03/16/16 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here for Liberty.me, the great libertarian social network.
They've got all the social media bells and whistles, plus you get your own publishing site and there are classes, shows, books, and resources of all kinds.
And I host two shows on Liberty.me, Eye on the Empire with Liberty.me's Chief Liberty Officer Jeffrey Tucker every other Tuesday, and The Future of Freedom with FFF founder and president Jacob Hornberger every Thursday night, both at 8 Eastern.
When you sign up, add me as a friend on there, ScottHorton.
Liberty.me.
Be free.
Liberty.me.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Our first guest today is our good friend Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst, head of the Soviet division, former briefer for Vice President George H.W. Bush in the Reagan years, co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and full-time PeaceNik writer for RayMcGovern.com, ConsortiumNews.com, and AntiWar.com, where today we are running Putin Shuns Syrian Quagmire.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you, Ray?
I'm doing fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
Good to see you.
I can see you on Skype today, so that's nice.
Nobody else can see me, I hope.
No, they can't.
It ain't set up that way, and I don't even have a camera in here for me, but anyway.
Okay.
Yeah.
Because I haven't combed my hair yet.
Yeah, no.
Hey, you know what?
It doesn't look too bad.
Your hairline is actually doing a bit better than mine, old man, so ...
All right, Putin Shuns Syrian Quagmire.
Why would he do such a stupid thing?
Everybody knows that quagmires are great.
That's why America gets in them all the time.
You know, the wonder, Scott, is that no one believed what he said at the beginning.
He said, we're going in to stabilize the situation with the Syrian government, which meant on the field, it meant you're not going to overthrow Bashar al-Assad.
That's one regime change too many, actually two if you count the one in Kiev.
We're coming in, and we're going to stabilize the situation.
When we get it stable enough, we're going to leave when there are conditions for what he called a compromised political settlement, end quote.
Well, hello?
Everyone was sort of kind of cajoled into believing, well, major world leaders, they didn't have to do what they say, you know?
So obviously, he's going to hang around until he wins, wins, right?
He saw what the situation looked like.
He wanted to make sure that Assad, Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria, didn't get any illusions that the Russians are going to pull his chestnuts completely out of the fire.
That is, try to reestablish Syria as it used to be.
And so the best thing is to get out and make sure the Americans are on board, which they are.
Mirabili dip diktu, you know?
It's a miracle, but they are.
And you know, Geneva, the notion of getting these groups together and working something out, well, it's still an uphill battle, but the battle is different now.
When you have Moscow, you have Washington, and you have others pretty much got religion that, you know, if you're a human being, you have certain, you have a certain responsibility to prevent the carnage that has already happened in Syria.
And if you're European, you have a political interest in stemming the flow of refugees.
So there's lots of incentive now to work something out.
The cease, I was going to say ceasefire, the cessation of hostilities seems to be holding again, and no one expected it to.
So there's a lot of good news here, and as far as the Russians are concerned, you know, it's really quite amazing that people should be surprised that they saw their advantage in not getting enmeshed in a quagmire, having known for a long time what it's like in Afghanistan, and what it's like for what they call their partner, the United States, and not only Vietnam, not only Afghanistan, but you know, and Iraq, and Syria, and Libya, you know, quagmire seems to be our thing, and explains a lot why the military industrial congressional complex has 170 bases around the world.
If we were in one quagmire, and we get out, well, there's always another one to get into, and quagmires, and wars, and tension, as you know, Scott, are very good for business.
Yeah, well, for some at the expense of the rest, of course, but yeah, for the ones with the connections, they certainly are.
And yeah, I guess, you know, the Russians, they just don't have that kind of budget to play around with.
They've got to be realistic with low oil prices right now.
They're not an empire anymore.
That's right.
They've already cut back 5% on their military budget for this year, and that has to do with economics.
You know, it's interesting.
