12/18/13 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott.
It's the show.
Next up is our friend Sheldon Richman, vice president of The Future of Freedom Foundation and editor of their journal, The Future of Freedom, which makes him editor of me from time to time.
Welcome back.
How are you doing, Sheldon?
I'm doing fine.
How are you doing, Scott?
I'm doing good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
We got this article at fff.org.
Does Obama want an agreement with Iran or not?
And so my first question to you on the show today, sir, is does Obama want an agreement with Iran or not?
Well, I asked you first.
I don't know.
I keep wondering that myself.
What is this guy doing?
Well, that's what I asked in the article.
I laid out the conflicting signals we get.
And then I leave it up to the reader to decide, because I sure don't know.
We get an interim agreement, which he brags about and seems to defend, under which the Iranians are bending over backwards to demonstrate to the world that they're not building a nuclear bomb.
Of course, that just confirms what the American and Israeli intelligence have been saying for years.
That they're willing to, you know, go that extra mile to demonstrate it by allowing daily intrusive inspections and by rendering their stockpile of 20 percent uranium-rich uranium into a form that can't be used to build bombs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And in return, getting, you know, the most modest relief, it hardly even deserves to be called relief, from the sanctions.
And then on the other hand, Obama, then he tells the Senate, cool it with the new sanctions, because McCain and those guys have been talking about it.
So that seemed like a good sign, telling the Senate to shut up.
But then on the other hand, he goes to the Brookings Institution, the Saban Center, the Saban Center, the same place where Netanyahu appeared, and before a very pro-Israeli audience tells him, well, I think there's only a 50-50 chance that the interim agreement will lead to a permanent comprehensive agreement.
Well, that seems sort of pessimistic, given what he's done.
And then, you know, just before telling the Senate to cool it on sanctions, he himself imposed sanctions on about a dozen companies that do business with Iran.
So it's not directly on Iran, it's on companies that do business with Iran.
And that nearly blew up the whole negotiation, because, you know, the foreign minister, he left at one point.
Luckily, he said, okay, we'll keep going.
But this can't be a good development.
So does Obama know what he wants?
Right.
Yeah, it's really something else.
I mean, first of all, one thing that you left out there was before the Saban Center speech, which I have another possible spin on that, but before that, I mean, he was facing some real heat from the Israelis, from Benjamin Netanyahu, who's just denouncing the thing up and down, and, you know, sending his people here to get the Senate, you know, I mean, outright lobbying the Senate to oppose the president.
And so Obama and Kerry had to, you know, be pretty, you know, tough that out anyway, to get through that, face that down.
And then again, like you're saying, that's just one more reason why it's such a buildup to then be kind of for nothing, it sounds like.
Yeah, what I point out in the article, just to tie in with what you're now saying, the Obama administration is in continuous consultation with Israeli officials.
Right.
They're not a party.
They're not a part of the P5-plus-1, and that's the Security Council in Germany, the permanent members of the Security Council in Germany.
Israel is a part of that.
And yet, they might as well be.
The way things are going, they're being continuously consulted with.
Susan Rice was doing this, Kerry has done it, Obama himself has done it.
And so it's enough to make you very suspicious that they're putting on a charade for us.
Now, France, I see a headline in the Wall Street Journal that just news, breaking news that France is now saying, well, we don't think this is ever going to lead to a permanent thing.
They say that Iran, we don't really think Iran is ever going to really want to give up its nuclear stuff.
So France, which has, of course, pending contracts with both Saudi Arabia and Israel, defense-related and military-related contracts, has never been enthusiastic about this.
And I don't like the handwriting I'm seeing on the wall.
Yeah, I mean, that's part of the danger of having the two-step process, is if you get the one step, you just make it easy to break the ice and get something signed.
That makes sense.
But man, now you've got six months for the bad guys to rally their forces against any final deal.
And if they're able to, as you're implying there, successfully define the final deal has to mean no centrifuges spinning at all, no nuclear material anywhere, well then, no, they're not going to get that.
That's exactly what they're not going to get.
And they're deliberately sabotaging it in the first place, if that's what the French are going to try to insist on, as you said, on behalf of the Israelis.
Yeah, look, we know that they're not going to prostrate themselves to the U.S.
Given the history, you know, no state would want to do that.
