01/25/13 – John Glaser – The Scott Horton Show

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For Pacifica Radio, January 25, 2013, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Thanks for tuning in, y'all.
It is Anti-War Radio here every Friday from 6.30 to 7 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
Now this week has been a really good week for interviews on my other radio show.
I talked with Yosef Butt and Mohammed Sahimi about Iran, Philip Giraldi on Christian Zionism, Max Blumenthal on the results of the Israeli elections, Eric Margulies and Patrick Coburn both on the war in Mali, and Chris Woods on the drone war, among others.
You can find the archives of all those at scotthorton.org.
Tonight's interview was recorded earlier this afternoon with John Glaser, editor of antiwar.com.
All right.
Welcome to the show, John.
How are you doing?
Very good, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
That's good.
Very happy to have you here.
Especially, you know, to wrap up the week of Friday night foreign policy show.
There's so much going on this week.
I turn to you because you're good on so many different things.
Let's start with the war in Mali.
That's really the biggest deal of all.
How much American involvement is going on with this French invasion, for starters here?
Well, essentially what we know is that the U.S. Air Force has been bringing in French troops and equipment and vehicles so that the French can, you know, properly occupy and militarily intervene in Mali.
That's the extent of it except, you know, U.S. officials like, for example, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has hinted that certain other things might be going on.
He says, you know, he has vague references to intelligence sharing or, you know, the fact that they won't comment on whether or not our CIA is in there and these types of things.
So our involvement is undoubtedly bigger and more expensive than is on the lips of U.S. officials in Washington.
But the extent of it mostly within the public is flights through the Air Force, helping the French just logistically in their military intervention.
And now, so I don't want to take him out of context.
Set the context straight for me.
When Leon Panetta said, hey, we're committed to this Mali thing, was he saying we're committed to escalation and more involvement here?
Or he was just justifying what he's already done?
Well, it's tough to say.
You know, one thing he did say was that the way that the United States has so far helped the French in their military intervention in yet another Muslim country, he said that this could be a model for future interventions.
I think what he meant by that was was the old, you know, leading from behind a meme that came out of the Obama administration.
They wanted to be less obvious in their militarism than the Bush administration.
So they relied on things like drones.
So they didn't have to do conventional ground invasions.
And they relied on, for example, in the Libya intervention, you know, being there to back up NATO, who, you know, in other countries like France and Britain, took the lead in many respects.
So, you know, this this is sort of Panetta's framework for thinking about this.
But, you know, the proper context should be even broader.
You can't find a single person in the media, in the government, anywhere, that doesn't admit that what's going on in Mali right now, both the militants in the north that are trying to secede, the Islamists that are embedded with those people, and the military junta that's now trying to rule a country with French backing, no one will tell you that what's going on there would still be going on if not for the U.S.
-NATO intervention in Libya in 2011.
What's going on in Mali is a direct result from that.
Someone in the media, someone recently that we ran on Antiwar.com, called it the fastest blowback yet in the war on terror.
Someone else said, you know, this is becoming very, very typical for Washington to cite instances of, quote-unquote, terrorism, and then go bomb, and then fuel that terrorism, and then repeat the process.
It's a nice little recipe for how to get stuck in quagmires and prompt more blowback.
Well, and especially outrageous in this case, too, is it's not just a consequence of the war in Libya, where when Qaddafi lost, his arms went to these Tuareg rebels that, you know, they decided autonomy wasn't good enough.
Now they wanted to secede from the Union and took this giant escalation to war.
It's not just that.
It's that they actually fought the war for the Islamists against Qaddafi in the first place.
So the bad guys that they're fighting in Mali are the allies of the so-called good guys in Libya.
If I understand it right, correct me if I'm wrong, but this is the whole kind of weird undercurrent to the fake, pretend Benghazi scandal, where Hillary Clinton this week had to go and testify before the Senate and justify the real lousy security at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, when, of course, the scandal was she had convinced the president and took responsibility for that, for taking the lead on convincing him to wage this war in Libya for America's enemies, the Islamist radicals, in this case, actual veterans of al-Qaeda in Iraq, guys from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.
She established a consulate in the heart of enemy territory.
