12/02/14 – Patrick L. Smith – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
Our next guest is Patrick L. Smith.
He's been writing for Salon.com for a little while here.
He's the author of the book Time No Longer, Americans After the American Century.
He was international, the International Herald Tribune's bureau chief in Hong Kong and then Tokyo from 1985 to 1992.
Isn't that interesting?
He also wrote Letter from Tokyo for The New Yorker.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Patrick?
I'm well, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Very happy to have you here.
I've been running your articles in the viewpoints at Antiwar.com for, I don't know, at least a few months now.
Oh, splendid.
Quite a few, yeah.
Some very interesting work that you've done here.
I want to focus at least at first here on one from just a couple articles ago.
What really happened in Beijing?
Putin, Obama, Xi and a backstory the media won't tell you.
And specifically, if it's all right with you, I'd like to ask you about the meeting that you talk about where John Kerry went to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, presumably to talk about a lying against the Islamic State.
You say there was a lot more going on there and then I'll let you run from there if you'd like.
OK, well, we need to start with this, Scott.
We live in a world where it is not possible to assume we are told all things.
And increasingly, it's not possible to assume we're told much.
OK, there are certain things we know and there are many other things.
It's necessary to assume we don't.
OK, so this is our starting point.
I started hearing from sources in commodity markets in mid-September.
I wasn't I wasn't looking for this at all.
It came to me suggesting that, as they put it, some very big hands were moving oil into the global supply and it appears to have been related to Kerry's unscheduled and plus minus uncovered visit to Jeddah.
Indeed, half of it was almost certainly the Islamic State matter.
The other half appears to have been related to the sanctions against Russia.
The Americans have been very restless with these sanctions.
The Europeans, it is a very big divide between the Europeans and the Americans.
The Europeans are not all that keen on them.
They they to their discredit, in my view, they follow along.
And they shouldn't.
And the Americans are very impatient to do yet more, more, more.
And so Kerry's message, according to my sources, and again, they're very well placed in in the markets, was, look, you Saudis can produce a barrel of oil for 30 odd dollars a barrel.
But I say 30 dollars by way of how it is accounted in the national budget.
OK, and be OK.
The Russians need one hundred and five dollars.
We want your help.
Raise productions and drop prices in the weeks following.
That is exactly what happened.
I question these sources quite closely.
They were pretty confident of what they were saying.
And that's what you read.
So I think everybody in America is grateful right now.
Hey, the price of gas is going down.
Perfectly good, man.
I live in rural Connecticut.
I have to drive 16 miles to get a loaf of bread.
Right.
Fine.
But it's nice that you got to wonder.
Yeah, there's yeah, there's a whole real world out there.
Yeah.
It's the beginning of winter.
There are production outages here and there and everywhere.
Libya, Iraq, Syria and so on.
Venezuela.
Why?
Where's the supply demand equation here?
Saudi's partners in OPEC are shrieking about these prices.
And Riyadh turns around and and raises production.
Honestly, I rely on my sources.
I can offer your listeners this much.
Certainly, I was a correspondent overseas 30 years.
I know how to listen to a source.
They can take that or leave that on on the basis of of their views of my credibility.
Fine.
But something is going on in those markets.
Well, tell me that is unexplained.
And I offered an explanation.
Sure.
Now, and it makes perfect sense to, in fact, I don't have any good footnotes for this.
You may be able to testify to the question of whether this was a Ronald Reagan strategy against the Soviet Union back in the early 1980s to work with the Saudis to help drive down the price of oil.
And, you know, I know from talking with Greg Palast over the years that the Saudis have talked openly and specifically about how, you know, they want to make the money as much as they can.
They're perfectly happy to drive the price way down in order to bankrupt their competition.
Like, for example, the tar sands and all that, which I don't know if they need one hundred and five, but they need something much higher than 30 to break even.
And so I wonder, what does Houston think of this?
What does Canada think of this?
What is domestic?
What is Texas oil think of this policy of driving the price down so low just to hurt Russia?
I I I can't speak for that, OK?
I think the point worth looking at here is that policy in Washington is very often conducted certainly on on an ad hoc basis, as we say, they're making it up as they go along.
I think the Obama people are are I've spoken to ambassadors who say this is so they it's improvisation.
And what you're seeing here are destructive side effects.
Certainly, I I've heard the same things you have.
The the new economy out in North Dakota is not going to make sense at certain price levels.
Right.
But these are side effects not considered.
Right.
That's, I think, what we can go home with on this point.
I cannot speak for what they're saying.
I haven't looked into it.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, it certainly is a mess.
If there's a grand design to it, whoever it is needs to be replaced in charge of this, this disaster unfolding now.
So when you think about grand design, Scott, when you speak about grand design, be careful not to give too much credit.
OK, well, I was just about to bring up Henry Kissinger.
You know, if there's anybody who interesting who pretends to know what he's doing around here, it's this old war criminal.
And he he was reduced to writing an op ed saying, hey, everybody, stop believing.
Oh, no, I guess it was a it was an interview with the German paper.
