02/04/13 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is Phil Giraldi.
He's the executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
That's councilforthenationalinterest.org.
And he's a contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine and regular contributor to antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show.
Phil, how are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today.
So, all the headlines are from over the weekend that Barack Obama told the Israelis, go ahead and bomb whatever in Syria you want, and they took him up on that and they started bombing some things.
Can you please fill us in on what you know?
Well, I don't know if it was quite that emphatic in terms of Obama telling them to go ahead and bomb.
I think basically he's acquiescing with what the Israelis are doing.
I think he's demonstrated otherwise, but he's fairly timid about what's going on in Syria, which is, of course, probably the right way to go.
But anyway, neither here nor there.
There are a couple of—if you go to the Israeli media, there are a number of different stories about what was bombed and why it was bombed.
The initial accounts were that it was a movement of chemical weapons, which didn't make much sense at all.
And the more recent account is that it was anti-aircraft missiles, which they felt were being put on trucks to be moved somewhere, and the suspicion was it might be going to Lebanon.
So those are the two accounts.
And then there are a number of other stories about other Israeli intentions, about creating a buffer zone inside Syria, attacking what they are describing as an Iranian intelligence collection base.
So, you know, I don't know.
Obviously, the Israelis are into it now.
Obama is not going to stop them.
And it's not really clear to me what exactly their objective might be.
Well, you know, Paul Pilar, the former CIA analyst who writes for the National Interest, had a thing where he was—I think he was citing the Daily Star or another Lebanese source, where they're speculating that maybe what this means is by throwing in on the side of the rebels, the Israelis are actually deliberately trying to sabotage them and make them look like the puppets of the Israelis in order to diffuse their revolution, because maybe they changed their mind and they prefer Assad after all.
What do you think of that?
I don't think Pilar endorses that necessarily.
He was just mentioning that as one of the theories going around.
Yeah, well, that demonstrates, I think, how crazy the whole situation is.
Because, you know, normally when you see one of these situations, it's clear what the players are trying to do.
And in this case, Israeli intervention in Syria is only going to damage the government, unless you get really convoluted about it.
And basically it's going to lead to a regime that from one viewpoint benefits the Israelis and that it's going to be weak and divided.
But on the other hand, it also could be extremely radical.
So, you know, it's kind of a flip of a coin.
So I don't get what the Israelis are doing.
To a large extent, I don't even get what the United States game is in Syria anymore.
Actually, I probably never did right from the beginning.
But it's becoming increasingly difficult to see any kind of plan of action.
I guess you know that in Washington there was a mini-conference last week at the John McCain Foreign Policy Institute, in which the subject was, Can we save Syria?
Oh, man.
Well.
And of course, actually it was the president who kind of sounded like he'd been listening to the show a little bit when he said, I mean, this is really surprising for this level of argument on that level of public debate, where he said, you know, who says that?
I think it was the New Republic interview.
Who says that if we intervene that the violence will be decreased?
I mean, hey, we might just really stumble into something much, much worse.
I mean, it ain't like I ever voted for the guy, but you gotta admit, he's better than Mitt Romney or John McCain on this issue for sure.
You know, just the fact that he's scared, like, good, you know?
The guy's not brave enough to get us into this challenge, you know?
Yeah, well, I hope he's not brave enough.
But I think you may have seen the news article that came out today about how Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, said that the situation in Helmand province was a lot more stable before the British military arrived.
So it kind of tells you that the unintended consequences of a military intervention, what they might be.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, I guess I could imagine a president thinking that way, but talking that way.
Wow, that's like a real threshold.
You know, we've really, you know, I guess times are really bad when the president really has to work hard to defend his decision to only throw in halfway on the side of the suicide bomber veterans of Al-Qaeda in Iraq fighting against Assad in Syria.
Well, but didn't he also explain that the money would be used to buy them warm clothes for the winter?
Well, yeah, I mean, that's the whole thing the whole time.
In fact, you're the guy who broke the story, Phil.
