02/27/15 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show, et cetera, et cetera.
Next up is our friend Phil Giraldi.
He formerly of the CIA and the DIA and now executive director of the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
He also writes for the American conservative magazine UNZ.com.
And, wow, this one is in the hill.
Great, Phil.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing really good.
Appreciate you joining us.
And so, yeah, man, the big excitement to me is that apparently – and I don't want to jinx it, so all jinxes are off – but apparently Netanyahu is too deep now.
He cannot call off this speech.
He's coming to town to give this speech, and I am just absolutely thrilled for all the reasons that most of his critics are upset.
They're saying he's jeopardizing America's relationship with Israel.
And so, you know, three cheers.
That's what I think.
So I wonder, what is your take, what is the take of the Council for the National Interest on Netanyahu and his upcoming speech in Washington, D.C. here?
Well, I mean, the Council for the National Interest believes that the relationship with Israel is wrong anyway, that it's far too one-sided in Israel's favor, and it basically has created a situation where the United States is hated by everyone else in that part of the world.
So we want to see more balance, obviously, in the relationship.
And I, like you, think that Netanyahu has finally gone more than a step too far, and he has a lot of people angry at him.
And I think that this could be the moment of truth when people begin to realize that the Israel-American relationship is a tremendous detriment for our country.
Yeah, I was amazed.
Apparently, this article came out on February the 2nd.
It's Mark Perry, who I believe spoke at the conference that you guys put on a year ago about questioning this special relationship, formerly of foreign policy.
And it's this article in Al Jazeera, Netanyahu's Congress invitation raises eyebrows among some U.S. generals, and eyebrows is understating it, I think.
Got some pretty serious responses from some American military officers of the highest rank here.
No wonder Netanyahu's friends of Israel who are criticizing Netanyahu are concerned that there are going to be some long-term consequences from this.
In fact, one of them even puts it in terms of, you're asking me to choose you over my commander-in-chief?
Not ever.
Not ever.
Wow, that's pretty strong language kind of a thing.
That's the way they framed it.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
I read the article you sent it over to me, and it's absolutely astonishing.
I mean, they're basically saying that he's attacking our whole system of government.
And, of course, they're right.
Some of them kind of soft-shooted a little bit, said, oh, yeah, well, you know, I'm still a great friend of Israel, and so on and so forth.
But the reality is, and everybody in Washington who is not totally partisan on the issue understands that for a long time, that Israel is a client state that has created more problems for us than has given us any benefit.
And this is finally kind of coming to the fore, and it's long overdue.
Well, I can't wait for the speech.
I hope it's a disaster, and I don't know, maybe it will go off pretty well or something.
I know Congress likes him.
It's a pretty nice audience to have.
But I guess really it's sort of bringing this up in a way that I think most Americans never hear.
I mean, I think about, you know, what it was I knew before I started really paying close attention to stuff, and I have to go back a ways, I guess.
But I think most Americans, they never hear of any daylight between America and Israel.
They don't know much about Israel, but as far as they're concerned, they're a friend of ours and whatever, whatever.
So for there to be a real contradiction between what the government of America is doing in its international relations and what the Israelis want and that the Israelis are willing to go this far to try to obstruct, I think we'll, you know, hopefully it will get a lot of attention.
It seems like it already is kind of bringing the question of Israel up to Americans who've never even really considered the question before.
They didn't even know it was an issue before.
Yeah, and of course the other side story that's interesting is what's going to happen in Israel.
Obviously Netanyahu has made a serious number of enemies as a result of this, people who see it just the way we've been discussing it, that, you know, Israel needs the United States a whole hell of a lot more than the United States needs Israel.
And Netanyahu has successfully poisoned the relationship.
So he might lose the election and we might be seeing some politicians who by and large will embrace the same policies he does, but they might be people that are better at talking with the Palestinians.
They might be people who see the real politic situation for Israel in a much clearer way.
And now as far as the fight over Iran here, I know you pay such close attention to this issue, but there's a major missing piece in this whole thing that I can't seem to nail down anywhere, which is what is it that Netanyahu or the war party, the Republicans especially who agree with him on all of this, what is it that they want instead?