But given the history of the Iran-American relations, going back to 1953, of course they're not going to do that.
That would only embolden the hardliners and hurt the reasonable guys, like Rouhani and his foreign minister.
And is that what Obama's trying to promote here?
I mean, it makes me very suspicious that he doesn't want this to work out.
He wants it to look like he did his best, but he's more catering to Israel and Israel supporters, which are, you know, which are very powerful, of course.
Well and then the thing about the sanctions, too, well, I was going to say one spin on the Sabin Center thing that I saw, it may have been MJ Rosenberg saying that, you know, the fact that he has to go to the Sabin Center and allay their concerns, in a way, I mean, you're right, he did, you know, that whole 50-50 thing sounds pretty, throwing cold water on the idea and all of that, in a way, but at the same time, who else does he have to go convince about this, other than those who put the interests of a foreign country first?
There are no other interest groups opposed to this deal but them, and so in a way he's sort of calling them out just by having to go there and say, listen everybody, it's going to be all right, you know?
But I don't know, I mean, maybe it's a little bit of both there.
Perhaps it's part of a show, I mean, look, obviously, I don't know, I don't have sources inside the administration, I'd be very interested to hear what some of your Iran experts will be saying about this.
I hope someone has a more positive spin about it, but I find it hard to put a positive spin on it.
You know, when you see the remarks from David Cohen, who's the sanctions czar at the Treasury Department, when they imposed these new restrictions on the trading partners, he said, look, Iran is off-limits.
We did this to show you that even though we're doing negotiations, we are committed to a severe sanctions regime.
Come on, they're talking out of two sides of their mouth.
Well, you know, when Obama put those new sanctions on, I guess convinced the Senate not to pass new ones, but then went ahead and implemented tighter restrictions under the existing sanctions, which is sort of the same thing, violated the spirit of the deal, as the Russians put it, I think it was kind of, you know, pretty, we got lucky so far, I guess, I mean to say that the politics in Iran are such, it's sort of, I guess, Rouhani's honeymoon, first hundred days kind of thing going on over there for a little while longer, maybe, but the fact that they, you know, temporarily broke off the lower level technical talks on the implementation of the first part of the deal for a few days there is an indication that they might not be able to, you know, be the bigger man and ignore it and press on with the negotiations regardless if the Americans and or the French, you know, come up with another couple of these and try to screw up the deal at some point, they're going to have too much heat attacking them from their right back at home, you know, about how much face they're losing because of course that's what counts so much to these guys.
Yeah, I'm ominously reminded of what happened in the 90s when the U.S. and the U.N. were conducting inspections in Iraq and the Clinton administration made it clear that the sanctions won't be lifted merely by a demonstration that Iraq doesn't have weapons of mass destruction.
In other words, it's only regime change that will lead to the end of sanctions and Saddam heard that loud and clear, which made I think, you know, the invasion by Bush later on, not too many years later, you know, more or less inevitable.
I mean, once you tell some people, now I'm not putting Rouhani in Saddam's category, Saddam was a ruthless dictator, but once you tell people, look, it doesn't matter what you're going to do, what you do, the sanctions are remaining or are going to get worse, things are going to happen.
That doesn't engender cooperation.
Right, and you know, here's the thing too, it's funny, I saw Stephen Walt pointing out the irony that all the people that think that Iran's nuclear program is not a big deal think that this deal is a really big deal.
It's just because we're so desperate to have this fake, stupid issue finally put to bed.
And you know, I mean, I guess for me, it's, you know, without the nuclear issue, then all they can cry about is, you know, Hamas and Hezbollah, whatever, which doesn't amount to much.
It's, you know, that N word, nuclear, scary, mushroom cloud, and all that, that shuts down all discussion and, and, you know, makes it possible for people to really scaremonger us into fresh conflicts, or at least out of peaceful resolutions to outstanding issues and whatever else.
I agree.
And I have no doubt that Netanyahu knows that full well.
He'd much rather have Iran looking like a menace with possible nuclear weapons than have the world concentrate on Hamas, namely Gaza, and Hezbollah, namely Lebanon.
The reason there's Hezbollah is because of repeated invasions and occupation of southern Lebanon by Israel.
The reason there's Hamas, for one thing, Israel helped to encourage the growth of Hamas, as a way of taking away support from the secular PLO.
