago, the Americans intervened themselves, not only did they let Saddam keep his helicopters, but they even landed helicopters on the highway, preventing an entire Iraqi army division from marching on Saddam Hussein to oust him.
And it seems like if that had happened then, there may have still been a civil war.
But if you look at the civil war of 2005 through 2008, where almost a million people were killed with the Americans basically undoing that so-called mistake, that was part of Wolfowitz's moral argument for the war is how we left the poor Shia high and dry.
And so but using the American army and Marine Corps to fight the civil war for them ended up being such an absolute bloody catastrophe and helped lead to the rise of the Islamic State in the Sunni provinces, et cetera, and empower Iran and all these other things.
And but it seems like if at that point they had just let the Shia defeat Saddam and then kept the hands off approach, at least it would have been much more likely or they would have the Shia would have had much more incentive to negotiate with the Sunni rather than, you know, having the entire U.S. Army and Marines at their beck and call to do their fighting for them and kick the Sunnis out of Baghdad and lead to the situation that we have today, it seems to me.
Yeah, I'm not at all sure, you know, there wouldn't have been a bloodbath of Shia against Sunni afterwards as well.
But in any case, you're absolutely right.
It would have it would have changed totally history to this day if the United States had simply not allowed Saddam Hussein to fly his his helicopters, his battle helicopters after they had defeated him to fly his helicopters to destroy the the rebels.
Also, by doing that, the United States gave a signal to the Iraqi military.
The Iraqi army was ready to go over to the rebel side.
But when they saw what the United States was doing, that it was back was backing off from the rebellion.
Well, the Iraqi army then decided, well, we better go in and smash the Shiites then, which is what they did.
Right.
And then.
OK, so it's even Newsweek official history, I believe Lawrence Wright in the looming tower says so as well, that Osama volunteered his men, the Azzam group, to fight against Saddam.
And the Saudi king said, no, we're going to have the Americans drive Saddam out of Kuwait instead of you.
And that was the beginning of his alienation from the Saudi king at that point right then and there.
And then it was the permanent occupation of Saudi Arabia that was used, those bases being used to enforce the blockade and the no fly zone bombings.
The conservative estimate of Jeremy Scahill is once every three days for eight years straight.
The New York Times says once every two days, you know, every other day, on average, they bombed Iraq.
That was the primary justification for Osama bin Laden's declaration of jihad against the United States in 1996 and in 1998.
Absolutely.
It all goes it all goes back to that.
And so I know you you sort of mentioned how that was part of the history.
But I just thought it was important to to kind of mention that we didn't just skip from from Bush killing to Bush killing.
There was the Democrats did more than their share in the intervening years.
And that was what really had led up to, as you said, 9-11, which then became the excuse for this much more war, you know, in response.
So, yeah, as long as we're talking history and we're going, you know what?
And we haven't changed.
I mean, the U.S. after after 9-11, the U.S. Congress voted with only one one dissenting vote to go ahead and take any actions they wanted to do against any terrorists associated with 9-11.
Only one congressman, Congresswoman had the guts to stand up and say, hold it just a second.
We don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past.
And just the other day in France, with France now having been hit by the terrorist act there after the assembly had sung the Marseillaise, they voted unanimously to continue with French attacks on ISIS in Iraq.
There was only one dissenting vote there.
These issues have not been debated at all, and it doesn't look like they're going to be.
Yeah.
They say those who do read history are condemned to sit and watch everybody who doesn't read history make the same bad decisions over and over again.
All right.
Well, thank you so much for your time on the show, Barry.
I really appreciate it.
Pleasure.
Bye bye.
All right.
So that's Barry Lando, the book and the documentary.
You can find the whole documentary, as far as I can tell, in pieces on YouTube Web of Deceit, which is I'm pretty sure where I got that George Bush senior audio.
And also the book is Web of Deceit.
Barry Lando dot com.
He has his novel, The Watchman's File, and he also has the audio.
All that Bush audio from the first Gulf War and his documentaries are there and the rest of it to Barry Lando dot com.
So happy to mention that.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here for the Future Freedom, the monthly journal of the Future Freedom Foundation.
As you may already be aware, Jacob Hornberger, Sheldon Richman and James Bovard are awesome.
They're also in every issue of the Future Freedom and they're joined by others of the best of the libertarian movement.
People like Anthony Gregory, Wendy McElroy, Lawrence Vance, Joe Stromberg and many more.
Even me.
Sign up for the Future Freedom at FFF dot org slash subscribe.
It's just twenty five dollars a year for the print edition.
Fifteen to read it online.
That's the Future Freedom edited by Sheldon Richman at FFF dot org slash subscribe and tell me you heard it here.
Man, you need some Liberty stickers for the back of your truck at Liberty stickers dot com.
They've got great state hate like Pearl Harbor was an inside job.
The Democrats want your guns.
U.S. Army die for Israel.
Police brutality, not just for black people anymore.
And government school.
Why you and your kids are so stupid.
Check out these and a thousand other great ones at Liberty stickers dot com.
Of course, they'll take care of all your custom printing for your band or your business at the bumper sticker dot com.
That's Liberty stickers dot com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Hey, I'll Scott here.
You're like me.
You need coffee.
Lots of it.
You probably prefer taste good, too.
Well, let me tell you about Darren's Coffee Company at Darren's Coffee dot 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 dot com.
Use promo code Scott and get free shipping.
Darren's Coffee dot com.
Hey, I'll Scott here.
First, I want to take a second to thank all the shows, listeners, sponsors and supporters for helping make the show what it is.
I literally couldn't do it without you.
And I want to tell you about the newest way to help support the show.
Whenever you shop at Amazon dot com, stop by Scott Horton dot org first.
Just click the Amazon logo on the right side of the page.
That way the show will get a kickback from Amazon's end of the sale.
It won't cost you an extra cent.
It's not just books.
Amazon dot com sells just about everything in the world except cars, I think.
So whatever you need, they've got it.
Just click the Amazon logo on the right side of the page at Scott Horton dot org or go to Scott Horton dot org slash Amazon.