Because when they claim any deal that allows for any civilian nuclear program in Iran is a bad deal and a non-starter and they'll settle for nothing less than Iran completely abandoning their nuclear program, that's completely ridiculous.
In fact J.J. Goldberg has a thing in the forward today saying that, wait a minute, they're so apocalyptic and crazy they're willing to try to make one nuke just to lob it at Israel and get their entire nation blown off the face of the earth with our H-bombs, and yet you also think they'll bow to our economic pressure or these sanctions and eventually just entirely abandon this program.
It makes no sense.
And now somebody on that side of the argument has to have some kind of argument of a different future than make this deal where we're expanding the inspections beyond reason and there's plenty of reason to be reassured and that's as good as we can get.
Yeah, and essentially that's what the White House is saying, although they're not saying it quite in those terms.
But the fact is that these people that are like David Brooks came out again today, we had Krauthammer in the Washington Post yesterday, or was it today?
The fact is they don't want to deal with Iran on any terms.
They want the United States to attack Iran and to eliminate Iran as a regional competitor for Israel in a military sense.
That's what they want.
And they're not going to verbalize it that way, but that's precisely what they want.
But they know, Phil, that they can't have that unless the Iranians really try to start making nukes, which they're not doing.
So it's just more Cold War is all that they're getting instead, right?
Well, you know, I think their expectations that they could have manipulated the U.S. into doing something that stupid were not that misplaced.
Look back the last three years with Netanyahu coming for these annual visits and trying each time to set up a red line or a tripwire that would obligate the United States to go to war with Iran.
And there's still legislation sitting in Congress, I'm sure you're aware of, in both the House and the Senate, that has that kind of language in it.
That if Israel is militarily threatened by Iran, the United States will go to war against Iran.
There's all that kind of craziness floating around.
So I suspect that they felt they had a really good shot at getting the United States to take Iran out of the game.
Well, and which would require – I mean, I guess they're still only talking in their wildest fantasies about an air war, right?
But what kind of air war would it take to completely erase Iran's nuclear program?
And, in fact, to even – of course, job one would be to take out any military resistance that they could possibly bring to bear so that they can do the rest of the bombing.
That's a pretty damn big war they're calling for.
Yeah, it would certainly be – it would be a huge war because Iran geographically is four times bigger than Iraq.
It's four times more populous.
A lot of the sites, the military sites, are located in civilian areas.
It would be an enormous job.
It would take months to do this kind of thing.
The Pentagon is aware of that, and that's why we're getting pushback from the generals.
Essentially, they're saying, you know, okay, we're allies with Israel in the war on terror.
But, you know, it kind of limits when – the limitation comes in when you're talking about starting World War III.
Yeah.
Well, and also, of course – and I thought this was important, too, as you mentioned that just the process where I think one of these generals in the Perry article says, you know, I don't necessarily agree with Obama about Iran, but he's my president, not you, so shut up kind of thing.
Like at some point rank counts, and he's the commander in chief, not Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of a foreign country.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
We've got to take this break.
We'll be right back with Phil Giraldi.
He's got a new one at the Hill, and we'll be talking about that right after this.
Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
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Without our unlimited support, they would have much more incentive to reach a lasting peace with their neighbors.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is the show, The Scott Horton Show.
Talking with Philip Giraldi from the Council for the National Interest in the American Conservative magazine here.
I guess we probably won't have time to get to the NSA article, new NSA article at the American Conservative there.
Hey, tell me, Phil, what is Busboys and Poets?
Busboys and Poets is a chain of, I don't know, bookstores combined with places where people gather and listen to speakers and listen to folk music and jazz.
And it's kind of a quirky institution in the Washington area.
There are about five of them in Maryland and the District of Columbia.
And I'm going to be speaking there on Monday night about AIPAC and about the Netanyahu visit.
It says Sunday in the email.
Which is it?
It's Sunday.
Sunday.
Sunday at 7 p.m.
And which one is that, on 5th Street here?
5th Street Northwest, yeah.
As you say, there are several of them, but that's the one.
It's 5th Street Northwest.
And there's also going to be Mikko Pellet, who's an Israeli peace activist, speaking.
And we're going to be talking about Netanyahu and AIPAC.
