03/11/15 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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So, Phil Giraldi, everybody.
Welcome back to the show.
Phil, how are you?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
A couple of good articles here.
One of them's at antiwar.com and unz.com.
Shutting down AIPAC.
Removing Israel from American politics.
And then another one brand new today, I think, at the American Conservative, how governments twist terrorism.
So I hadn't read that one yet, but it sounds interesting.
But first of all, let's talk about Israel.
And actually, Phil, let's do it this way.
I'll introduce you like this because I need to get to this.
Former CIA officer, now executive director of the Council for the National Interest in Washington.
And then again, writer for unz.com and the American Conservative magazine.
And so this article is actually the text of a great speech that you gave on the eve, pretty much at least, by day of Netanyahu's speech.
And really giving a great overview of how you see America and Israel's relationship.
So I would ask you to kind of give that overview, assuming an audience of people who aren't familiar with any real criticism of Israel, maybe.
And as far as they know, hey, they're our greatest ally and all of that.
So really, what is your beef?
Phil, let them know.
Yeah, well, basically, I was debunking the idea that Israel is a great ally or that it indeed is even a country that would qualify as a friend.
The track record of Israel through the years certainly has indicated quite the contrary.
Israel is almost every year the leading friendly country in terms of spying against the United States.
Certainly, Israel has involved the United States in wars in the Middle East, has basically used the United States to defend its own policies and its own wars to the detriment of U.S. interests.
And I lay all this out in the speech.
And the speech basically is intended to address the issue of, is this relationship in any way valuable or helpful for the United States?
And I come to the conclusion that it is not.
And indeed, beyond that, it's not even good for Israel.
Israel, having been empowered to do things that are beyond its reach and that are in the long term damaging, has not been good for Israel.
Well, yeah, let's let's focus on that for a minute.
I think that's a very important point there.
Well, I don't know.
I don't necessarily want to ask you for a counterfactual how might it be instead.
But could you explain, you know, in what ways you think that their power has been distorted in how things have been made different than they otherwise would have been?
Well, I mean, Israel has a history of attacking its neighbors.
You know, I'm sure you know the incidents as much as I do.
But Israel wouldn't have done a lot of these things and wouldn't have have done the aggressive seizure of Arab land on the West Bank and its treatment of Gaza and its attacks on Lebanon and so on and so forth without the knowledge that the United States would protect it in the U.N. Security Council and that the United States would basically bail it out by providing more weapons and more money and more political support.
Well, and that's the thing that's always left out of the narrative on TV, especially, is that all the Arab states in the region and including the Palestinian Authority have said now, I guess the Palestinian Authority, maybe they were last on the list to say so.
And that was back in 1988 that, OK, OK, we'll recognize the state of Israel, but just end the occupation.
And so but it's always portrayed as though Israel is completely surrounded by implacable enemies.
But in fact, without our support for their bullying, they might just accept that same status quo that the rest of the region has already decided to accept on their behalf, really.
Yeah, I mean, they keep saying what they claim is that the Hamas is going to, you know, destroy Israel, kill all the Jews and everything like that.
But, you know, there's no real evidence for this kind of animus.
Hamas is a resistance movement that was, in fact, created by Israel or encouraged by Israel, at least.
And the fact is that this is part of the jargon and so on and so forth.
All of Israel's neighbors accept the reality of Israel.
And this is often overlooked and certainly overlooked by people like Netanyahu when they come here for a visit.
And the fact is that there have been a number of Arab resolutions tabled to recognize Israel and to establish normal relations.
And that means embassies and the whole thing, but subject to Israel basically pulling back to the 68 lines and allowing the creation of a Palestinian state.
So this whole narrative has been shaped in kind of the reverse direction by Israel's propagandists in the United States primarily.
And it's quite wrong.
Yeah, it's funny, too, about the narrative about the United Nations and how, well, America is protecting poor little Israel from the rest of the mean old world ganging up on them without.
It seems like you could only believe that if you just refuse to entertain the opposite position for even a moment to check if maybe the rest of the world has a point about what's going on there.
And usually I think that comes down to the people that that narrative works on.
Mostly in America are people who have never really been shown a map and don't really understand about the war of 67 and the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.
Ever since then, they think of of Palestine as some sort of neighboring territory, if not a state rather than a place that's already conquered and under occupation for all this time.
Yeah.
And of course, there's also the Christian Zionists who basically any historical argument they don't care about.