That's the scandal that no one will even talk about here.
And you know what?
It's as absurd as that is and as big of a scandal as it is, it happens to be not unprecedented.
We went through a similar situation in the 80s in Pakistan when we decided to fuel the mujahideen to oust the Soviets in their war against the Soviets in Afghanistan when the Soviets invaded.
We're repeating these types of policies.
Those mujahideen fighters, those so-called freedom fighters, later became the Taliban and other militant groups, and then the associated bin Laden groups, which eventually in the 1990s became al-Qaeda.
And we saw what that blowback brought on September 11th.
And you know what?
A lot of what's underlying this latest Mali intervention is warnings about, oh, Mali could become another stateless sort of failed state, and that's an opportunity for militants to have a safe haven.
But the fact is that this is a local issue.
This is a regional issue in Mali.
The militants in Mali have expressed precisely zero intention to attack the United States on U.S. soil.
They have expressed zero intention broader than Mali.
Their only intentions are to secede from the south and go on and impose their sharia law or whatever, and that's a terrible thing, but this is not an international security issue.
This is a regional security issue, and the U.S. has no hardcore interest in Mali, and we're not defending our own security because there is no security threat.
This is becoming a trend in Africa.
Ever since the U.S.
-Africa command was established in 2007, the United States has been involved in dozens and dozens of countries, propping up those governments, even though they're really terrible, propping up and training and aiding the militaries in those governments, even though they're really terrible.
Mali is just one of those scenarios.
We have others.
Take, for example, what has been going on in Somalia.
Al-Shabaab has no ability to strike the United States directly.
The group poses no direct threat to the security of the United States, but the inflated threats that are coming out of Washington are producing policies that exacerbate a localized regional problem into a global one.
It was only last year that the Washington Post reported, in the context of Al-Shabaab in Somalia, that certain administration officials in the Obama administration are concerned that, quote, a broader campaign could turn Al-Shabaab from a regional menace into an adversary determined to carry out attacks on U.S. soil.
We seem to be doing this again in Mali.
In fact, in her testimony, Hillary Clinton called the Somali operation a victory and gave credit to, quote, American military boots on the ground, she said.
Nobody called her on it.
We don't just have boots on the ground there, but there is some evidence, in fact, that JSOC, Joint Special Operations Command, has been in places like Mali, has been in places like Nigeria.
Boko Haram is another one of these groups that don't actually threaten the United States directly, but which Washington has been inflating as a necessary threat.
Patrick Meehan, he's the chairman of the U.S. Congressional Committee that drew up a report last year on Boko Haram saying that they were a serious threat, and then he was interviewed by someone on the Hill afterwards, and he said, I'm quoting him, while I recognize there is little evidence at this moment to suggest Boko Haram is planning attacks against the U.S., lack of evidence does not mean it cannot happen.
So that's the mindset that's coming out of Washington.
Everywhere that there could be a possible problem, the United States has to get involved.
You know, Mika Zenko, he's a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, recently commented on the situation in Mali.
He said, some things that happen on the other 94% of the Earth that isn't the United States have nothing to do with the U.S., nor require the U.S. response.
We don't get that coming out of Washington.
This point sounds just like Murray Rothbard talking about, oh, there's a border dispute in South Bumblestan, and what is America going to do about it?
It really doesn't matter.
We own the world, so we have to be involved in every single corner of it.
All right.
Well, and, of course, in this case, as you mentioned, they're doing this leading from behind multilateralism collective security thing, which just means getting the NATO allies in Europe, in Western Europe, to do more of the heavy lifting, and they seem to be perfectly willing to go along with it.
And I guess their populations don't mind nearly as much as when it was George Bush doing the exact same kind of thing.
But now David Cameron, the prime minister of Great Britain, said the other day that he sounded just like Tony Blair, just like George W. Bush or Dick Cheney.
Cheney's grim vision, that's what one newspaper called it, decades of war.
We are going to have to fight Islamists basically wherever there's sand on the ground.
We, we all, NATO, have to wage war there from now on.
Right.
And this is in the context of just a few days ago Barack Obama in his inaugural address beckoning the end of a decade of war.
