03/22/16 – Daniel McAdams – The Scott Horton Show

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Trying to get these wars ended.
Alright y'all, this is the Scott Horton Show.
I'm Scott Horton, and our guest today is Daniel McAdams.
For many years, he was Ron Paul's foreign policy advisor in his congressional office, and he is now the director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, and they put out a lot of great content on interventionist foreign policy on a daily basis.
Welcome back to the show.
Dan, how are you doing?
Hi Scott, great to be back with you.
Very happy to have you here, and I want to talk with you, obviously, about Brussels.
And I guess it's too late, but I was going to crack a joke about how, hey, wouldn't it be a great idea if we back a bunch of jihadist terrorists in Syria and give them the eastern half of that country at a minimum, and then betray them and stab them in the back and start bombing them?
Don't you think that'll probably work out?
Especially if we give them years and years for a bunch of European Muslims to go and travel to Syria and join the ranks of the jihadists before we betray them.
That'll probably work out great, right?
We could just end right now, Scott, because you've captured everything so perfectly.
This is everything that we warned them about for five years, Dan.
Yeah, but still we're wrong.
It's exactly what we said would happen.
Yeah, still we're wrong.
It's interesting.
I was looking up before we started, and this is something you probably know this, Scott, but from the countries that are not in the immediate region of Syria, Belgium has by far the most foreign fighters inside Syria.
It's estimated to be at least 250, and the next closest is Denmark.
So there are plenty of Belgians who've gone over to fight with ISIS.
And this is going to keep blowing back for years and years.
And the solution, I just did the Liberty Report with Dr. Paul, and the solution, of course, is to do more of what caused it in the first place.
It's going to be, C, we told you we're going to send more military, and we're already sending more troops into Iraq now.
So do more of what caused the problem in the first place.
All right.
And so assuming for the sake of argument that it was the Islamic State or the Al-Nusra Front, which seems like the most likely explanations to me anyway, but assuming that for the sake of argument, or you could quibble with that if you want, but assume that, why do you think they would do such a thing?
I mean, what's the point?
They're just mad and want to kill innocent bystanders, or there's something more to what they're up to?
Well, I think there is, there has to be a component of retaliation.
You know, I think Brussels is sort of the weak underbelly in a way.
It's a lot easier to hit in Europe right now than to hit the United States, thankfully, because of, you know, the policies of Angela Merkel, the policies of the EU, which have been, as you sort of alluded to half-jokingly in the beginning, you follow the U.S. blindly in foreign policy.
You go into Libya, which unleashes ISIS and all kinds of radicals, destroys the country.
You have this great plan to overthrow the Syrian government, and we can talk about this a little later, but you know, the Hillary emails have been fascinating over the last couple of days.
So you have this plan to do this, you destabilize the region, you ruin these people's homeland, and then you're Angela Merkel, and you open the door and say, hey guys, come on in.
Anyone can come as you wish.
And then you wonder why this problem exists and is getting worse.
If I was, I mean, if I was one of these guys and I saw my family killed, my home ruined, and I had the opportunity to travel, who knows, either of us might be mad enough to go seek revenge.
Yeah, you know, the fact that, well, I don't know, just the group think, the way this works, I was talking with Peter Van Buren about it, where, you know, come on, on this show for five years, and of course at the Ron Paul Institute and, you know, among the libertarians, we've been saying, you know, just all you have to do is use your imagination for 15 seconds and say, well, then what, and then what, and then what?
I mean, really, for 10 years we've been saying on this show, if we did have a neocon-inspired regime change in Syria, who could possibly take their place?
The Muslim Brotherhood, if you're lucky, right?
That would be the most moderate version of the new Sunni Islamist majority government in Syria, if you overthrew Damascus.
We talked about that for years and years on this show.
And then when they started the thing, we're saying, look at, and we didn't really have this problem as much in Iraq for whatever reason, and a lot of Arabs from around the Middle East go to Iraq to fight with Zarqawi against the Americans, and then they went home to Libya and to Syria to be, for Obama and Hillary to ally with later.
But with the Syria war, and from the very beginning, right in front of all of our faces from the very beginning, the foreign fighters weren't just coming from Saudi.
They were coming from Europe.
This was a whole new generation of kids who grew up on the Iraq war, et cetera, whatever.