If you have some perspective on this, there was a book written, it was called Khrushchev Remembers, and what he remembered was his political life, and he gave this to a fellow who now is a neocon, but at least he wrote this book, and in it, he talks about Khrushchev's discussions with Eisenhower, okay?
Dwight D. Eisenhower.
And Eisenhower says, you know, I can't deal with this military-industrial complex because what they tell me is they come into my office, they say, the Russians are doing this, A, B, and C, we've got to do it too.
And Khrushchev says, whoa, that's exactly what happens here, okay?
So there it is, the two leaders of the world at that particular time admitting that once the defense ministry or the defense set up here, and the people who are fed by it, what Pope Francis called the blood-soaked arms merchants, once they get into the president's office, even with Obama, or especially with Obama, you've got a real problem.
So that's what we have here, and the big new element, Scott, that I really haven't had a chance to deal with just yet, but as you may remember, when I cut my teeth on analysis of Soviet foreign policy, my portfolio was China.
It was Vietnam.
It was the international communist movement.
Now, China was the big deal because it looked like the Chinese and the Russians didn't like one another, you know?
Whoa!
You know, there were troglodytes who say, oh, McGovern, you're being taken in here.
They're both commies, they're both commies.
How can they differ with each other?
Well, it was so clear that they started a border skirmish, skirmishes along the rivers there.
It was so clear that they, you know, they defeated each other at every turn, and the Chinese went so far as to prevent, to prevent the transit of Soviet military aid to Vietnam.
That's how bitter the thing was, okay?
So we were convinced, we smart guys in Washington, that the Russians and the Chinese hated each other, and they would hate each other forever.
Guess what?
When Kissinger left, I will have to give him credit for one thing, he played this triangular relationship in a beautiful way.
He went to China, and immediately after that, what did we get?
We got arms control agreements with the Russians.
We got a quarter partite agreement on Berlin, where the East Germans and the Russians wouldn't harass the supply, or the trains, or the planes that went in there.
We got all manner of concessions from the Russians by playing the Chinese card.
Now, why do I mention all that?
Well, I mention all that because at that time, the trade situation between Russia and China was, get this, $400 million a year.
That's a paltry sum, okay?
Now what is it?
The Chinese are getting sophisticated weaponry from Russia, there's big bucks involved, and I think the last time I looked, the trade relationship involves at least $50 billion, B with a B. Now, that's a big change.
So why is it that Putin says, well, all right, the Americans and NATO are being bellicose on our border in Europe, they're making trouble for us everywhere else, but still, we're going to cut 5% off our military budget.
How does he get away with that?
Well, because China has its back, and that's new, and that's big.
I would go so far as to suggest that if the strange, not strange love, what's his name, greed love, the general who heads NATO, were he to cause some real problems, military problems in Europe, I will bet you that the Chinese will come and say, knock it off.
All right, hold it right there, Ray.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Ray McGovern, right after this.
All right, everybody, with Ray McGovern, we'll be right back, everybody, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McCovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern with Ray McGovern, with Ray McGovern Ray McGovern ray mcgobern i'm not sure is he from that so much relative peace now reigns in Syria for the last two weeks as a result of this agreement.
And it's easy to say, well, you know, once the U.S. and Russia agreed on this, it was going to happen.
That wasn't so clear at the time, so that's a very good sign.
What I would say is that the focus is now on Geneva.
And TASS today, the Russian news service, is reporting that these two groups, you know, the government, the representatives of the government, these are intra-Syrian talks going on.
So you can imagine how delicate and how difficult they are.
But the U.N. coordinator here is talking in very optimistic terms.
He's talking about actual negotiations, actual position papers that are being surfaced by both sides.
And that's new.
Last time they got together, they quit after two days and they say, hey, this is getting nowhere.
Well, let's do it in four weeks again.
So this is in four weeks, about eight weeks.
But that's a good sign.
So what I would do is to say it's not gilding the lily to accentuate the positive here.
The Russian withdrawal is a big deal.
It's being played by the U.N. representative as a catalyst for other people working out their differences.