And I don't know who your sources were, but they were pretty good ones when you reported in December of 2011 that he had signed a finding authorizing the CIA to, I don't know, the way you put it, at least step up covert operations in Iran and Syria both.
And I guess that meant coordinating the Free Syrian Army and the Saudis and the Qataris and the money and the weapons, no?
Yeah, well, and I think I was the first one in January who described how they were getting the weapons in.
They were getting them on NATO airplanes.
And that was back in January of last year.
So, yeah, you know, this has been going on for a year.
So they really have been.
They really have been arming.
I mean, come on.
When Ronald Reagan was selling weapons to the Israelis and then the Israelis were selling weapons to the Iranians, nobody bought that.
All it did was implicate the Israelis, too.
But it didn't exonerate the Americans from the very obvious, quote-unquote, plausible deniability that it was somebody else that was selling the TOW missiles to the Ayatollah, right?
I mean, why should it be if Obama launders the actual money and weapons through Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who get all their stuff from us anyway, right?
Then why should that matter?
Hasn't he been arming these guys just outright this whole time?
And then just calling it that he's reluctant, but doing it anyway?
Yeah, I think that's true.
I think that basically this started out by shifting some of the weapons that were in gross numbers in Libya onto vessels that were making ports of call in places where the weapons could be received, probably in south of Turkey, and also flying some of them in.
So it started out small, but essentially I think it's continued since that time.
The rebels, of course, have been complaining they're not getting weapons, and I think that's an indication of Turkey kind of backing out of the deal.
Turkey's beginning to see that there's a lot of downside to what's going on in Syria.
But what about the Saudis and the Qataris?
Are they still just pushing on?
Well, the Saudis and Qataris definitely are pushing on.
They're the paymasters for all of this.
They're sending money and everything in, but the weapons have to come through Turkey.
I mean, there's no other alternative except Lebanon, and that doesn't work very well either.
So they really have to come from Turkey.
Now, an interesting sidebar to all of this is I don't know how closely you're following everything that's been going on in Egypt, but it's the Saudis and Qataris who are messing around in Egypt, too.
And what they're doing is they're funding the opposition.
And now you're hearing this first from me, Scott.
They're funding the opposition.
The idea is to make the current regime look bad, which it's bad enough as it is, but what they really want is a return to some kind of quasi-military rule.
The Saudis and the Qataris, they don't feel comfortable with the Muslim Brotherhood running Egypt?
Well, Muslim Brotherhood is not really in bed with the Saudis and Qataris.
They have their own brand of fundamentalism, as I'm sure you know.
And basically they see the whole situation in Egypt as dangerous in terms of destabilizing their own populations and their own interests.
So they like a nice, comfortable, Mubarak-style government of national unity in which the military is calling most of the shots.
And that's what they're aspiring to do.
But I've heard, I heard from a very reliable source a couple days ago, that over a billion dollars has gone to the so-called protesters in various guises.
And this, very often, the protests are being led by junior army officers in civilian clothes.
So this is something that apparently our intelligence agencies know all about, but they don't know what to do with it.
Does that include the labor union and the more liberalian protesters?
Or that's just the Salafists?
No, I'm not including the actual, some of the actual genuine protesters who started this whole process.
So it's not even really that they've infiltrated them so much as they're just got undercover provocateurs in plain clothes out there getting the work done.
Right, they're doing a rent-a-crowd type deal.
You get people out in the street and you give them a little money, you tell them they can loot, and off they go.
And when that happens, there's a reaction from the government, which means through the police forces, which we've seen, and the situation escalates.
And the Egyptian chief of staff last week suggested that there might have to be a, quote, military intervention.
So that's the way it's going.
But to me, the interesting part of the story is that the Saudi Arabians and the Gulf states are behind it.
Well, I guess America and Saudi Arabia have been running a counter-revolution the whole time, really.
I guess Tunisia took them by surprise, but in Egypt they worked really hard to keep Mubarak as long as they could.
And then in every other place, in Yemen and in Bahrain and everywhere else, I guess in Kuwait, increasing everybody's welfare was enough, but pretty much everywhere else they had to bring out the truncheons at the very least across the world and put all these revolutions down, at least for a time, less, of course, Libya and Syria That's right.
