04/23/15 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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War and religion.
The Bible made me do it.
That's one.
That's at unz.com.
The other is the Pope rebukes Turkey and should challenge America and Israel by both by Phil Giraldi, former CIA officer and writer for the American Conservative.
That's the last one there.
And unz.com again.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing good.
Oh, I forgot to say, executive director of the Council for the National Interest in Washington.
Okay.
So yeah, talk to me about the Pope here.
The Pope rebukes Turkey, and that's over the old Ottoman genocide from right around this time a hundred years ago.
Is that right?
Yeah.
It's the centenary of the start of the genocide, and basically started in 1915 when the Russian imperial armies invaded eastern Turkey.
And the Armenians, it was suspected at the time, or perhaps it was invented at the time, that they were siding with the invaders who were fellow Christians.
So they became a convenient scapegoat and were basically marched en masse away from their homeland across a desert region, central Anatolia, and as many as a million and a half of them might have died.
Wow.
So that's kind of Andrew Jackson with exponents there.
Yeah.
Certainly there are precedents in our own history of similar forced migrations of Indians, but nobody's worried about that one.
They're worried about the one that was carried out by the Turks, because of course the Turks are the other, they're Muslims.
And so there's a religious kind of flavor to all of this.
Right.
Yeah, of course.
And now, but so I don't know, man, what's the big deal about just recognizing the thing?
I mean, why such politics about this?
Everybody agrees.
I mean, if you're telling me with a straight face that, yeah, something on the order of a million point something died in this thing.
And it sounds like a genocide or an attempted one, you know?
Yeah, I agree.
And in fact, in my article, I say that, you know, there's no doubt about it, that a lot of the orders to carry this out came from top level Turks among the young Turks and the Ottoman advisors.
And there's no question but that it was genocidal in nature.
I don't have a problem with that, except it seems to be something that they're digging out after 100 years to be playing politics with.
I don't think that there's any clear humanitarian message here.
And the objection I raise is the fact that here we have the Pope talking about something that occurred 100 years ago with a government that no longer exists, with people that no longer exist.
And yet we have real life things like, for example, George W. Bush, who was met in private audience by Pope John Paul II four times without John Paul II ever saying anything to George Bush or refusing to meet him, which would have been even better, to send a signal that George Bush was kind of carrying out his own genocide.
Yeah, and he only had, I mean, he did, I guess, oppose the Iraq War, John Paul, but just barely, right?
So, oh, well, you know, I hope for peace or some kind of...
Right.
Yeah, it was that kind of language.
So I'm basically saying here it was a Pope that genuinely, I think, is a revered individual for a lot of what he did, who basically when confronted with the issue of confronting an American president for policies that were manifestly evil and were gravely damaging the Christian populations in the Middle East.
And here all he does is come out with a mealy-mouthed comment about, oh, well, we oppose this fighting and so on and so forth.
So he could have done a lot more, and that was my point.
And then I get into the point of, well, what about, you know, Israel?
Why are Christian churches so reluctant to support BDS, which is Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, against particularly the West Bank Israeli colonies?
Yeah, yeah, and then there's been a tepid response on the part of Christianity about this.
And I said, gee, what would it be like if the Pope were actually to make a very firm comment about this, that Catholics should support BDS or some aspect of it?
And again, it seems to me that there's politics in this and that where the Pope should be serving as a witness to this and making a moral statement, he's unwilling to do so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, and this Pope Francis, he's more outspoken on all kinds of things than the last two popes, right?
But just not on the American empire?
Yeah, that's right.
He is.
But, you know, nevertheless, I guess it gives you the lesson that however much you want to regard a religion as some kind of moral force, basically any organized religion is actually political.
And we're seeing the politics of this playing out in terms of what he thinks he can get away with saying and what he thinks he can't get away with saying, because it's clear to anyone that these are major moral issues in terms of how the United States has devastated the Middle East.
I'm sure you saw the story about a week ago where they're estimating now that two million people are dead as a result of the global war on terror, and nobody talks about that.
And the Israeli policy on the West Bank and everything, almost nobody agrees that there's some kind of a moral basis for what they're doing there or ethical basis.
So these are these are clear cut issues.
And yet we're not getting the kind of definitive comments from our moral leaders in the religious organizations.
Right.
Yeah.
In fact, Grant Smith is just pointing out a new study where Americans, I think 60 something percent say that they don't agree with the current policy of the occupation in the West Bank, that kind of thing.