And perhaps most important, you know, Russia saved Bashar al-Assad from being overthrown.
God, when you think about if they hadn't come in, we have ISIS on the Mediterranean now.
Anyhow, they saved Bashar al-Assad.
So he owes them big time.
Now they're gone.
OK, now.
And they only intervene just enough to save him, but not enough to help him win the war.
That's exactly right.
So, you know, if he has any ambitions of reconstituting Syria as it existed before the war, the Russians have made it very clear to him, I'm sure.
Forget about it.
OK.
Now, if he wants to be real hard-nosed and sabotage these negotiations, I'm sure the Russians would say, forget about it, Bashar al-Assad.
We're not going to permit this.
We're not going to support you unless you show more flexibility.
You're wobbly now.
We're not there anymore en masse as we were before.
And so I think part of this has to do with the Russians speaking cold turkey, so to speak, to Assad and saying, look, we're putting a lot of investment in this.
And so are the Americans for that matter.
So if you can work something out here with these rebels, that's what's going to have to happen here.
And we will help secure whatever comes out of here.
But you've got to show some flexibility.
We ain't around anymore.
We're not going to carry your water.
So that's a big thing.
And that's an incentive to Assad.
If he wants to keep what he has, and that's most of Syria, most of the population, and I dare say most of the army that is still sympathetic to him, even though they're not all Alawites, and most of the Sunnis are still sympathetic to him.
But if he wants to keep a nation and he wants to have free elections in which he would undoubtedly win as he did last time, then he has to play ball.
The ball is in his court as well as it's in the court of Geneva.
And that I think is the big news coming out today and yesterday, where these people did get together and they're holding what seemed to be almost substantive talks about how to work this out.
Well, of course, you know, the big problem with all of this is that probably half the country, at least in land area, I know a lot of it is worthless desert out there in the east of the country, but still, you know, quite a few towns are held by the Al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State, both of which are, you know, politically impossible to negotiate with in any sense.
They've got to be destroyed by somebody at some point.
So I wonder, you know, what you think the Russian slash American plan for that is.
Well, the Russian statement, Putin's statement the other night, the afternoon, was very clear in saying that our forces in the airbase there near Damascus and in Latakia remain and things remain.
That's why I was really interested in looking at the Russian, what he said.
You know, you get all kinds of translations.
But what he said was things with respect to the bases will remain as usual, like it was before.
All right.
And so that means that if you're ISIS, if you're Al-Nusra, you better get down under the ground, because in my view, the assault on these folks from the residual force that Russia has in Syria and from the Americans, that will continue.
In other words, your translation of before means the day before yesterday, not before the intervention last fall.
That's correct.
In other words, not only Secretary of State Kerry and Foreign Minister Lavrov have worked out this mutual agreement that, you know, ISIS and Al-Nusra are a fair game, OK?
And not only that, but it was followed up by really strong air action.
That's still on the board.
What Putin did in removing the bulk of the troops, and that's what he says, the bulk, it's not all of them.
And that's another reason you need to go to the Russian translation.
He says, which means the withdrawal of the bulk of the troops or the main part of the troops.
So let's be clear, the ones that were there before the big buildup are still there.
And I think that if I were an ISIS or Al-Nusra guy, I think I'd go deep under the ground at this point.
Yeah.
Well, I guess it remains to be seen.
You know, there's a lot of talk about the buildup for a prepared invasion of Mosul.
But then I get nothing but conflicting articles, one after the others, that say, yeah, this is coming soon or, yeah, maybe, you know, in a year or, you know, next winter or something like that.
But on the other hand, you know, apparently Shia militias and Iraqi so-called army forces, Shia-stan army forces in Peshmerga are getting ready to, as best they can, to assault Mosul and drive the Islamic State out of power there.
So I guess at that point, like you're saying, they'll just go from a state back to an insurgency, back to underground again.
That's right.
They, you know, they had certain vestiges of an actual state.