So they created this mortal danger.
And they don't want concentration on how the people, people, you know, they don't want the world concentrating on how the Palestinians in Gaza are being treated, much less the West Bank and inside Israel itself.
Yeah, of course, they could hardly portray Hezbollah as any kind of threat of all, at all, if they didn't just, you know, equate Hezbollah with the government of Syria and the government of Iran and, and, you know, pretend it's just a projection of Tehran's power and all that kind of thing, which isn't really true, but...
No, it's ridiculous.
First of all, no, they have their own local issues.
The government of Lebanon, you know, going back to the 80s, could do nothing for the people in southern Lebanon and protect them from the Israelis.
The Israelis violate their airspace all the time.
People live there with sonic booms going off all the time because of Israeli jets.
They don't know what's going to happen next.
Hezbollah arose to protect the people of southern Lebanon, to also provide various kinds of social services.
Hezbollah is in the government.
It's a party, basically.
So to just condemn it, I'm not saying it never, you know, committed any kind of violence that should be condemned, but to just portray them as, quote, a terrorist organization is propaganda, just propaganda coming from Israel and the Israel supporters in the United States.
Yeah, and that much less believable if we're friends with Iran again.
That's right.
I forget who wrote this, but there was a very good analysis that I think summed up the Israeli, or at least, you know, certainly Netanyahu's attitude.
He wants two kinds of countries in the Middle East, I mean, not counting Israel.
He either wants Saudi Arabia-type countries, which are totally, you know, beholden to the United States and pretty much, you know, rely on the U.S., and countries that are beyond the pale, like Iran has been, you know, that the U.S. can't even talk to or touch.
And his real fear is Iran will become a non-aligned but friendly country with the United States.
Just friendly because of trade and tourism and exchanges, but not, you know, not a client of the U.S.
He wants two kinds, like I said, pariahs and clients, U.S. clients, which means effectively an Israeli client.
And they're afraid that Iran will break that mold and stick out its own position.
Right.
Yeah, you know, that reminds me of when John McCain said, hey, you know, Hamas won the election in 2006.
They're the government of the Gaza Strip now, so you got to talk to them.
And then somebody notified him that he wasn't supposed to say that, and he had to take it back real bad.
Yeah.
Hamas has done some things which also should be condemned.
But if you stack up the victims of Hamas versus the victims, the Palestinian victims of Israel, there's no contest.
And it's very rarely pointed out, or almost never, that when Hamas fires rockets, which again, I don't defend, but when it fires rockets at villages, those were villages that were once inhabited by Palestinians, going back to pre-'48, people who were driven out of those villages and herded into Gaza.
So that gives a little context that we shouldn't forget.
Yeah.
Meanwhile, they have drones and F-16s bombing them whenever they feel like it all the time.
As Israelis always call attack, defense, but that doesn't make it so.
Right.
But yeah, I mean, in fact, you know, before Hamas, the reason there was an election in 06 is because the Republicans agreed with, I guess, Sharon then, in 05, that we got to hold elections because the Israelis can't be expected to negotiate with Arafat when he's not democratically elected.
He has no legitimacy whatsoever.
So he has to stand for election first.
And then he lost the election.
And then, even then, they had to form a coalition government with Fatah, Hamas did, in the Gaza Strip, which they just canceled the results in the West Bank.
But in the Gaza Strip, they had to form a coalition government.
But then Elliott Abrams and Hosni Mubarak went and smuggled them a bunch of weapons, Fatah, to try to beat Hamas.
But Hamas just got the guns and beat them and kicked them out.
And so it's ruled the Strip ever since and under the terrible siege ever since.
But that's where it all came from, was you're beyond the pale.
We don't have to deal with you.
Exactly.
That's right.
Even though, you know, Hamas leaders have distanced themselves from their original charter and there have been conciliatory statements over the years.
But then what happens?
A Hamas leader gets assassinated by the Israelis, usually around the time, like a day after they've made some conciliatory statement.
He goes, oh, we can't have Hamas leaders saying anything conciliatory.
We've got to get rid of that guy.
They want the extremists.
It's funny that the hardliners on both sides have a common interest.
If you look at Iran or Hamas or Hezbollah, the hardest liners, you know, and I don't even like that word, but, you know, the people that are against any kind of, you know, rapprochement on both sides, I think, you know, they have a common interest in bolstering each other.