And so, you know, it's confusing to me, especially with this current pope.
I mean, John Paul was already so old.
I mean, who knows what with him?
I don't know.
But but with this current guy, it seems like if he would actually just make a case, right, not just, you know, make a statement, a small statement, but actually explain why this or that, you know, on a controversial issue like the war on terrorism or, you know, indefinite detention or or the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in East Jerusalem, these kinds of things that if he would explain, hey, look, this is why I think this and this is why it ought to be our official position that that could really make a big difference in the way people think about this.
I mean, in I don't know how it is in Europe, but in America, the Protestant churches are so divided.
There's like, you know, however many twenty five different, you know, major branches of Protestantism.
But on the Catholic side, that's a lot of people to kind of get with it at once.
You know, it seems like if it's if the pope is promoting something like justice in a previously taboo area of discussion, you know.
Yeah, absolutely.
And that's the way I see it.
There are there are 80 million people who are nominally at least Catholic in the United States.
And that's quite a big group.
And the fact is, if, you know, the pope were to take the lead, you know, you don't have to you don't have to package this as as an Israel bash or even as a as a United States bash.
There are ways to finesse the issue, but to talk about it.
And it just seems to me that this opportunity is is is sedulously avoided.
It's easier to talk about Armenian genocide because it's 100 years old.
And besides, Turks are Muslims.
So, you know, it's the kind of message that comes across to me that I think is totally inappropriate.
And it's why probably personally, I felt I haven't been very religious for a long time, but I personally felt a complete dissociation with the Catholic Church when Pope John Paul II met with George W. Bush.
I said, this is just a betrayal of every value that I was brought up with as a Catholic.
I still feel that way.
Yeah, yeah, it really is unfortunate that, well, you know, again, just the opportunity wasted.
It's like Rand Paul, all all that could be done, but then it's the same frustration I feel when I listen to the radio, you know, tune in NPR or something, and it's just some nonsense, right?
Like the most hard hitting thing they'll talk about is promoting the next housing bubble or something.
Whatever.
It's just what a waste of bandwidth of, you know what I mean, of radio spectrum.
It's like, you know, my wife has the tendency to watch a channel of CBS news in the morning and they have what's his name, Bob Rose.
What's his first name?
Charlie Rose, the PBS.
Charlie Rose.
Charlie Rose is the moderator or whatever.
And he looks at you with a steely gaze and he says, we are now about to have some real news.
And they use that phrase every day.
So obviously some kind of consultant told him that this is a phrase you have to use to impress upon the people that they're getting real news.
And of course, it's all bullshit.
Yeah, it's just pictures of puppies.
Yeah, it's about what the Kardashians are doing about some guy who survived after having his leg eaten by a shark.
You know, that's real news.
Yeah.
Always with the sharks.
Sharks, sharks are the victims of our media.
Yeah, you know, the whole summer.
Anything you do in the news.
Yeah, the whole summer in 2001, before the 9-11 attack, that was all I talked about was Gary Condit and then the shark attacks because there were a dozen.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right.
Well, anyway, so and now to the Protestant side of this.
Oh, actually, you know what?
We're supposed to be on break.
So hang tight with us.
We'll be right back.
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All right, guys.
Well, I don't know if you were hearing all that, but.
Had some technical difficulties here, but it's all right.
I got Phil Giraldi on the line.
He's a former CIA officer.
Now he runs the Council for the National Interest and he writes for UNS dot com and the American Conservative dot com.
We're talking about how the pope ought to denounce the empire.
It's not like he would need to even hedge that much.
It's pretty much all wrong and based on all lies.
And I don't know about we can all just get along, but we could certainly get along a hell of a lot better than we are with the way things are going.
I think anyone could agree.
And then so you have this other piece that's sort of along these same lines, but in a different way.
War and religion.
Don't tell me the Bible made me do it here at UNS dot com.
And when you start off here talking about Michelle Bachmann and I got to admit, I'm a bit confused about the end times here that she's saying that Barack Obama's refusal to kowtow to Israel is going to cause Jesus to come back.
When I thought that we always had to kowtow to Israel in order to make Jesus come back was the whole scam here.
So which is it, Phil?
I don't know.
I mean, she's a little bit confusing, actually.
I mean, I also point out that she's apparently studied Islamic holy texts and has determined that that the Muslims have ever since the beginning been wanting to invent or get a nuclear weapon.