But I think it is fair to say, and I'm reluctant to, well, yeah, I'm reluctant to say it, but I think it's true, that ISIS and ISIL or Daesh has suffered major setbacks now.
The more so since the Russians have sort of broken the supply lines that come down from Turkey, not only to the so-called moderate rebels, but these other fellas.
And Turkey has got to make some basic decisions as well.
All right.
That's where we're going to pick up this conversation in like eight minutes or something, Ray.
So you can go take a break.
We'll be back at six after with the great Ray McGovern on The Scott Horton Show.
Hey, all Scott here.
The thing is, I need you guys to help me to get these download numbers up.
So do me a favor and sign up for the podcast feeds of this show.
You can choose the whole show or just the interviews at iTunes and Stitcher.
All the buttons you need are at the top of the right margin at scotthorton.org.
The more subscribers I have, the more iTunes and Stitcher will help promote the show to new listeners.
If you're a hardcore fan, brand new or from way back, please leave them customer ratings and reviews too.
I'm trying to get these wars ended.
Superior blends of premium coffee, roasted fresh in Zionsville, Indiana.
Darren's coffee satisfies the casual and the connoisseur.
Scott Horton Show listeners visit Darren's coffee.com and use the coupon code Scott at checkout for free shipping.
Darren's coffee.com because everyone deserves to drink great coffee.
All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm going overtime here with Ray McGovern on the line.
Putin shuns Syrian quagmire is the piece running today at Antiwar.com.
Of course, this discussion, it's all proxy war, a Cold War fight between the American Empire and the Russians and the Chinese, for that matter, as Ray was mentioning earlier.
We're going to get back into healing the Sino-Soviet split and what it all means, but first, I wanted to go back to what you were saying right there at the break about the Turks and all the tough choices that they have to make.
It seems like President Erdogan is making worse and worse choices all the time over there.
I don't know, but he's got a lot of pressure on him as well to go along, but what do you think is going to happen there?
How much conflict is there, do you think, between Turkey's position and America's real position in this?
Not the public one, but America's real position in this war?
Well, Scott, I would say the Americans' real position of a couple of years ago was that the Turks would help us insert, quote, moderate, end quote, rebels into Syria, help equip them, help arm them, and that's what the Turks did.
Now, the Turks not only did that, but with or without our acquiescence, they brought chemical agents into Syria.
We know that because two Turkish parliamentarians in December, now, you haven't read that in the New York Times or the Washington Post, have you?
But in December, using court documents from a judicial proceeding, showed that eight or so people were involved in the transit of the precursors to sarin and other chemical weapons from Europe through Turkey down into Syria.
Now, those parliamentarians said it's a very good guess that that was the sarin that was used in the attack of August 21, 2013, outside of Damascus, the one that John Kerry and others seized upon saying, Bashar al-Assad did it, Bashar al-Assad did it.
Well, the reality is that he didn't do it.
Who was it?
It was the so-called moderate rebels.
And who made it possible?
The Turks, okay?
The Turkish intelligence service.
We had reporting about that at the time.
And we told the president, we, veteran intelligence professionals for sanity, were in touch with our former colleagues and other people.
We knew that that sarin was homemade sarin.
It was not the sarin that was in Syrian government stocks.
So why do I mention all that?
Well, we almost went to war with Syria, didn't we?
Read Jeffrey Goldberg's article in The Atlantic.
The president was hours away from pushing the button until, and Jeffrey Goldberg doesn't mention this, until General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went to the president the evening after John Kerry said 35 times, Bashar al-Assad's government, Bashar al-Assad's government did it, did it, did it, okay?
Dempsey goes to the president and he says, Mr. President, I've just heard from my British colleague.
He tells me they have a sample of the sarin that was used on August 21 outside Damascus.
It's homemade sarin, Mr. President.
It's not from Syrian army stocks.
Now if you want to press the button, well, that's your business.
I'm just advising you, but the UN investigators, inspection team are still in Damascus.