It's really just starting.
This so-called war on terror that people on the left were so critical of the Bush administration because it had no traditional boundaries, state borders and so forth, no legal boundaries.
It spanned the globe.
It had no end in sight because there's no definition of when we can end a tactic.
And that's happening right through the Obama administration.
We can see it continue in a second term.
Right.
And as you said, they already have the conspiracy theory about all the different al-Qaeda could-be linked groups in Africa.
And, of course, when they run out of al-Qaeda and the Islamic Maghreb and Boko Haram and al-Shabaab, they'll just make up a couple of new ones and they get a whole giant helpless continent to conquer.
That's right.
All right.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's Anti-War Radio here on Pacifica, KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
I'm talking with John Glaser, editor of AntiWar.com.
All right.
Well, so let's move on to Iran for a moment.
You've got a great piece on the blog at AntiWar.com this week.
Why don't you take us through it?
Well, you know, the Obama administration's diplomacy with Iran over its nuclear program has really sort of halted.
It's basically in shambles.
There was an effort not so long ago, many months at the end of 2011, to have the P5-plus-1, which is the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany, to actually build some sort of an agenda to have with Iran where we could reach some sort of a diplomatic settlement.
But the United States has proven itself that it has no interest in any sort of diplomatic settlement.
On the one hand, you know, we've chosen this route of sanctions, which is extremely detrimental to Iranian society.
You know, the sanctions, as a renowned international relations theorist, Kenneth Waltz, in the recent foreign affairs piece, has argued, the sanctions should be dropped because they primarily harm ordinary Iranians with little purpose.
And indeed, Iranians are being harmed.
Unemployment continues to rise.
Inflation is increasingly out of control.
The import of vital medicines for severely sick Iranians are being blocked.
You know, this is putting millions of lives at risk.
When a country puts sanctions on another country, like the United States has been doing to Iran, what it does is try to shut down exports and imports.
They also try to target particular industries, like the banking industry or the oil industry, or certain firms that might have a connection to the Iranian state, and so on and so forth.
But economies are really complex things.
I mean, all they really are are collections of individual actions between millions of people.
And when that sort of complexity runs head to head with just, you know, blanket sanctions, which is economic warfare, essentially, trying to stop the Iranian economy in its tracks, you end up with problems.
So pharmaceutical companies can't get loans that are necessary in order to buy drugs that are overseas, because the United States has, of course, imposed sanctions on the banking industry in Iran.
So all these types of things, right, are happening on a large scale.
And, you know, the Iranians don't have that much cancer treatment for chemotherapy.
They don't produce that domestically, so it's very hard to get it in the country, and so on and so forth.
So, you know, we saw this, actually, with Iraq in the 1990s.
The United States imposed harsh sanctions.
This was even worse because it was right after the Gulf War in 1991.
And the United States led the world in imposing harsh sanctions on Iran, and you ended up with a situation where, you know, more than a million people were killed because they couldn't refrigerate their food, they couldn't import salt, they couldn't get simple medicines for babies when they were born, so the infant mortality rate skyrocketed, so on and so forth, right?
And, you know, the consensus is that 500,000 children were killed in the 1990s.
One of the high-level U.N. officials that was assigned to Iraq in the 1990s, Dennis Halliday, he resigned in protest because what he said what we were doing to Iraq was genocidal, and he couldn't go on with being a part of the organization that was imposing that kind of horror on Iraq.
And we're seeing a similar thing happen with Iran.
Iran is in a different situation because it didn't just come out of a war like Iraq did in 1991, so it's trucking along a little better.
But these are sanctions of unprecedented severity, and what it's doing is backing Tehran, the Iranian government, into a corner, and it's completely losing its effectiveness.
There's no chance that by this point that Iran is going to say, fine, we'll submit to you, we'll do everything you say, we'll give up our nuclear program, which, by the way, is perfectly civilian in nature.
And, you know, the Iranians just aren't going to say that.
They're offended by the international isolation, despite overtures for diplomacy that they've made, and they're offended by the economic warfare that the United States is unjustly imposing on their country.
You don't come to diplomatic solutions this way.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny.
Obama's policy is much harsher than Bush's.