That means since these texts date from the 7th century, that means that they've been doing it for, you know, fourteen hundred years.
Maybe she studied under Daniel Pipes or Frank Daphne.
I suspect so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, you're right.
She's she's a bit confused.
She she also said in the interview that she was just really looking forward to the fact that all these all this this dissing of Israel and and this this love fest by Obama with Islamic terrorists is going to bring back the second coming of Christ much sooner.
And that's something that she's really happy about.
She's yet another American politician who wants the world to end.
Yeah.
Well, at least she's optimistic either way.
Right.
That if we're doing everything George Bush's way, that's helping to bring about the apocalypse.
And and if we do it Obama's way, then that's helping to bring about the apocalypse, too, which is something we can all look forward to.
Well, that's probably due to her experience as a politician.
She's willing to look at both sides of the issue.
And fortunately, they both come out her way.
Oh, man.
All right.
So now.
But listen, Michelle Bachman, she's a easy target to use as a punching bag here.
But does anyone agree with her, Phil, about any of this nonsense?
Yeah, that's what the rest of my article goes on to describe how apparently there are quite quite a lot of Michelle Bachman's out there, because if you look at various developments, they're the Republican Party, which, of course, pretty much moves in lockstep with both Israel and the Christian Zionists is essentially dedicated clearly to to go to war with Iran.
So, I mean, this is a this is the kind of consequence which probably a lot of Republican congressmen would not want to admit or they don't really want that.
They just want something, you know, to chew on.
But the fact is that this is what the ultimately this is where it's going to lead.
And then there was an opinion poll, a Bloomberg opinion poll, which essentially said that roughly half of the U.S. population very heavily weighted in terms of Democrats, Republicans and especially those who describe themselves as evangelical or born again.
These people, by large margins, basically want the United States to defer to Israeli interests in terms of what the United States does in the Middle East.
In other words, turn over our foreign policy to them is OK with them.
That was a perfect bleep there with your phone.
There started with the F and it could have been either one there, foreign or something else.
Now, listen, it's not hyperbole, everybody.
Wait, stop.
I know that you're thinking, come on, Phil Giroldi, did they really say that?
But that's really what they said was, quote, even if Israel's interests diverge from the United States, the Republicans said America should do what the Israelis want, not what's good for America.
That's what they said.
And, you know, admittedly, I pointed out that if you read the whole question, the whole question starts with Israel is our closest ally and friend and the only democracy in the Middle East.
And then it goes into the question.
So it's a loaded question the way it's set up.
And I suspect that the question is something different, like should the United States go to war against Iran because Israel wants us to?
The response, I think, could have been quite different.
But, you know, it's the problem is that the U.S. public has been fed this steady diet of propaganda and nonsense for years and years and years now.
And it really doesn't know what's going on and probably doesn't really care.
But the fact is that, you know, this kind of stuff is real dangerous, just like when you and I have talked in the past about the policy in the Ukraine and with Russia, this stuff is dangerous.
I mean, this is this is our nation's security.
I hate to use that word, but our security in a very real sense and the well-being of our of our people and and and not sending our kids off to get killed in wars that make no sense, like we've been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yeah.
Now, and especially when you're talking about Russia, if they have one job in the world, it's keeping the peace with Russia, even if we've got to sacrifice Lithuania.
Sorry, but you know what I mean?
If if the Russians, if if the next president after Putin decides to call himself something more dictatorial than president and decides he's going to retake the Baltics, according to the current treaty situation, we would be obliged to get into a nuclear war with them, even if it meant the death of every last Lithuanian in order to make sure that they guaranteed their independence from Russia was guaranteed.
And so, I mean, I have to be that to phrase it that ruthless, because that's the actual stakes, the way that the empire set it up.
Yeah, that's right.
And we have a lot of that to blame on Bill Clinton, who basically was the one that gave the green light to expanding into Eastern Europe, even after Gorbachev was promised that we wouldn't do that.
And this has created this horrible situation where we're we're basically obligated to defend former parts of the Warsaw Pact against Russia.
And Russia is the only country in the world that can destroy us.
I mean, this is, you know, if you wanted to write a fiction novel and use this as a theme, nobody would believe it.
Yeah, you know, it's funny because when I I'm sure you read John Mearsheimer's piece about this in Foreign Affairs and I interviewed him about it and he said that, no, really, I know it might sound unbelievable.
It's really all about interests and and real things going on behind the scenes.
But from his point of view, it was an academic exercise.