You'll never see any evidence of the Saudis or the Gulf states supporting groups like the Muslim Brotherhood because basically that group is, to them, as dangerous as democracy.
And the point is they have their own brand of fundamentalism, they have their own idea of how a state should be run, and it's rather authoritarian.
Well, is that why Al Nusra is so far ahead of everybody else in Syria?
Because I guess I would have thought that the Muslim Brotherhood would have been even if, you know, coming from the underground that they would have been the most organized force to fight any revolution there, but it doesn't look like they're the ones running as far as I know.
No.
No, they're not.
And that's the reason why.
The money's not going to them.
Interesting.
I mean, wouldn't they have been, before the whole thing started, wouldn't they have been the ones in the best position to actually get the job done?
If the Saudis had supported them, for example?
Yeah, they had an infrastructure and they had the capability to do it without being anti-regime.
Well, now this brings us back to what you said about weapons being shipped from Libya.
I assume you've read Raimondo's column today about this, right?
Yes, I did.
And so you're referring at least to this Times of London report about at least one big boat full of weapons going from Libya to Turkey to go to...well, and then there was a dispute whether the Muslim Brotherhood or others were going to get it and that was part of the thing that Justin's speculating maybe is what led to the Benghazi attack.
But the point I'm interested in is can you verify, are you verifying or are you just referring to that Times of London story or you're telling us yeah, you're a former CIA guy and you're telling us you know that this is right from your own sources, etc., like that?
Well, some of the wrinkles are different but as I say, this has been going on for a lot longer than that ship and it's been coming in by air and it's been coming in through NATO channels because NATO had access to the Libyan weapons so yeah, it's been happening since that time, I don't think there's any question about it.
Yeah.
So it was basically just uncountable quantities of Libyan weapons up for grabs after that thing.
Right, and the key player, of course, in all this has been Turkey which had to provide the access to these weapons and they were quite willing to do it when it looked like Syria was going to be a 90-day turnaround but they're not so happy about it now so they're basically between a rock and a hard place and are resisting, coming down too hard on the side of the resistance because the resistance is nobody knows what it represents.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, they could have, should have known better to even get involved in this thing in the first place.
What do you make of Hillary Clinton now apparently leaking to Michael Gordon in the New York Times that, yeah, I tried to get the President to intervene more fully on Al Qaeda's side but he wouldn't do it.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting it's probably no surprise that there was a split in the Cabinet on the issue and that she came down on the side of wanting to have a military intervention but, you know, we're not finished with Hillary yet her PAC got set up today I guess it was for electing her in 2016 Hillary's always been a hawk and no question about it and Bill Clinton has been one too.
I mean, it's just, why should anybody question it?
It's just that the whole saga, what went on in the Balkans was basically his show.
Right.
Yeah, well, and also the blockade and the no-fly zone bombings of the 1990s in Iraq that really provoked the September 11th attack Then, of course, well, maybe you can fill us in on this Michael Sawyer says that as far as he knows Clinton had at least 10 different chances to capture or kill Bin Laden before 9-11 This guy he provoked into being our enemy and then refused to do anything about Yeah, well, if Michael is saying that, I'm sure it's true The only question in my mind would be, you know, what is he calling an opportunity?
I mean some of the opportunities might have been better than others and there might have been good reasons for some of those opportunities not being taken advantage of, but yeah I'm sure if he's saying that it's correct Yeah, I think some of them are kind of widely known right?
Like there was a swing set and kids at the farmhouse and then one time he was out falconing but there was some Arabian prince I remember Sawyer actually said to me Yeah, well, the world's lousy with Arabian princes alright?
Sometimes you just have to kill us on anyway, you know Yeah, I like that.
That's Michael, yeah Yeah, for sure Alright, so So, now the Israelis are bombing Syria Let's get back to that.
This guy Netanyahu, is he trying to get into war here?
I mean, Assad's response was to just sit there and take it basically, but is that crazy?
Or how long can we expect that to last?