Okay, great.
And that's Sunday night at 7 o'clock, 1025 5th Street Northwest in Washington, D.C.
For those of you unfortunate enough to live within driving distance of the center of evil on Earth, Washington, D.C.
Go see Phil there.
That sounds like a lot of fun.
I'd go if I lived anywhere nearby, but I don't.
Okay.
Yeah, no, that's cool.
All right, so yeah, now back to the subject matter here and the question of the Israelis attempting to interfere in the Iran talks.
It doesn't seem like it's working as far as – well, I don't know.
Obama, okay, apparently is going to have a deal here, right?
I mean, all trial balloons seem to indicate they're going to wrap this thing up in six weeks or so.
So what exactly could Netanyahu's Congress in Washington, D.C. do about that really to stop him, Phil?
Well, Scott McConnell had a piece on this a couple of days ago.
You probably saw it.
And he was speculating that in spite of all this, Netanyahu and the Israel lobby appear to have something like 60 senators in their pocket that will vote with them if the Senate passes a bill mandating that Congress approve any kind of agreement with Iran.
So they still have a high potential to wreck this.
Now, of course, they need more than that to be veto-proof with the president, and the president would undoubtedly veto them.
But the fact is this shows how dangerous they still are.
I mean, they're within reach of accomplishing this, and they would be able to throw a spanner in the works.
Yeah.
Well, I kind of actually would be in favor of that in a way just for the crisis of it, bring these issues to a head.
Now, I guess I don't want to see it go that bad, but I'd like to see the nuclear deal go through.
But, of course, you know, the leaks already are that Khamenei and Obama both are saying that, yeah, we should work together against the Islamic State in Iraq, right back to George Bush's position of using the American Air Force, Army, Marine Corps as the auxiliary for the Bata Brigade.
Yeah, that's exactly right, and it makes sense.
I mean, you know, I've been writing this for months now saying that the two forces that are going to be most effective against fighting ISIS, if that's really your intention, since the Turks won't do anything, is going to be the Syrians and they're going to be the Iranians.
And if we really want to defeat these guys, you don't have to get in bed with them, but you do have to work out some modus vivendi to destroy these people, and they should be destroyed.
Well, now, yeah, I don't want to lie with the Iranians at all, but sit back and at least recognize the reality that the Ayatollah and the caliph are deadly enemies and that we could at least stay out of it, you know, at the very least.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, we could use their power as appropriate.
We could say, all right, we know what you guys are doing, and, you know, God bless, go right ahead.
We don't have to enter into an alliance with these people.
We don't have to embrace them as entities.
We just have to say, look, this is in our interest and it's in your interest.
All right.
Now, I want to get to this article in The Hill, U.S. legislation abused by foreign entities.
What is lawfare, Phil?
Lawfare is the use of our legal system or any legal system in general to basically fight a war by other means.
And what it essentially means in the modern context is that it is generally something that's carried out by Israel, although it is carried out by others, too, but primarily by Israel, which has a quasi-independent part of its government that does this sort of thing.
And what they do is they sue other entities in court to tie them up to get their money to basically to punish them.
And the latest case last week in New York involved several Israeli citizens suing in a New York court for an attack or a series of attacks that took place in Israel and demanding compensation from the Palestinian Authority.
And they won the case and the damages could be as much as one billion dollars, which would bankrupt the Palestinian Authority.
All right.
And now, well, obviously quite a few issues raised here, but I wonder about the lawsuit abuse.
Are there not judges who see it this way, too?
And aren't there already precedents from all kinds of different cases where courts can prevent people from bringing frivolous suits or suits that are intended to just harass rather than really accomplish their stated goal?
Yeah, you have to find a judge who's sympathetic.
And certainly in New York City, you will find them.
And there have been a couple of cases where the State Department has intervened in the case of Saudi Arabia back a couple of years ago to tell the courts that this is not in our interest for diplomatic reasons and everything to pursue this.
They didn't do that in the case of the Palestinian Authority.
And so, yeah, you have to find a sympathetic judge.
The people who engage in lawfare don't care if the suits are frivolous because the idea is to tie the other guy up, make him get lawyers, make him do this, make him do that.