They don't come back for three days.
If you push the button, I know that the press is going to be beating on me.
They're going to say, General Dempsey, why could you not have waited three, four more days till the UN inspectors came back to tell us what kind of sarin it was?
I'm going to have to say to the press, it beats the hell out of me.
Go ask the president.
I don't think Dempsey did it in those clearer terms, but all I know is that within 20 hours, the president went up in the White House Rose Garden and said, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey, has advised me that there is, quote, no time sensitivity, end quote, to this operation against Syria, and therefore, we can do it tomorrow or next day or next week or next month, and so I have decided to go to Congress for appropriate authorization.
Now, there's a lot more to that story.
The British, for the first time in 3,472 years, voted against war, and there was a lot of dissent in the United States at the time, whether we should have another war, so there was more to the story, but the basic thing was that the Turks set us up, set the U.S. president up, and that's clear now.
Now you don't find it in the Times.
I wonder if- You find it in the London Review of Books, all right.
You do, but I wonder if the president's daily brief, I used to brief personally to Ronald Reagan's most senior national security advisors, including Vice President Bush and, you know, the rest of them.
I wonder if the president knows that he's been mousetrapped to that degree, and if so, whether he would take the necessary conclusions from that, and what I mean by that is the Turks can't be trusted, and the Turks are, well, unpredictable.
Erdogan is a little bit of a, well, I would not want to trust his judgment.
He shot down the Russian plane, for God's sake.
Now, the Turks are a problem because they're our ally, I mean a real ally, not like Israel, which is not a real ally, not like Saudi Arabia, same thing.
You know, to be an ally, you need a mutual defense treaty, and there is none with Israel.
There is none with Saudi Arabia, so you can call that, you know, an ally if you want, but it ain't an ally.
So Turkey is an ally, so let's say the Russians and the Turks get involved in a little shooting match.
Well, you know, the troglodytes like General Strangelove, not Strangelove, General Breedlove up there at NATO, he's going to be beating on the press and the president to retaliate against those bad Russians.
Well, that's really, really a problem.
And so what Obama's got to do is talk Turkey to Turkey, so to speak, no pun intended.
He's got to tell them, look, you start up a real problem with Russia.
I don't care if you're a member of NATO or not, we're going to tell it like it is.
If you provoked it, we're going to tell our NATO allies, don't expect us to, you know, come in and pick your chestnuts out of the fire.
But you know, Erdogan can't be depended on to even listen to that.
So that's a real problem.
The Saudis and the Qataris and the other rich Arabs, that's a different problem.
The problem there is simply, now your listeners need to know this, because they need to know this.
During Barack Obama's tenure, so seven years, $100 billion, B with a B, dollars worth of military aid has been offered by our arms merchants and arms manufacturers to Saudi Arabia.
That's a lot of money.
Okay.
Now people say, oh yeah, but only $50 billion has been approved.
Right, right, right.
Now only as an adverb or an adjective does not belong before $50 billion.
That's the fly in the ointment.
That's why Pope Francis, you know, talked about the blood-soaked arms merchants.
So these powerful people exercising this influence, well, they can't go to, Obama can't say, well, forget about those $50 billion, we're going to talk Turkey, we're going to talk Turkey to the Saudis, so to speak.
They have to knock it off.
So that's why you have the Saudis feeling pretty confident they can do anything they darn well please, and they have the leverage on us, it's not vice versa.
So will Obama face into that?
I don't know.
That remains to be seen, but that's an essential ingredient here.
And I like to think that he might be tempted to do that because, you know, what the Saudis are doing, not only beheading their own people, not only giving them 50,000 lashes, but destroying the country of Yemen.
You know, the people of the world are getting to know that.
Maybe the Saudis need to be set back a little bit.
Maybe we could get, see what we're afraid of, what our arms manufacturers are afraid of.
You know, if we put the Saudi noses at a joint, what's going to happen?
Oh, the French, the British, oh, the Russians, they're going to sell all this arms, we'll be out $50 billion.