Well, Assad really has no resources to strike back That's the fact And so, if I would imagine if Netanyahu decides to occupy 10 more miles of Syria, it would be rather popular in Israel You know, maybe that's the game he's playing.
He still hasn't formed a government, so he's going to be playing off various political interests in attempting to do so And hell, maybe Ariel Sharon is coming back He's coming out of his coma, isn't he?
Nuh-uh, is that happening for real?
Yeah Or you're just saying metaphorically?
No, no, no, he's been showing some signs of brain activity and apparently even maybe speaking That's in the Israeli media, yeah Can you imagine that?
Wouldn't it be funny if they made him Prime Minister again?
Well, yeah Well, I mean, it would be tragic for all the people People would have to die, but still, you know what I mean Yeah, exactly It would be one of those incredible Mad Magazine moments My goodness I'm looking at Google News, I don't see it Maybe I need to put in Ariel with Sharon Yeah, type in Ariel Sharon and you'll come up with reports about his Brain scan shows response to stimuli reports the New York Times There you go, I always wondered just how dead that guy was Apparently not I saw one report, I think in an Israeli paper that basically said there actually had been some reports that he had recognized one of his family members and was trying to speak or something, so it's a pretty scary prospect Well, I'm actually looking forward to the fight between him and Netanyahu over the future of Likud That would be a good time That would be fun to watch And then Do you think that Netanyahu is going to keep bombing Syria for now?
There are plenty of missiles that could be a threat to Israel one day if anybody ever got their hands on them Unlike Iraq, there actually are buildings with some mustard gas in them somewhere, right?
Yeah, that's the stupid thing about this whole Israeli policy because as long as the government is in control, those chemical weapons are safe But once you bring down the government or you weaken it sufficiently, suddenly you have people that have access to those weapons who are not responding to central control or orders or anything like that and could well wind up using them.
It's just like this whole thing is insane And you can't bomb chemical weapon sites because that releases the chemicals So it's kind of a lose-lose situation, so I don't know what they're planning in terms of that.
I rather suspect if indeed they think there is some Iranian intelligence operation going on they'll probably bomb that But I don't know, it might be just it might come down to what are the internal Israeli politics that are involved with this?
And if Netanyahu is playing at something to enhance his position to form a government, that could be maybe all it is Well you know, it seems like this debate and you know, this goes for Iraq and Iran too, but especially when we're talking about Syria, it's always been the question of just mean and belligerent versus rational on the other side of the argument.
I mean from the point of view of even the most right-wing nationalists in Israel who could they possibly have that they could rely on better than Bashar al-Assad to be the dictator of Syria?
They would have to be absolutely insane to think they're better off with some kind of giant Lebanon-style 15 years civil war between factions up there I mean, I could see how okay, they would have a splintered nation-state that would no longer be a threat but they would have just been like you know, Mickey Mouse cutting up the broom into just smaller and smaller pieces more and more enemies Well I think maybe the model is Iraq, and essentially what they would like to see Syria become is like Iraq, basically divided into three constituencies, all of which are weak enough where they don't threaten Israel but of course that requires constituencies that have self-identification at such a level that they can come together and it seems to me Syria is much more diverse than that and also much more radicalized in terms of the players in this thing so yeah, it ain't gonna work but it certainly is in line with what the clean break policy would have recommended and so I suspect there are probably people in Israel who think that this is some kind of solution Yeah again, while it was David Wumser Dick Cheney's Middle East advisor and the guy holding Colin Powell's leash in the first junior term it was a companion piece to a clean break but for the same foundation there in Israel where he said in Syria we need to expedite the chaotic collapse that way we can control the future of it and all of that so it sure doesn't seem to make much sense really I see it does make sense but I just mean when you weigh it with the pros and cons and the consequences and possible unintended consequences as well as likely ones and all of that there's no way it makes sense but I don't know Yeah, it's kind of one of these situations where it doesn't seem to be a whole lot of logic to it but maybe we're just missing something I don't know what exactly the Israelis would see as their interest in Syria their interest, it would seem to me, would be having, as you pointed out, a stable Syria controlled by kind of a strong man who keeps everything under wraps kind of a clone of Mubarak but obviously that's not what they're pushing for, they're destabilizing the regime and the result, in my mind, can only be bad Well now, do your former CIA buds and current CIA buds tell you that they think Assad's gonna fall soon or this thing's just gonna drag on forever if the current level of foreign involvement is kept up or where do we stand with that?