And they were ready to go and fight.
They're that much closer to Europe in Syria there.
And we've known for years and years that you've had hundreds of maybe thousands of European Muslims going to fight in Syria.
And then the obvious question, come on, well, what's going to happen to them when they come home?
What are they going to do when they come home?
And how could the national police and the intelligence agencies think that they could possibly have a handle on it all and be able to contain it all?
And the point about Peter Van Buren being, he used to be in the State Department, of course.
And when I talk with him like this, he says, listen, they don't have these discussions at the State Department.
I know it's hard to believe.
You think that they're going, yes, we're going to use al Qaeda to do this and that in the most cynical way.
But in fact, they believe really stupid, wrong things.
And all of their staff only tells them what they know they want to hear.
And they just don't get pushback.
Madam Secretary, we're worried that Zawahiri's goals are going to really be advanced here.
Right.
Like that conversation just doesn't happen.
But I don't know.
What do you think of that?
You worked in D.C. for so long.
Well, I actually worked very briefly in the State Department and I kept my mouth shut and my eyes open.
But you know, there is that group thing.
These are people who are together all day in the same place.
They're very carefully screened out, especially the foreign service officers.
They're very screened out in terms of the personality type.
You know, they're the way they operate.
They're very they're very screened.
They live together.
They work together.
And there's a lot of pressure not to think outside the box.
And I had when I was there, I had a very good friend who became a mentor and a lifelong friend, and he was a dedicated analyst and he was not afraid to think outside the box.
And when the end of communism came, he sent up a few pieces of analysis that were not going along with conventional wisdom.
And I'll tell you, he had his career destroyed by these people.
So there is a huge downside to not going along with the Washington group, with the State Department, especially the State Department group.
These people are generally not big risk takers, especially intellectually.
It's just bad for your career.
So why would you do it?
So, yeah, I think, Peter, I mean, I think the world of Peter and I think he's absolutely right.
It's not some nefarious plan launched in the bowels of of the State Department, but it's just simply groupthink that just takes over.
And, you know, I remember this as a journalist over in Eastern Europe, Scott, if you if you try to talk to another journalist about things that you've seen, they're different.
They say, well, nobody else is writing it that way.
You know, how can I how can I do this?
So, you know, this is how we get in the mess we are.
People are afraid to think differently and speak out differently.
It's not unless you are Scott Horton or you work for Ron Paul.
It's terrible for you.
And even then, neither of us are sitting in in our cozy Washington, D.C., think tanks, are we, Scott?
Yeah, no, I guess if I guess if the Qataris were paying me seven figures, I might have a little bit of a different idea about what should be done with Assad.
You know, I can admit that I can admit that, you know, come on, old Charles Lister.
That boy, he's got a nice place, I bet.
Yeah.
And he's yeah.
No, that's a that's a good point.
If I could circle back really quickly, you said about Syria.
You're right, though.
What's the best thing we could hope for the Muslim Brotherhood taking over?
And you reminded when you said that that's what happened when we did the Arab Spring in Egypt.
You know, the Muslim Brotherhood took over and what happened?
We freaked out and said, oh, my God, we can't have this.
So we got rid of him and put another strongman back in, just like the one we took out.
Maybe even worse.
So this is you know, this is the example of them just absolutely having no idea what will come next.
Yeah.
I mean, well, I quibble with you a bit there.
It seemed to me like it was more the consensus of virtually all the people of Egypt, less the military to overthrow Mubarak.
But then, you know, the part that got out of hand was they they wanted all their little with the September 15th or the whatever little kept liberals and union, you know, NGO types and whatever.
They expected them to inherit the power.
You know, that had been Liz Cheney's project even back in the Bush years in the second Bush administration.
But then what happened was the military, I guess, was it the military of the Muslim Brotherhood that had I think it was the military that had all the Western NGO, you know, NED records deported and and then the Muslim Brotherhood won the election and then they freaked.
So I think I could be wrong, but I kind of believe the New York Times version was they wanted to keep Mubarak so bad.
And then if they couldn't have that, they wanted Omar Suleiman, the head of the secret torture police, to be the new pharaoh.
And then failing that, they were hoping to get their good little pet Democrats, which of course was never going to happen.
But yeah, I don't know.
I mean, the State Department had been involved quite a number of years before the Arab Spring in trying to get these people going.