The only difference is Bush walked around talking about, yeah, and if you don't look out, we might bomb you, whereas the Democrats call it, no, we insist on talking to them.
But it's the same status quo, economic warfare, support for terrorist groups, and, you know, stuff like that, assassinations and cyber war, relatively low-level stuff.
But otherwise, it's the exact same policy, right?
In this sense, the Obama administration mirrors the Clinton administration, because during the 90s, Clinton was in power, and that's when the harsh sanctions went on Iran.
They had the long-term goal of regime change, because not only at that time were we doing economic sanctions, but we were funding Iraqi opposition groups inside Iraq that had the aim of overthrowing the government, who were actively undermining the government of Iraq during this time, trying to get it overthrown.
The sanctions were imposed with the justification that Iraq has violations in its nuclear program, and they need to disarm and prove to the international community that they don't have a weapons program.
Well, in 1997, Iraq had completed the disarmament phase of the ceasefire agreement that imposed sanctions on it, and then the United Nations developed a monitoring system that tried to prove the nonproliferation going on in Iraq.
And by 1997, the United States still refused to lift the sanctions.
In fact, the U.S. Secretary of State at the time, Madeleine Albright, said in a speech at Georgetown University that they would not lift sanctions unless Saddam had been removed from power.
And that's kind of what we're seeing going on in Iran.
The Obama administration clearly doesn't seem to be interested in a diplomatic settlement where the Iranians prove that they don't have intentions to build nuclear weapons, because there have been many opportunities to do that.
Instead, what they've done is focus on economic warfare and trying to undermine the Iranian government.
And if an administration more prone to military intervention follows the Obama administration, we could see a repeat of what went on in Iraq, and that's really unfortunate.
Yeah.
All right.
So now what do you expect for, you know, John Kerry said this week that he would like to solve the, he agrees with the president, of course they have to solve this problem diplomatically.
Do you think that they're going to try to do anything except maybe just keep the status quo for the long term?
You know, we'll have to see.
What either has to happen is, you know, a complete diplomatic breakthrough where the Obama administration starts making confessions to the Iranian government like, OK, you can produce nuclear fuel.
Right.
So forget that.
In other words, the choice is either economic war or real war still.
That's right.
That's what seems to be coming down the pipe.
Yeah.
All right.
So now I know also that there's been a lot of great coverage at Antiwar.com this week, John, about Yemen and about Pakistan and recent ratcheting up of the drone strikes.
What can you tell us about that?
Well, the Obama administration has continued to bomb both Yemen and Pakistan.
And as we were talking about before with Mali and these types of places in Libya, what it's doing is it's having an effect of bolstering the Islamist and anti-American sentiment in these countries.
You know, when when the Obama administration in 2009 started to bomb Yemen with drones, there were maybe maybe 300 members of al Qaeda in Yemen.
Fast forward to today, there's estimates that go as high as about 3000.
You know, people in Yemen are visibly and actively angry at the United States for continuing to bomb the country.
We're not at war with that country.
The way we continue to do it is through a technological loophole with drones and by bribing the Yemeni government, which we helped install with money and weapons and military assistance, so that they will allow us to continue to bomb people who are mostly helpless nomadic tribesmen in the sand dunes of Yemen.
This is extremely dangerous policy.
Not only is it dangerous, but it's killing people and it's laying the groundwork for more blowback.
You know, luckily, there's started to be some pushback against this, both in the United States and from the international community.
You know, there's a there's a U.N. officials have announced that they will start to launch a major investigation into civilian drone deaths.
They'll focus in Pakistan, but they'll also take advice from lawyers and from activists inside Yemen who know the situation well.
You know, we have to see if the U.N. will actually be successful in imposing some sort of order or legal restrictions on the United States, but I highly, highly doubt it.
The United States seems committed to continuing to have wars where they can, first of all, they're secret.
Second of all, they don't need any congressional approval or transparency or accountability or anything like this.
And thirdly, since it's in secret, the Obama administration doesn't have to admit when civilians get killed.