Well, my sources are saying that basically it's at a stalemate and that Assad can hang on if he makes the essentially political decision to do so but as far as in terms of the resources clearly the Turks are being difficult about letting more weapons through to the rebels which is a problem for them and while the Qataris and Saudis can provide money it's a little more tricky getting weapons into the country, so I don't see where the rebels are necessarily going to get into a stronger position unless they can literally capture weapons from the army, which they're having I think some mixed success with Well now, what about Jordan?
Are they just moving all the bases that they had in Turkey to Jordan now or what?
Well Jordan basically is getting overwhelmed by the refugee flow and that's the other big question about Syria that, you know, you're talking about close to a million refugees right now who are in various countries and it's creating major structural and infrastructural problems for those countries and I think Jordan is nervous extremely nervous about the situation and is trying to I think is trying to basically not get involved at a serious level and they're sort of coming around to the views that the Turks have adopted by virtue of having bad policies It's kind of a mess, I mean nobody thought through this process when they started it That sounds like the history of the last 11 years I think that's what we're seeing again Right, I mean with Libya you could tell where this is very much an east versus west kind of thing and even if it is just special forces and a few militia guys at the front that as long as they got NATO air power that even if it takes 9 months eventually they'll sack Tripoli and so that's how it worked out and you could tell that, we could predict that we didn't know exactly how many months it would take but we could bet that by the end of 2011 Qaddafi would have been shot in the head on the side of the road so that was simple enough but Syria really doesn't seem like it, huh?
Yeah, well Syria occupies a different position geographically in terms of its importance in the Arab world and Libya was kind of a bit player and I think that they really kind of miscalculated based on what they thought they saw in Libya in terms of what could be accomplished quickly and relatively painlessly but you know they were wrong It's the Rumsfeld model, right?
Light and fast Get in there and get your regime changed So how much help are the Russians giving Assad?
Are they determined to keep him?
The Russians are If you follow their comments in their media they're kind of on both sides of the argument They've been critical of Assad but they basically support him as a sovereignty issue which is what I've always kind of felt we should have done right from the beginning that essentially you can criticize the hell out of him but at the same time Assad was the legitimate government of the state of Syria and he still is and I think that's where the Russians come down because once you start playing around with the idea that regime change is possible all over the globe, it then becomes all over the globe.
It means that people who believe that Russia is a dictatorship will start playing the same game or who start going after the various former Soviet republics that are part of the Confederation right now.
It's the same game So I think the Russians have that viewpoint and I think they're correct Well and yeah I mean it's certainly not for the United Nations to decide whether Assad is legit or not and that's really my problem with this too I focus so much on the foreign involvement because that's what's my business right is the empire getting involved here my responsibility is to try to check that in whatever way I can interviewing people like you about it informing people about it, that kind of thing but I'm perfectly happy for the people of Syria to kill Assad to death if that's what they want to do What right does he have to be their dictator?
None whatsoever.
It's just that my guys don't have the right to change it is all Yeah that's right If the Egyptians want to overthrow Mubarak if the Syrians want to overthrow Assad if the Iraqis want to overthrow Saddam Hussein that's fine with me just like I'm sure with you but the fact is that it's not our right to intervene in those countries to change their government what the dynamics there are the fact that we've gotten this idea that we have some kind of pre-emptive right to do that is just absurd Yeah, well and especially when I mean if the precedent is anywhere that there's a civil war and people are dying, we have to intervene then what does that even mean?
They're declaring war for or against any armed faction anywhere in the world, right?