So you always have to have a combination.
So there's you know, the question was asked, like, what are we going to do after Mubarak?
He is getting old.
And there were you know, I think some wanted the torture squad and some wanted to try democracy there.
Some kind of thing.
Yeah.
And you and I just thought we should leave him the heck alone.
Yeah.
And look at what a mess of it has become.
And now.
But so.
Yeah.
Now back to Syria.
You mentioned the Hillary emails there.
I can't find I was sitting here Googling it.
But there I read the PDF file of the thing.
You know, it wasn't hearsay or of any kind.
It's out there somewhere where a Hillary staffer.
And this would be February of 2012.
Hillary staffer sends an email to her that includes a note about Ayman al-Zawahiri endorsing the Syrian revolution.
And he says, hey, boss, look, AQ is on our side in this one.
And what's interesting about this to me is it was two days later, one or two days later that Hillary Clinton was on CBS and was interviewed on CBS.
And of course, this would have been March 28th, I think, 2012.
And the CBS slant, of course, is why aren't we doing more to overthrow Assad?
And she obviously thinking of this exact email, I think it's fair to say, uses it as an excuse to not do more.
It's really short.
Let's listen.
We know Al-Qaeda.
Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
Hamas is now supporting the opposition.
Are we supporting Hamas?
So she's you know, that's her own way of conceiving the situation is that if we're undermining Assad and helping the revolution, we at least very well could be helping our only real G.D. enemies in the world, the guys who attacked us from 1993 through right now and and and not Assad.
So that was her own conception of it.
That was her excuse that she hid behind there was that, hey, if this revolution is good for all, I'm an Al-Zawahiri, maybe it's not good for us.
And yet we this is the beginning of 2012.
We know she did nothing but persist through the rest of the year.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I mean, I think this is you know, this is the problem of these people who really believe they're the masters of the universe.
They believe that they are the puppet masters.
And I'm looking at another one of the WikiLeaks cable.
This is from 2015, where one of Hillary's emails, the best way to help Israel deal with Iran's growing nuclear capability is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad.
You know, so there's this there's so many different misperceptions and perceptions.
First, that our job in the Middle East is to help Israel.
The second, that helping overthrow Assad will help Israel.
And third, that you can deal with Iran's nuclear capability by doing these other two things.
There are so many variables in this one statement.
It's it's it's just hard to even get your head around it.
Well, and, you know, I think part of it even, too, was, you know, this is in 2012 again, this was the the harshest period of Netanyahu's bluff to attack Iran.
And they were all, you know, in D.C., apparently really worried about it.
And I think part of the argument in that email is that, listen, if if we, you know, push harder against Assad, then that will, for I guess, you know, appease the Israelis and make them less likely to do a sneak attack on Iran without our permission that would drag us into war and, of course, ruin the negotiations, et cetera, like that.
So that's pretty huge when that's the advice to Hillary Clinton is like, boy, you know, we better do what the Israelis say on this one or else things could be really bad, boss.
You know, not like, hey, what what would you have me instruct Netanyahu?
Right.
Yeah.
You know, hopefully those checks clear.
Maybe that would be the way to go.
But there's also the misperception that that the U.S. knows what's best for Israel.
And you know, they usually get it wrong.
And, you know, we I think we saw this this past week, the pandering at the AIPAC meeting where the American politicians who, as you well know, Scott, they know about as much about Israel as they know about the man in the moon.
But they go down there and they tell them what they think they want to hear.
And it's a small group of mostly Americans who are there.
And meanwhile, the people that actually live in Israel, you know, do have to suffer the consequences of bad policy that's largely made in the U.S. to a degree and have to deal with people who don't live there setting the setting the agenda for them.
So I would think that I would resent that if I lived in Israel.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That is a very important point that, you know, like Sheldon Adelson, for example, of course, he lives here, but he's one of the biggest donors to the Likud party in Israel.
So as much as Americans complain about the Israeli lobby distorting our politics, it's American, you know, not just Jews, but also born again, Christian movements and all that who support and intervene in Israeli politics and support the very same Likud kooks who then dream up the policies for our Likud kooks to parrot back and forth.
It's the world's worst echo chamber in the world.
It's all run by a gambling casino magnet out of Las Vegas.