He said basically seemed to be confronting a real Washington group think that they believe their own hype about what Putin is doing in Ukraine, rather than admitting, at least to themselves, that they know that they're lying, that they did a coup, that they provoked him into taking Crimea back.
But that the rest of all this stuff about how he's Hitler on the march to to recreate the the the Stalinist Soviet Union or whatever it is, is a bunch of smoke to cover for the bad reaction to their blundering policy.
But apparently Kissinger feels that he needs to address them directly and tell them that, you know, your lie is wrong.
You know, Scott, I can say in reply, I saw the Kissinger piece.
It was in Gershpiegel.
We have, in addition, a piece in the September-October edition of Foreign Affairs that radical rag from East 68th Street and Park Avenue, Council on Foreign Relations, saying why the West is at fault in Ukraine.
In response to this point, I will say this.
It's been a lonely year writing columns, insisting on on the points you made.
But I will take two cents worth of credit on the dollar for sticking with it.
Yeah, yeah.
No, you've been really good on the issue.
Now, I'm sorry I got to interrupt you here because we have to take this break, Patrick, but it will hang tight with us on hold here.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Patrick L. Smith.
He's writing for Salon dot com.
A lot of great stuff, at least over this past year that I can vouch for on Ukraine and other issues.
And we'll be right back.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
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All right, guys, welcome back.
I'm just reading the right web profile of the new supposedly appointed to be appointed secretary of defense.
And here he is running around with the OSP boys writing about Iran's nuclear program with Michael Rubin for crying out loud.
All right.
Well, anyway, what do you expect?
All right.
Talking with Patrick L. Smith.
He's right now for Salon dot com.
A lot of great articles there.
This one is what really happened in Beijing.
Putin, Obama, Xi and the backstory the media won't tell you.
And we're not so much about Xi as much as the king of Saudi Arabia and the oil price wars here.
So how bad is this really hurting Russia so far?
You know, severely.
The Russian ruble in the last couple of days to take the most recent news is that I don't know, something like an eight year low.
It's a it's it's bad.
It's the markets are bad.
There is what we call silent sanctions.
The European and American banks have more or less uniformly just stopped extending credit.
This very important step.
This these these sanctions are I don't know whether crippling is is too strong a word, but it's getting quite severe.
My thought on this is you can take down an economy the size of, let's say, Thailand and the consequences may be what they will.
Russia's economy is one of the largest in the world to to be tinkering with it, with oil price manipulations and sanctions of this type.
The Europeans know better.
But Washington is pushing the envelope.
I think it's very irresponsible, very irresponsible.
And and nobody will get away with this.
Nobody will come out of this.
Well, yeah, well, it seems like that's why what kind of drove Kissinger to write this.
The closest thing we've got to a Kissinger now is the Kagan's, and they're perfectly willing to just march us into disaster after disaster here where they can't even admit that.
OK, they kind of picked one fight a little too many.
One regime changed too many.
Ray McGovern called it.
They have to just continue doubling down and picking a fight.
Kissinger said, you know, if we really, really recreate a new Cold War here, it would be the ultimate tragedy.
Here's finally someone talking like a grown up up there.
And it's Kissinger.
I mean, the guy with the bloodiest hands in the room.
I know.
Really remarkable.
As as as as an op ed columnist in The Post put it the other day, when Henry Kissinger is a dissident, you know you're in trouble.
My take on this, Scott, is as as the years go by and another order emerges, which is the real news in Beijing.
What happened in Beijing was the consolidation of a strategic partnership between Russia and China, the two largest non-Western powers in the world.
That's what's going on.
And as this process, it's inevitable.
In my view, it's the turning of history's wheel, as I put it.
As this proceeds, I think Washington, the people who set policy and we have nothing to say about that, are becoming ever more desperate to deny the realities.
And you get and we all know decisions made in desperation never work out well.
That's what we're looking at.
And that's what we're stuck with.
Yeah.
Well, and I remember Chalmers Johnson 10 years ago warning about this and how all we can really do is help push the European capitals and, you know, particularly Berlin and Paris into the same axis with the Russians and the Chinese.
If we keep it up, the Sino-Soviet split or whatever, the Russian-Chinese split, that's going to heal.
You're going to push the Europeans into saying, forget the Americans.
They're more trouble than they're worth at this point.
Exactly.
You know, you've got to go back to the basic.
Atmosphere during the Cold War decades, of course, we Americans were never told of this, but it's there.
The Europeans were never that keen on the Cold War.
You do understand that and your listeners should.
They were, as the years went by, ever more reluctant to participate.
They thought it was overdone.
They were not under any illusions.
I don't want to suggest otherwise.
But the Germans have their Ostpolitik, as it is called.
They were, as they have emerged in the post-Berlin Wall phase, they're into compromise and diplomacy.
They are not into confrontation.
And what we're seeing now is the logical consequence of things that go back decades.
One of the unnoted side effects of this Ukraine, and I will call it aggression, the popular term to describe Moscow's activities.
I'm sorry, the aggression was in the other way, in the other direction.