Some academics believed that it's basically like just spreading the EU.
You spread NATO, too, and that keeps America's influence there and it'll be fine.
And the Russians won't mind.
And it was basically, you know, it all came down to some stupid paper some guy wrote or something that everybody decided they agreed with.
And then it turned out that it was actually a bad idea.
And, you know, it's basically as simple as that.
Like these guys basically thought all they were doing was, you know, making sure that their golf club could stay on the dole for the longer term or whatever, and that there would be no consequences.
That was really the argument of Strobe Talbot.
And then the Russians will never misconstrue this as some kind of threat to them.
How could they ever when we don't mean it that way at all?
And so it makes me wonder whether that's actually true.
Maybe that's actually true that rather than, you know, this much more, you know, hard line neocon wish to someday dismantle Russia or do a color coded revolution there, something like that, that the men who actually expanded NATO really were just a bunch of, you know, guys with elbow patches and pipes and bright ideas.
You know, without even not even considering what Lockheed wants necessarily or anything like that.
What do you think of that?
Well, I suspect it could be a lot of truth to that.
And certainly Mearsheimer is well enough placed to kind of be, you know, inside the system when when that was happening.
I wouldn't doubt that.
But at the same time, let's not let's not, you know, diminish the role of people like Wolfowitz and Victoria Nuland in terms of operating from the inside, from inside the government to make this kind of stuff happen.
This just didn't happen in a vacuum.
Right.
Yeah, well, yeah.
And certainly when you're talking about the the latest crisis, but I don't know how much influence she had going back on this.
Well, she's actually well, she goes all the way back to to Cheney.
She was his foreign policy advisor.
So we're talking, you know, 2000.
Oh, yeah.
No.
So so, yes, somebody you or somebody ought to really look into that and see what was her role in in in Bush's Eastern European policy and NATO expansion, specifically like in in 2008, when they held that meeting where they talked about bringing Ukraine into NATO and Georgia, too.
Yeah, yeah.
And Georgia, I would suspect if we could get at the documents, which are probably classified, we would learn that a lot of these names are popping up here, there and everywhere in terms of the discussions, in terms of the direction they should move in.
I bet you.
Yeah.
Well, anyway, so I'm sorry I kept you over time here.
But one more thing, I guess, would be back to the question of the religiosity and all this here.
It's sort of the state religion is all mixed up in it, too.
And it seems like the bottom line here, Phil, is that the truth doesn't matter at all, that Americans can just be made to believe that, yeah, well, you know, war with Russia was inevitable or, yeah, well, you know, the only solution in the Middle East is just to turn the whole place to glass or whatever kind of, you know, bromides that people get subjected to time after time and year after year that, you know, none of it has to have anything to do with the reality.
Even Rand Paul says the enemy is radical Islam when when we're right in the middle of a regional civil war within, you know, a sectarian war within the the Riyadh side and the Tehran side.
And and but meanwhile, the enemy is all of them, even according to him.
That's all anybody knows.
And then throw a little Jesus come back kind of magic on top and whatever.
And and that's enough to support any sort of policy that the Newlands and the rest of these idiots can make up for us, it seems like.
Yeah, well, I agree with that.
But I see to me, the scariest thing is the fact that you have this solid, wealthy, numerous, religious oriented group that actually believes that the world should end and sooner rather than later.
And it's about time for the rest of us to stand up to this.
I mean, we've had we've had numerous Republican politicians who've taken the same position, although they don't quite verbalize it that way.
But that's what they believe.
And you've got this huge mass of of of Christians United for Israel and other evangelical groups that basically are on board of the same thing.
This is what scares me.
It's maybe time for the rest of us who don't want unnecessarily our world to end next week to stand up to them and expose them and talk about them.
Yeah, well, and you know, the thing is, too, is it sounds so crazy.
It sounds like maybe you're the crazy one or something.
But no, really, they're there.
And there's always indications here and there, Phil, and they don't ever get enough attention.
But that our Air Force at the highest levels is run by these nuts and including the Strategic Air Command, the guys with the bombers, the long range nuclear bombers.
Yep, yep.
I understand nobody wants to die alone, but damn, we got to all die.
Yeah, I'm aware of the information about that.
And I'm sure you are.
It's just it's amazing.
It's scary.
It's beyond scary.
All right.
That's Phil Durali, everybody.
He's at the Council for the National Interest on dot com and the American Conservative magazine at the American Conservative dot com.
Thanks again, Phil.
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