And it's essentially what they're willing to do as part of the process.
Yeah.
And now, so before we get to the suit against the PA that would really turn the West Bank, in effect, right over to the Israelis again, as you say here, can you talk about this previous case here and a little bit of, you know, as kind of an explanation of how this works, this Shirat Hadin thing?
Well, I cite a couple of cases.
I mean, there was one case that I found sort of bizarre, where they were going after the Chinese government for the Chinese National Bank having opened an account for Hamas.
And none of this took place in the United States.
None of this took place involving an American citizen.
But they nevertheless got quite far in the prosecution in terms of trying to get, you know, a billion dollars out of the Bank of China.
So this is essentially how it works.
And they have, there have been a whole lot of other cases.
By the way, on that one, was that effective?
Did the Bank of China end up having to change their business in the way they dealt with Hamas at all?
Well, they had to close the account.
That's for sure.
Yeah.
Oh, it worked, huh?
Yeah.
So they didn't, but they didn't win any damages.
But there are other cases in the United States where the law firms that work, where they're trying to shut down Palestinian groups at college campuses and attempts to get BDS, you know, boycott divestment.
And what they're claiming is that Jewish students are having their, they're uncomfortable because of what the Palestinians are saying and doing and people complaining about Israel.
And so there are a number of lawsuits of that nature, too, in the United States.
And that's all lawfare.
Well, and especially it's just ridiculous to see the way this goes on on college campuses, which are supposed to be bastions of free thought and debate and all of this stuff.
And, you know, those kind of suits or at least the controversies that I'm familiar with are all seem to be, you know, silly on their face.
You know, I became scared when I saw a Palestinian flag.
Well, the fear is in you.
Sorry.
There's nothing terroristic about a Palestinian flag for crying out loud.
Yeah, it's that kind of stuff.
But the idea is not necessarily to win.
The idea is to tie these other people up, make them spend money or make them back off because they don't have the resources to contest this kind of thing.
So it's insidious.
And these people are doing this.
It's all overseas.
I mean, you know, apart from like this stuff at campuses, but all of the terrorist acts and everything that they're trying to get the big settlements from took place somewhere else.
And and and almost very few of them involved American citizens or dual nationals in any way.
So it's like our courts are being used to prosecute these cases, which are essentially political.
All right.
But now.
So if they win some kind of six hundred million dollar judgment against the Palestinian Authority, how is a court in America supposed to enforce that anyway?
They would they would go.
Well, if the Palestinians have any assets in the United States, they could seize them.
And they could also seize the money that the Israelis have been withholding from the Palestinians since the Palestinians registered with the International Criminal Court.
That's about four hundred million dollars, four hundred and fifty million dollars, I think, right now.
So they could just seize that money.
Yeah, they would seize that money.
And the Palestinian Authority would go out of business.
There would be no schools, there would be no hospitals, there would be no anything.
There would be no security services.
So the Israelis would have to reoccupy the West Bank.
Wow, that's that's really something.
I wonder whether politics would intervene at that point to try to prevent that from going through or what would happen.
I mean, doesn't sound like the American government would want that to work, right?
Yeah, sure.
I mean, there's no reason why the Israeli government wanted to work.
Right.
The fact is you've created this Frankenstein that you you figured out.
Let's keep punishing them, punishing them, punishing them with lawfare and not realizing that at the end of the road, you're hurting yourself.
And this is a typical mindset of people like Netanyahu, that the Palestinians are basically there to be punished.
And if you can't punish them one way, you punish them another way.
And eventually maybe they'll leave.
I think that's the thinking.
Right.
And then just like our previous guest, Michael Schwartz, was saying it's all because they want to steal their natural gas.
So for the most cynical of reasons.
Oh, yeah.
The Bible or something.
Give me your natural gas or I'll kill you.
That's right.
All right.
Hey, thanks very much, Phil.
I kept you over time, but I really appreciate you coming on the show again.
OK, Scott, take care.
All right.
So that's Phil Giraldi, former CIA.
Now he writes for the American Conservative Magazine and UNS.com, and he's the executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
Go and see him talk at this bookstore, Busboys and Poets, Sunday at 7 on Fifth Street in D.C.
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