Well, now, so back to this president guy that we're stuck with here.
The Obama is his name, I think.
Peace Prize winner.
Peace Prize.
He won the Peace Prize.
Yeah, something or other like that.
So he's got this thing.
OK, so the old policies seem to be, you know, the Cheney policy would have been we try to negotiate with these guys and they're, you know, suicidal and crazy and religious and we can't deal with them.
And so we have to bomb them.
That's the only option we've got left.
Now, it hadn't seemed to me that, you know, one, that Obama was really trying to negotiate a permanent solution to this thing.
You look at him deliberately flubbing it in 09 and 010 and then just adding more sanctions since then and all of that.
But at the same time, it seemed to me like he was just trying to run out the clock.
He wasn't necessarily trying to build up that excuse that, hey, we try to deal with him.
So now we're going to have to go ahead and bomb them.
But then again, he's he he kind of keeps saying that, right, that this is the path to war.
If the Republicans pass more sanctions and screw up these negotiations, these negotiations are the only thing between us and war now.
So he maybe he does mean what do you think?
Do you think that this is really just still the Cheney policy of we've got to, you know, check off all the boxes on the list so we can pretend that we tried everything and had to resort to force?
Yeah, they got a little bit there.
Maybe they don't really know what they're doing.
I mean, we always assume they kind of know what they're doing with some grand strategy.
But but why the you know, why these sanctions on the on the dozen companies?
Doesn't that just tip their hand?
How can they say we really tried everything when some of them say, well, wait a second, you got an interim agreement, which you praise everyone saying, look, cooperate.
And the first thing you do is impose sanctions, intensify the sanctions.
So I don't maybe they don't know what they're doing.
I mean, maybe they're just totally incompetent.
I used to think Obama was probably a pretty bright guy.
You know, in recent years, I've come to doubt that very seriously.
And you'd be wrong and bright, but I think he's wrong and not so bright.
I mean, they're just Democrats.
I don't expect that much of them, really, even if they mean well, you know.
All right.
Well, I think we're getting the worst.
I don't I don't think they're very bright and they don't mean well.
So let me ask you this, then we talked about the situation in Palestine there a bit.
Have you seen just Romano's article about the boycott, the boycott and divestment movement?
Well, thanks to you, I became aware of it.
And so I only read the first couple of paragraphs.
I see where he's going.
I'm very eager to read Max Blumenthal's book.
I have not read yet.
I have it and looked at the first chapter, but I have to read to say more about it.
Yeah, it's a hell of a thing.
I keep getting distracted.
I need to finish that thing.
I'm about a third of the way through it or something like that.
It's a nightmare, though.
And honestly, you know what it is?
It's dissuading me.
It's too much information.
This is something that Romano refers to in his article that just keeping track of the interrelationships of the different countries themselves is a big enough chore without having to get that far into the inner workings of somebody else's entire society where I've never even been there or whatever like this.
And it's all so horrible that it's really a bummer, man, reading that book.
It's worth it.
It's worth the education.
I'd recommend it to anyone.
And I really need to get it finished and interview Max all about it because I already got a ton of questions I want to ask him.
But it's really bad.
You know, it's like, I guess the closest approximation that, you know, that I'm familiar with would be the Jim Crow South from just the generation before me, you know.
So he's focusing, I take it, both on Israel inside the Green Line and the and I don't like to call them the Occupied Territories.
I think even at the most of the rest of occupied Palestine.
Well, you know, I'm actually not that far so far, it's all still within Israel proper, although I do know that he spent a lot of time in Ramallah at some point.
In fact, I guess there's some parts where he's talking about being in Ramallah.
Am I right about that?
Or maybe I'm just thinking of other things he's written.
Anyway, I don't think I know the answer to that so far, Sheldon.
OK, well, I look forward to it.
Yeah, but there's a lot of history.
You know, already I read about, you know, Cast Lead and the Mavi Mamara and a lot of, you know, the history of Jaffa and the history of, you know, some of the different stuff that took place during the Nakba and the different villages and whatever.
It's an interesting book.
It's interesting to be the most I know about Israel, which will make a lot of people mad, I guess, because...
Well, the problem is not enough people are going to read it, and people who need to read it won't read it.
And, you know, look, I saw a discussion on Facebook...