And there are thousands of jobs inside the beltway for people that probably couldn't give a hoot either way about fundamentalists or Israelis, but nevertheless make a huge living off the war machine.
It pays extremely well.
So but, you know, I was I was I have to confess, I was tweeting slightly nastily during Trump's AIPAC speech.
And I but then someone said something about the AIPAC's influence or what have you.
And I and I and I pointed out, you know, I've got nothing against AIPAC.
They have a right to make themselves heard.
I fault the politicians who who think by sucking up and doing everything they're told in exchange for a campaign donation that they can sell out their the constituency, they can sell out Americans' interests.
You know, I blame the the American politicians and the American people for not holding their feet to the fire.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, that was what was so controversial, of course, about Walter Mearsheimer's book on the Israel lobby is they say probably from the first sentence that, hey, everything that they're doing here, virtually all of it is legitimate democratic politics in a limited constitutional republic.
And so we're not saying they can't.
We're just saying they are.
Look at how well they play the game of democracy.
If you cross them, they will finance your primary opponent next time and they won't forget it.
Well, the the peacenik lobby could do the very same thing.
We just don't.
Not as well.
You know.
And it's, you know, it's the idea that you have to tell them what you think they want to hear.
But, you know, Ron Paul, as you know, in his whole time there, he never would sit and think, oh, my gosh, what am I going to say to this group?
I've got to make them happy.
It never happened that way.
He just simply had a different idea of what would hurt or harm the U.S. first and then and then and then Israel.
He didn't agree with the the view of the neocons that causing an absolute commotion in the Middle East is going to help anyone over there.
Right.
Yeah.
He's very fond of pointing out about the attempted negotiations by the government in 2006 and 2007 with the Syrians that the Bush administration quashed, intervened in and ended.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You can't do it without us.
We've got to be in the middle of it.
And think about what's happened since then.
You know, if they could have had anything like an Egypt style or a Jordan style peace agreement, even a sort of kind of unofficial one with Assad, then then where would we be right now?
We wouldn't be talking about the Brussels slaughter today.
You're most likely we wouldn't.
And you know, the thing about non interventionism is we don't it's it's not a utopian philosophy.
We don't promise a perfect world.
There will be acts of terrorism.
There will be acts of violence.
There will be people beating their wives and husbands.
But it's just that it will be it will be better.
It will be less bad if we stop going over and provoking people.
If we stop thinking that we can run people's lives thousands of miles away, you know, when the government doesn't even know how to run our lives here.
And I mean, thankfully, they are incompetent here, but they think somehow they have this magic potion that they can run the world.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so now what is to be done anyway?
Assuming that we can just get the intervention in Muslim countries ended, we still got a lot of guys on their side who seem to be, you know, at least some of them will be hell bent on revenge enough or maybe worse, will still believe that it makes smart strategic sense for them to continue to quarrel with the crusaders.
And so they would, you know, very well may want to keep attacking us in order to, you know, even if we could get a Ron Paul in there to end the war, but they might want to try to start it back up again at this point.
So how do how do the civilian populations of the West?
How does our society break off this whole engagement at this point?
You know, you could hear the cruisers maybe even say, well, Dan McAdams, there was a time when you were right, but now it's gone too far.
Now we got to kill them.
They said that about ISIS, you know, but, you know, the whole thing is it goes back to, you know, we don't promise nirvana, but, you know, it's like you're a guy who who works too hard, eats too much and doesn't exercise and you gain a bunch of weight and you're super unhealthy just because you give up doing that and change your lifestyle and start doing exercise.
You're not going to be healthy tomorrow.
But that doesn't mean you shouldn't start going down the right path again.
And eventually you may find your way back to good health.
You know, I guess that hits too close to home, but you see what I'm saying?
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
No, I need to lose pounds.
All right.
Well, listen, man, it's been very good having you back on the show.
Great to talk to you again.
Really appreciate it, Dan.
Great.
Thanks, Scott.
All the great work you guys do there.
All right, y'all.
That is the great Dan McAdams.
For years and years, he is Ron Paul's foreign policy advisor in his congressional office there, which clearly did a hell of a lot of good.
And now he is the director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
And they churn out great antiwar propaganda day in and day out over there.
So check out the Ron Paul Institute.
See you all tomorrow.
Thanks.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
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