All they care about is the fact that their interpretation of the Bible, which, of course, is by no means universal, tells them that basically they have to support Israel for their own reasons, which which generally come down to their desire to see the second coming of Christ, of which the establishment of Israel is a precursor.
So it has nothing to do with reality or with politics or history.
It has a lot to do with this faith based emotion.
All right now.
So when you say that they have a role in involving the United States in wars, can you be more specific about that?
Yeah, I I think it's it's clear that Israel was not the sole reason that we invaded Iraq, but it was a major contributor.
The the Israeli government got on board very quickly.
Initially, it was somewhat reluctant because it wanted the United States to attack Iran instead.
But they got on to the war.
And certainly the pro-Israel community in the United States, and particularly the neocons, of course, were the initiators of the war.
So you have to say Israel is kind of in the matrix of what happened in terms of the invasion of Iraq.
Israel has also been basically the the genesis of America's counterterrorism policy comes out of Israel.
Essentially, rather than Israel adopting American policies, it's gone the other way.
Israel has basically, which has had, of course, terrorism issues for quite some time, has evolved certain policies that are one might regard as very repressive.
And the United States has basically taken these over as our own policies so that this involvement, the global war on terrorism, is is to a certain extent derivative from Israel.
And the U.S. has been a target of terrorism because of the relationship with Israel.
And then finally, of course, the case of Iran, there is nobody arguing that or nobody saying arguing that Iran threatens the United States.
But yet we're seeing this very week and last week, evidence that there is an extremely powerful war party in the U.S. Senate and elsewhere that wants us essentially to go to war with Iran.
Well, and doesn't seem like they have any support within the military, but they I guess if well, let me ask you real quick then.
Well, very short on time for this segment.
But if they're able to scotch the negotiations, say their letter works and it caused enough to send inside the government of Iran to scotch the thing from there and that kind of thing, then is that really a path to war there?
Or don't worry, they still are under the safeguards agreement and everything is, you know, still status quo is not a crisis.
It's only a fake crisis after all.
Yeah, but we're seeing an escalation of a fake crisis since 1993, when Netanyahu first started complaining about Iran.
It's you know, they have a powerful voice in Congress and in the media.
And the fact is that they do want a war.
They want the United States to eliminate Iran as a military competitor to Israel's.
It's not just an issue of of nuclear weapons.
It's an issue of Iran as as a competitor in that region.
And, you know, they want a war.
And we've seen many instances in the last 50 years, certainly where people who want more very passionately and are well placed are very often able to do that.
All right, hold it right there.
It's Phil Zaroli from the American Conservative and UNS.com.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
Talking with Phil Zaroli, former CIA officer, writer for the American Conservative Magazine and UNS.com.
That's UNZ, UNS.com.
And we're talking about this speech shutting down APAC.
Just maybe not the best title for it.
But it's a great, great article for you to read there.
It's linked at antiwar.com today as well.
And maybe we'll get into this other one at the American Conservative about terrorism in a minute.
But where the break interrupted, we were talking about how the neocons and I guess the Israeli government, is that the same thing?
The Likud Party and the neoconservative movement in America.
They want war with Iran and they won't rest.
Even if they can't get one now, they're going to keep trying to get one.
They're going to keep trying to get one tomorrow kind of a thing.
And it's certainly the case that it's been reported time and again that the neocons, the only country they ever wanted to bomb more than Iraq was Iran.
And that was what they wanted and tried to get from the very beginning after the September 11th crisis began.
And but so I was reminded when you were talking there, Phil, about the leak.
And this was, I think, if I remember right, it was confirmed by the two majors, New York Times and Washington Post, that Dick Cheney had sent David Wumser around to AEI and maybe a couple of other neocon think tanks and kind of, for whatever reason, deliberately leaking to them to get it out, that he was considering an end run around the president of the United States and that he would make a deal with Ehud Olmert and would get Ehud Olmert to attack Iranian interests in the Persian Gulf in order to force Bush's hand and have him do it.
And if I remember right, when the New York Times, et cetera, confirmed it, they were like, yeah, this is basically what happened here.
And all they did was, you know, confirm that, yeah, Wumser was the leaker.
All right.
And I wonder if you think that that kind of thing is still a danger, even under an Obama presidency, who clearly has no interest in starting a war with Iran himself.
Yeah, you know, I think there's always danger of this kind of thing happening.
And, you know, we talk about various options like false flag attacks, contrived attacks.
I mean, you know, it was also reported in the media, I guess, about a year ago that Israeli case officers, Mossad officers, were going around pretending to be American case officers, you know, and having American, they have American passports and all this kind of thing.
Think about that.