It's in its second printing now.
Well, that's a good sign.
You know, I saw a discussion on Facebook just the other day where people who were condemning the people who were promoting the boycott of Israel, and, you know, there are criticisms you can make of a general boycott.
Justin, I know, discussed that in the beginning of his article.
But that aside, the people in the Facebook thread were saying the only possible reason for there being a boycott of Israel over the Palestinians when there's so much other, you know, so much worse human rights abuses going on in the world, there could only be one thing, anti-Semitism.
And, you know, as they put it, anti-capitalism, as if Israel had a free market, which it doesn't.
They couldn't think of any other reason for people being mad at Israel except for racism, you know, anti-Semitism, and being against the free market.
That's ridiculous.
Do they really believe that?
It's absurd.
There's lots of other reasons.
Yeah, well...
Those are not the main reasons.
I think a lot of them really do believe that, because it's just a lot less trouble than having to think much further about it.
But, you know, as Justin puts it in his article, well, what other place in the world actually has this kind of law of the land, where you have to be this ethnicity to have a house, or you have to be this ethnicity to be able to do this or that or the other thing, or never mind the occupied territories, you know?
That's right.
And here's a telling thing, and it's an old story, but most people don't know about it.
There's no such thing as Israeli nationality, right?
If you're a citizen of Israel, that doesn't make you an Israeli national.
Under nationality, it says Jew or Arab or perhaps other.
There are other categories, but...
So a Jewish citizen of Israel, isn't that person's nationality a Jew?
And an Arab citizen of Israel, you know, Israel likes to talk about how, oh, no, our Palestinian citizens have the right to vote and blah, blah, blah.
But they're not even listed as Israeli nationals.
They're listed as Arab under nationality.
And it is just plain old white supremacy, colonialism.
And I know that makes everybody mad to call some Jews white supremacists.
But, I mean, really, they're Europeans, and they are, you know, refugees.
They're not, you know, an imperial power.
You know, a colony of an imperial power.
They're their own colony or whatever.
That's right.
I agree.
I agree with Gilad Otzman on this.
It's not right to call it, to use the language, colonialism, because there's no mother country, like you just said.
There's no mother country.
It's not classic colonialism.
It's simply aggression and occupation.
And it's not really apartheid, although it takes the form of apartheid.
But the difference with South African apartheid was the South African whites, or the Afrikaners, wanted to exploit the black majority.
The Israelis don't want to exploit the Palestinians.
They want them out.
They just haven't figured out a way to do it yet, you know, that will minimize the flack.
They don't want to keep them there to do the dirty, you know, the grunt work, the menial work.
They want them gone.
That's different from apartheid.
Yeah.
Although, you know, the racism, it's funny.
I think because Jews typically in history are an oppressed minority of their own, and people are so hesitant to look at it as a white supremacy, you know, Ashkenazi over darker skinned people kind of an issue.
It seems to me it really obscures the fact that that's really a lot of what's going on here.
If you just put the shoe on the other foot, and it was the Arabs doing any of these things to, quote unquote, the Jews, it would be the biggest deal in the whole wide world.
Bulldozers coming and tearing down their homes and saying, oh, yeah, no, because you're a Jew.
We get to bulldoze your home and build our home there instead.
It would be the biggest deal in the whole world.
But then when Jews do it to Arabs, meh, well, you know, what are you going to do?
That's how it is.
Look, they're kicking out 40,000 Bedouins.
Luckily, that got shelved.
But when that was a live option and still may come back.
The proverb plan, I saw lots of comments about it.
That's no big deal.
That's no big deal.
So what?
So what?
Yeah.
And just like people say, look, Jordan is the real Palestinian country.
So what's wrong with picking up the Palestinians and dropping them in Jordan?
Well, that's a little like saying, let's pick up New Yorkers and drop them in New Jersey.
Same kind of people.
Yeah, or taking all of the Jews in Israel and putting them in Germany.
Or somewhere in Eastern Europe where their families are.
Well, Israelis are moving to Germany freely.
Yeah.
Oh, we talked about that on the show before as well, because who wants to live in a fascist dictatorship?
Thanks, Sheldon.
Appreciate it.
Anytime, Scott.
I was going to talk to you.
That's Sheldon Richman, everybody.
FFF.org.
He's vice president there.
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