As long as we disagree with them Yeah, exactly, they can be on the side of the state against their local insurgents or on the side of the insurgents against their local state depending on whether it's Mali or Libya a few hundred miles away Yeah, that's right I mean, we're with somebody friendly to us somehow we don't seem to get the same the same argument is not produced That's really the funnest part about this I mean with the Iraq war anyone could have told you and a lot of us did hey, don't invade Iraq if what you're trying to limit is Al-Qaeda style terrorism because you're just going to make that problem worse as a side effect, you know of overthrowing and invading and occupying the country and that kind of thing but now in this case we literally have wars we're back in Al-Qaeda in Libya and Syria while we're fighting them in Afghanistan and Mali at the exact same time I mean if you were in the U.S. Army wouldn't you be like what the hell?
I think a lot of people in the U.S. Army don't know what the hell and I think people at the Pentagon at senior levels are doing the same none of this makes any sense if you go back to anti-war the website back in 2003 you go back to the first and second year of the American Conservative Magazine you'll find that there were a lot of people including myself who were predicting that this is exactly how this would play out and now here we are ten years later and it's still playing out there's this article I think it was in UPI about how a lot of what's going on right now is the legacy of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who of course the Pentagon begged George Bush let us kill him before the invasion because they knew he was going to be such a problem and Bush refused because he needed that talking point that this guy who was wanted by Saddam and wasn't even friends with Osama was the connection between the two because he lived in American Kurdistan up in the north it's such a ridiculous lie but they needed that excuse to invade and then he led the suicide bomber brigades for two and a half years until early 2006 and how these are his guys are fighting the revolution in Syria right now the guy who specializes in bombing marketplaces full of Shiite women and children that's right it's a ten year legacy of really bad policies what a disaster the only thing good about it is how hilarious it's going to be in like 300 years when they're reading the history of it and doing the Jean-Luc Picard facepalm and just going man those Americans are something else it's hard to even imagine what they would compare us to in terms of an empire being so inept the others managed to pull it off better the British and the Romans it's just incredible how a country that had aspirations of what amounts to imperial power just never quite figured out how to do it Hitler invaded the Soviet Union Napoleon too we're about on that level of overreach now it seems like to me well Russia I mean Napoleon didn't invade the Soviet Union I'm sorry we're over time thanks for your time take care thanks for the back of your truck at libertystickers.com they've got great state hate like Pearl Harbor was an inside job the Democrats want your guns US Army, die for Israel police brutality not just for black people anymore at government school why you and your kids are so stupid check out these and a thousand other great ones at libertystickers.com and of course they'll take care of all your custom printing for your band or your business libertystickers suck Scott Horton here everything maybe your group should hire me to give a speech well maybe you should I've got a few good ones to choose from including how to end the war on terror the case against war with Iran central banking and war Uncle Sam and the Arab Spring the ongoing war on civil liberties and of course why everything in the world is Woodrow Wilson's fault but I'm happy to talk about just about anything else you've ever heard me cover on the show as well and email scott at scotthorton.org for more details Hey ladies, Scott Horton here if you would like truly youthful, healthy and healthy looking skin there is one very special company you need to visit Dagny and Lane at dagnyandlane.com Dagny and Lane has revolutionized the industry with a full line of products made from organic and all natural ingredients that penetrate deeply with nutrient rich ionic minerals and antioxidants for healthy and beautiful skin that's dagnyandlane at dagnyandlane.com and for a limited time add promo code SCOTT15 at checkout for a 15% discount The Emergency Committee for Israel Brookings, Heritage, APAC WINEP, GINSA, PNAC, CNAS the AEI, FPI CFR and CSP it sure does seem sometimes like the war party has got the foreign policy debate in DC all locked up, but not quite check out the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org they put America first opposing our government's world empire and especially their Middle Eastern madness that's the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org Hey everybody, Scott Horton here inviting you to check out the Future Freedom Foundation at fff.org they've got a brand new website with new and improved access to more than 20 years worth of essays promoting the cause of liberty and FFF's writers, including Jacob Hornberger Jim Bovard, Sheldon Richman, Anthony Gregory Wendy McElroy and more aren't just good, they're the best discrediting our corrupt overlords in Washington and their warfare-welfare regulatory police state that's the Future Freedom Foundation's new and improved site at fff.org