You know, it wasn't so long ago that New York Times reported that according to administration officials, the way that they're counting people as militants is to say if they're in a certain geographic area, namely Pakistan or Yemen, if they're a male and if they're of military age, which typically means 16 or 18 and above.
So, you know, if that's their criteria for who to be killing in their worldwide targeted killing program, assassination essentially, they're not only in breach of law, but it's a humanitarian disaster.
Yeah.
Well, and by the way, that New York Times piece was clearly orchestrated by the administration in the first place.
It said in the first paragraph or second paragraph, this is based on interviews with the top two or three dozen national security officials explaining that this is how they wage their drone war.
So might as well have been written by the Pentagon, in other words.
No, that's right.
You know, this wasn't an accusation against them by Code Pink activists or something.
This is their story.
Exactly.
It sheds light on how the Obama administration views this kind of thing, because on the one hand, it's very beneficial to them that the drone war is secret because they don't have to answer certain questions about it.
On the other hand, when they want to show their political opposition in Washington that they're really tough on terror and they're really hawkish on foreign policy, they get to point to this drone war, which, by the way, more than 400 drones have been launched in Pakistan and Yemen, a couple in Somalia, one in the Philippines that we know of, and probably more than three or four thousand people have been killed.
So when a top Al Qaeda official that they actually have the, you know, that that can actually name because they rarely name these people is killed by a drone, they get to brag.
And then when reporters ask hard hitting questions about the drone war and the legal implications, the humanitarian implications of it, the Obama administration gets to say, well, it's secret, so we can't tell you anymore.
This is this is how they they approach it.
And so when a New York Times article comes and reveals some serious architecture of the drone war, it's not subversive.
You know, this is what the Obama administration wants us to know.
Sure.
And it's it's quite damning, actually.
Well, in a way, it's darkly hilarious when he sent the attorney general to go and give a speech and claim that due process in the mind of the president or whoever he appoints is good enough.
Due process now has nothing to do with separate powers, checks and balances process that courts have decided, you know, in the past or anything like that.
Due process just means, you know, if Obama feels like killing you.
That's right.
And as we know, this process holds even for American citizens with constitutional rights.
So not only is this drone war in Yemen dangerous, murderous and strategically counterproductive, but it also represents one of the most dramatic expansions of executive authority in modern American history.
We haven't seen anything like it.
The president can literally choose to kill an American citizen on his own.
Say so without congressional opposition, without legal opposition, without any transparency or accountability.
I mean, that is some serious, kingly authoritarian power right there.
And it's not being legitimately and effectively challenged at all in Washington.
Right.
Or in the mass of the population, because conservatives already agree that the president ought to be able to kill whoever he feels like, no matter who he is.
Even if he's a terrible Kenyan secret agent of Al-Qaeda or something, they still think he ought to have the power to assassinate because, hey, it's the office of the presidency.
And I guess that's what conservatism means.
And then the liberals who would mind if it was a conservative in the chair don't because it's not.
It's one of their guys.
And so even though there are still great liberal writers and liberal radio show hosts, the masses of Democratic supporters, they don't care who Obama assassinates at all.
No, that's right there.
People are understandably worried about jobs in the economy.
So they want to vote themselves goodies by politicians willing to dole them out.
But unfortunately, most of them don't even know about drones.
The ones that do, according to polling, you know, there's widespread support for drones.
We're kind of in a situation in like 2003, 2004, when the Bush administration was revealed to have, you know, orchestrated some torture regimes in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and so forth.
Torture, if you polled Americans, had support.
You know, that started to change a little bit.
And the polls gradually got less and less in favor of torture.
But we're at the same situation with drones right now.
You know, most people still support them.
And that's really unfortunate and selfish, too, because the whole idea is that we don't have to go in there on the ground and put our own people at risk.
We can just bomb people, nameless, faceless individuals in far off countries with a remote control in Arizona.
And, you know, there's no political cost to it.
Man, how corrupt is that?
All right.
Thank you so much for your time, John.
It's great to talk to you as always.
Thanks very much, Scott.
All right, everybody.
That's John Glaser, editor of Antiwar.com.
I'm Scott Horton.
You can find my full interview archives at ScottHorton.org.
And you can find me on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube at Slash The Scott Horton Show.
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