So, you know, is it beyond the power of our diplomats to go to Paris, to go to London, to go to Moscow and say, look, we're going to talk Turkey to the Saudis, and we don't want you coming in behind us selling us all those arms.
All right, wait, wait, wait, hold it right there, y'all.
We'll be right back.
One more with Ray McGovern after this.
You hate government?
One of them libertarian types?
Maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers or warmongers.
Me too.
That's why I invented LibertyStickers.com.
Well, Rick owns it now, and I didn't make up all of them, but still, if you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go.
LibertyStickers.com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right, libertarian, empire, police, state, founders, quote, central banking.
Yes, bumper stickers about central banking, lots of them.
And well, everything that matters, LibertyStickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here for WallStreetWindow.com.
Mike Swanson knows his stuff.
He made a killing running his own hedge fund and always gets out of the stock market before the government generated bubbles pop, which is, by the way, what he's doing right now, selling all his stocks and betting on gold and commodities.
Sign up at WallStreetWindow.com and get real-time updates from Mike on all his market moves.
It's hard to know how to protect your savings and earn a good return in an economy like this.
Mike Swanson can help.
Follow along on paper and see for yourself.
WallStreetWindow.com.
All right, y'all.
I'm taking advantage of Ray McGovern's generosity now.
I've still got him on the line here.
FreedomNews.com, original.antiwar.com, slash McGovern.
We're talking about his piece on Russia accomplishing its goals in Syria and getting the hell out, saving Assad, not helping him win, but saving him from defeat, and mostly leaving.
But then, as Ray was explaining, no, they'll still be staying and doing airstrikes against the Islamic State in the illness or front to some degree.
But anyway, so we're talking about that.
We're talking about the role, of course, of Turkey and of Saudi Arabia.
But now I want to get back to what you were mentioning in the first segment there about Russia and China and how America has helped to heal the old split that Kissinger had exploited back in the 1970s during the era of one-world communism and how America defeated him by splitting him up.
So the deal is, well, I wanted to mention to you something that I'm willing to bet that you've read by Alfred McCoy not long ago for Tom Dispatch, all about the American panic over not just Russian-China, but Europe too, agreeing, at least in principle, to these long-term projects for building superhighway rail lines, pipelines, electric lines, and whatever kind of lines you could possibly build between Lisbon and Shanghai, and connecting all of Eurasia on one massive corridor of energy and trade and transportation and all of this, and how this is the Americans' worst nightmare.
In fact, Chalmers Johnson told me on the show years ago, in the old days, this would have been America's worst nightmare in the world would be Europe going ahead and teaming up with Russia and China.
Now our policymakers seem to be doing everything they can to push all these guys together.
Now I'm not sure what we have to lose.
Our politicians maybe have influence to lose, but I don't know what the American civilization has to lose if Eurasia gets it together and starts trading instead of killing each other.
Anyway, I wonder what you think of all of that, especially in terms of how American policy is a reaction to that, in a sense, or the cause and the reaction.
Well, the basic thing, in my view, Scott, to remember is that U.S. politicians have either a two-year or a four-year vista perspective.
They can't think beyond four years or eight years.
And this is a long-term trend.
This is probably, it probably dwarfs in importance anything else having to do with the strategic equation.
The empire is on its way out, the United States empire.
It's just that it can't be, it's not perceptible all that much just yet.
But the things you mentioned, not only the rapprochement with China on Moscow's part, but the fact that finally the West European, you know, it's been 70 years since we saved them from the Nazis.
They're going to grow up sooner or later.
I'd give them maybe five, 10 more years, and they'll see that their interests are better served by looking elsewhere rather than doing things, cutting off their nose to spite their throat or vice versa in instituting sanctions, economic sanctions on Russia.
So this is a long-term trend.
Myopia prevails in Washington.
And little by little, as I already said, the Russians don't have to build up their defense potential too much anymore.