And recruiting terrorists in Iran, right?
Yeah, and recruiting terrorists to attack Iran.
And so you go around and you contrive a situation where the people on the receiving end think they're dealing with Americans and they stage an incident which could lead to war.
It's something that can be easily contrived.
When I spoke on Sunday at the AIPAC thing, someone came up and asked me about Charlie Hebdo.
And I said, look, I said, I could probably set up a false flag for something like Charlie Hebdo and have somebody completely unwittingly, part of a conspiracy, killing somebody that leads to other things that were completely unanticipated.
It's not that hard to do.
This stuff isn't that difficult to do.
You get people that are passionately involved in causes and their rationality gets suspended.
And that's what you rely on in these kinds of cases.
And sure, once you're once you're completely hostile and you're face to face with a country like Iran, all it needs is a little trigger to get something going.
And that's what my concern would be.
Yeah.
You know, Seymour Hersh also talked about how Cheney and I guess must have been Libyan them and Wumser floated the idea that maybe they would have what?
Well, maybe you remember better than me, but wasn't it something like special forces would attack the American Navy in the Persian Gulf?
Not that they went through with it, but that they had at least talked about that in the vice president's office.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And recently, Erdogan in Turkey with his intelligence chief was talking about the same thing, attacking the Turkish soldiers who were guarding the mausoleum inside Syria and making it look like it was done by the Syrian government.
So, you know, this kind of stuff, it floats to the top all the time.
All right, now let's talk a little bit more about the lobby and its power inside the United States.
There's this famous article in The New Yorker by Jeffrey Goldberg back from 2005 called Real Insiders.
It's about Steve Rosen, who, of course, was involved in a plan to steal documents relating to the Bush administration's highest level councils on what they were going to do about Iran.
They were stealing this information to give it to the Israeli embassy, to give to the Israeli government to figure out how to better lie us into that war, in fact.
But anyway, in this article, point being that Rosen is quoted as saying a lobby is like a night flower.
It thrives in the dark and dies in the sun.
Of course, this is also the source of the famous quote about how he could get 70 senators.
You see this napkin?
I could have 70 senators sign this thing in 24 hours.
But what I want to ask you about is the night flower thing, because it seems to me like they've had some pretty high profile engagements in the public view in the past couple of years, including the war against Chuck Hagel, the attempted war against Syria in 2013, and a couple of major public fights with Obama about sanctions in Iran.
Now you have Netanyahu coming to town and the whole public partisan this and that kind of politics surrounding that.
And then now you have this letter from the Republican senators, which seems to have really made people angry.
And the Hill has a story today that this letter has just completely backfired and made the Republicans look like such idiots.
And I wonder whether you think the tide is turning at all if the sun is shining now on this night flower and that everybody, hey, look at Israel's role in American politics.
Yeah, I think that certainly the last two weeks have been a public relations disaster, both for Netanyahu and for the lobby.
No question about it.
But I think the seeds of this were there before.
I think that if you're going back a year or so, you would discover that there's been a lot more discussion about the role of the lobby.
I said a year ago that I thought the lobby was dead, but it just hasn't figured that out yet and hasn't rolled over.
The fact is that the Israel lobby is increasingly having to come out in the open and is defending the indefensible in terms of what Netanyahu has been doing.
The attack on Gaza last summer and everything like that, in which so many civilians died.
You know, I think it opened a lot of eyes to the fact that this is just not this is just not defensive stuff.
This is not a country, you know, acting defensively to protect its interests and stuff like that.
This is goes way beyond that.
So I think the lobby is basically losing the information war, losing the perspective war in terms of what's going on in the Middle East.
And eventually it's going to lose.
But, you know, it could take 20 years to die.
Well, I think, as you were saying before, you have the the hardcore forced Jesus to come back, small minority, even of evangelical Christians.
But then I think most other people who are just sort of, you know, basically biased toward Israel mostly just have never even heard the other side of the story at all.
And that's really what they're victims of, that when there's when there's cracks in the narrative whatsoever and they really start to understand the abuse of human rights at the hands of the Israelis on a daily basis, you know, things become much clearer.
And I think that's really what's happening here.
So, yeah, some people certainly believe that the fault is not so much in terms of our political class, but it's in the media, because the media does not tell the story the way it is or the way it would for any other country.
But more and more, the American conservative and UNS.com are getting around that.
And that's what's really making the difference.
Thanks, Phil.
Appreciate it.
OK, Scott, take care.
That's Phil Giraldi on UNS.com and TheAmericanConservative.com.
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