One of the consequences of this is a rift, a widening of a subtle rift between the European capitals and Washington that has been there for decades.
Well, the Bush crew, they were, you know, happy to go ahead and mock them and say, you know, what are you going to do?
And all that kind of thing.
Now it's a little too late, it looks like, which is, you know, damage to the empire.
I'm fine with, but I'd hate to see us all have to go out in some horrible war or even a cold war, a real cold war, which, you know, compare it, you know, if we look at the last one as any lesson, included a lot of dead people, even if it was only in proxy wars and not a real thermonuclear exchange between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.
A hell of a lot of people still died.
Scott, I'll tell you one reason why this conversation is important.
One of the things Henry learned during the Vietnam era is that you cannot, I don't know how old you are, but this is certainly extremely real to me, you cannot conduct any foreign policy, but notably a destructive one, without a domestic consensus, it'll ruin you.
And for us to be conversing this way, for your listeners to be thinking these things over, it's extremely important.
It'll make a difference.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, my current attention, of course, is mostly on Iraq War III now, which I was kind of musing yesterday about how right now it feels like November, December 2002 to me.
There's a gigantic American invasion of Iraq that's going to happen next year, and we're sleepwalking right toward it, like, don't worry, Paul Wolfowitz is going to take care of it for us or something right now.
I know.
How well one remembers that winter of 2003, January, February, March, when Judy Miller at the Times and all the people who were whispering in her ear were preparing us for an invasion.
It starts to reek, doesn't it?
The Islamic State is nobody's gift to anybody, but what we are doing over there, you know this expression of Einstein's fairly famous, we cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.
And this is lesson number one in the Middle East.
More of the same produces more of the same.
What's so complicated to grasp in that, huh?
Right.
Well, and you know, as insane as Bush's policy was, it had some kind of coherence to it in its horribleness.
But when you have a massive, really Bush-created sectarian civil war across the entire region, and you have America backing the Shiite side in Iraq still, the Iranian side, and backing the Saudi-Sunni side in Syria still, in the middle of this thing, after the caliphate has been declared, and that's the part I just can't understand.
I know the Saudis and the Israelis hate Assad and want America to hate Assad and get rid of him, but the military and the CIA and the National Security Council, they know that Assad helped Bill Clinton and George W. Bush kill jihadists, you know, their whole times in power, and that it's completely crazy and counterproductive to be trying to undermine his power when he's fighting the Islamic State, not in 2013, but in 2014, after Baghdadi has declared himself the caliph Ibrahim and a whole new state.
Scott, I go to what I call the Tito thesis, Marshal Tito, okay?
I don't want to insult Tito by comparing him to Saddam Hussein or indeed Assad.
It does take some doing to make Saddam Hussein look good.
But like Tito, who is far more a person than these two, you have a person who understands conflicting interests, ethnic groups, etc.
And he manages to hold the sovereignty together by apportioning duties and rewards properly so there is some sort of a balance.
The rest is secondary, right?
Not to be dismissed, but the rest is secondary.
Again, it takes some doing to make Saddam Hussein look good.
But in hindsight, if you apply my Marshal Tito thesis, he had that country together, right?
And this is what his regime was about, avoiding this, right?
Was it pretty to look at?
I rather doubt it, I've never covered Iraq.
Assad, Syria, same.
But Assad, the problem we have with Assad is, he's our logical ally at this point, but we've so demonized him that it would be too embarrassing to do the logical thing.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, for me, the only logical thing is to abolish the Pentagon and the entire national security state and just forget it.
But at least it would make sense if, okay, look, we've been fighting for the Ayatollah since 2003 and we're going to continue doing that until they help us kill Al-Qaeda dead.
But that would be evil and counterproductive ultimately, but at least it would make sense as far as stated ends and attempted means.
But this whole thing where we're still working against Assad, even at this point, and all the criticism of the President, among all the national security wonks I follow on Twitter, is he just doesn't get it that he's got to get rid of Assad in order to fight the Islamic State.
And they never really explain themselves, because it doesn't make any sense, but boy, do they all agree about it.
Right.
Go into the history books.
There was nothing wrong with Assad.
Catch me on the date.
There was nothing wrong with Assad until he refused to cooperate in deposing Saddam Hussein.
Okay.
Assad was fine until then.
Go back to those clips.
Well, you know, David Wumser and them were writing about getting rid of him in the 1990s because he backs Hezbollah and that's what they're most worried about Israel.
But, you know, as far as, well, compared to Hezbollah or compared to the Islamic State or the Al-Nusra Front, the Israelis could never hope for a friendlier leader than Assad for Syria.
Yeah.
He hadn't made a peep about the Golan Heights this whole time, as far as I've ever heard.
No, he hasn't.
Anyway.
No, no.
I'm sorry, I've already actually kept you over time by a couple of minutes here, but I didn't want to interrupt.
But I'll let you go now, and I'll thank you for coming on the show.
You're welcome.
It's been a pleasure to be with you.
All right, y'all.
That is Patrick L. Smith.
And this is Time No Longer, Americans After the American Century.
That's you and me.
Yeah.
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