They're not really afraid of what Strange Love or Breed Love will do, the commander of NATO.
The U.S. Army is not going to do anything desperate.
Now the Turks might do something.
And anyhow, what really obtains here is a strategic rearrangement, what is called the New Silk Road, which is going on from China, as you said, to Portugal, could become a reality.
And the supreme irony, and I'll only take one more minute to say this, is that I go back a ways.
And if you go back to 1979, 1989 actually, when the Berlin Wall fell, okay, there was talk there, sincere talk, by people like George H.W. Bush of one united, free Europe from Lisbon, not to Beijing, but to Vladivostok.
Now the military industrial congressional complex put the kibosh on that.
But this new arrangement, where the New Silk Road coming from China all the way to Lisbon, that's more a reality now than anyone would have dreamed just 10 years ago.
So the empire is sort of doomed.
And the question is whether U.S. politicians will be adroit enough or knowledgeable enough to work out reasonable deals where Americans will not suffer too terribly.
That remains to be seen.
Yeah, well, like you were saying before, as long as we have our arms merchants have such an interest in keeping this thing going.
And you know, there's very little detailed journalism about how this goes.
You know, the last real great article I read about it was back 10 years ago by Richard Cummings all about how Lockheed had learned the lesson that they don't just want to sell only to the military, that'll guarantee their profits.
They need to help determine what the policy is going to be and who we're going to be attacking so that they know what kind of tanks to make and that kind of thing.
What kind of planes we're going to need so that they don't make bad investments or captive market isn't good enough.
They need to captivate the policy behind the market, too.
So they created the committee to expand NATO was a creation of Lockheed, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which specialized in human rights concerns as opposed to weapons of mass destruction.
But still, again, set up by Bruce Jackson, a Lockheed.
And then it turns out that all the political neocons, you know, Richard Pearl and Paul Wolfowitz and all the ones in the actual administration, that separate government, as Colin Powell called it in the first Bush Jr. administration.
They were all Lockheed guys as much as they were Likudniks.
And yet, but who's documenting this now?
I mean, we can all see it from the outside, but who's got a good insider on on how they dictate, say, for example, the policy in Yemen or the policy in Ukraine?
We have some folks writing about arms control.
And there are there is a lot of information out there on the Web comparing our defense expenditures.
And what Boeing, as well as Lockheed, see as their interests, what is not appreciated by the American people is the insatiable greed, the insatiable greed not only of the corporations to profiteer on war, but the Chinovniks, the bureaucrats, the people like Pearl, Wolfowitz and others who sit up in their ivory towers, have their martinis and think about how they'll make the next million.
I know that to be the case.
I don't understand it because I don't know what one does with this second million dollars.
Call me naive, but I come from a more proletarian background.
It's really hard for me to understand it.
I do know it.
All right, so that's Ray McGovern.
He was a CIA analyst for 27 years, was the chief of the Soviet division and of course was the briefer for H.W. Bush when he was vice president in the 1980s.
He's the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and he writes at raymcgovern.com, consortiumnews.com and original.antiwar.com slash McGovern, where his latest is running today, Putin shuns Syrian quagmire.
Thank you so much, especially for staying the whole hour with us today, Ray.
Welcome, Scott.
Sure, appreciate it.
Talk to you soon.
Hey, check out the audio book of Lew Rockwell's Fascism vs.
Capitalism, narrated by me, Scott Horton at audible.com.
It's a great collection of his essays and speeches on the important tradition of liberty.
From medieval history to the Ron Paul revolution, Rockwell blasts our status enemies, profiles our greatest libertarian heroes and prescribes the path forward in the battle against Leviathan.
Fascism vs.
Capitalism by Lew Rockwell for audio book.
Find it at Audible, Amazon, iTunes or just click in the right margin of my website at scotthorton.org.
Hey, Al, Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
This nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone.
We are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at Amazon.com in Kindle or in paperback.
Just click the book in the right margin at scotthorton.org or thewarstate.com.