05/20/16 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, May 22nd, 2016, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all, welcome to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Anti-War Radio.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in LA.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 4,000 of them now, going back 13 years, at scotthorton.org.
And you can follow me on Twitter, at Scott Horton Show.
Today's guest is Phil Giraldi.
He is a former DIA and CIA officer.
He's Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
He writes regularly at unz.com.
That's U-N-Z, unz.com.
And the American Conservative Magazine, theamericanconservative.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us on the show today.
Good to talk to you, as always.
And a very important piece that you've written here.
I hope that people really take a good look at it.
Clinton's hawk in waiting.
And this is the kind of thing where maybe we're asking a lot of people to say, hey, you know what, besides the cast of characters at the top, it's really important that you start to learn who's the Deputy Secretary of State for lying us into war, and who's the special assistant to the ambassador to the United Nations, and God knows what, because these people have so much power and influence.
Unaccountable power and influence, really.
And you really make the case here about Hillary's hawk in waiting, Victoria Nuland.
Who's Victoria Nuland?
Well, Victoria became better known.
She's the Assistant Secretary of State for Eurasia and Europe, which means that she has a mandate for Europe and also Russia and much of Eastern, Western Asia.
And she became well-known when she used an obscenity to describe the Europeans in a phone conversation in the Ukraine, and basically she was using an expletive to say that we should dismiss the European considerations or interests.
And she was also, of course, the heavy hand behind overthrowing the regime of Yanukovych, who was basically friendly to Russia in an attempt to promote regime change in Ukraine to make it pro-European and pro-Western and pro-American.
So anyway, that's where she became well-known, but she's been a figure that some of us have been aware of for quite some time, as she is a Dick Cheney prodigy originally, extremely hawkish, and also a protégé of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Man, that's a bad thing to be two protégés of Hillary and Dick.
Well, and she's married to Robert Kagan, the author of Benevolent Global Hegemony, which is a beautiful euphemism for American Empire.
Yeah, Robert Kagan, of course, is a well-known neoconservative.
That's her husband, and he has been one of the early neoconservatives to come out and indicate that they are thinking or they are going to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton.
So this thing fits together all very nicely.
And then when you throw into the hopper the fact that there is another Kagan brother, Fred, who is married to Kimberly, who heads the Institute of War, it all kind of fits that this is the first family of military intervention, and it's interesting how their power kind of works in a circle.
They define the policies.
The policies then get picked up by the people who are inside the government, and then the wheel continues to turn, and it becomes like a self-justifying system where the policies are never really challenged, and these people, meanwhile, are inside the system like a hamster running around a cage, and it generates lots of money.
It generates access to the media, and it's a very, very dangerous situation.
It's almost impossible to believe until you learn all about it.
The first time I ever learned about Victoria Nuland was in the article years ago, and I had forgotten.
I had to go back and went, oh, wow, this was her, huh?
It's the article, All in the Neocon Family, by Jim Loeb, who's, I would say, the foremost, the world's foremost expert on the neoconservative movement, if there is a single one.
And he talks about how, yeah, no, really, the entire neoconservative movement meets for Thanksgiving dinner at one big table because they're all intermarried.
There's only a few dozen of them in the world.
And, you know, here it is, Kagan's wife, and as you say, bridging the divide between the Republican and Democratic parties in power and this kind of thing, working for Cheney, working for Hillary, same difference either way.
Yeah, and they're in the think tanks, too.
I mean, one of them is in Bookings, and the other one is in American Enterprise Institute, and as I say, they have their own institute, which is the Institute for the Study of War.
And, you know, the idea is they have all these people on the payroll, and they come up with these ideas that are, of course, from the perspective of you and me, ridiculous.
But these ideas, nevertheless, in Washington have currency about how America should be exercising power.
They all believe that America has a responsibility to use military power.
We're not talking about soft power here.
We're talking about military power to bring democracy to the world and to make all these places a lot more like Peoria.
Well, yeah, that's the excuse anyway, but, yeah, emphasis on the first part, making sure the military is powerful enough to do whatever they think their agenda is.
That's right.
And, of course, Obama, you know, is famously walking around with Robert Kagan's book and meeting with him for lunch and promising, you know, almost like David Petraeus and Max Boot.
You know, will you please go back and tell the other guys that I'm cool, you know, despite whatever rumors are going around about my Islam or whatever?
Well, Fred and Kimberly were, in fact, the court historians for Petraeus.
They used to follow him around in Afghanistan and Iraq, and they wrote a hagiography on him, basically describing how he's the greatest general since Napoleon.
He only lost two wars, Phil.
What's your beef?
Well, Napoleon eventually lost, too.
Come on.
But, yeah, the fact is that these people are deeply embedded in the power structure, and they are dangerous.
And if Hillary Clinton is elected president, I would certainly expect to see Victoria Nuland popping up at a senior position in the bureaucracy, maybe at the very top of the bureaucracy we're talking, maybe Secretary of State, maybe National Security Advisor or something like that.
Yeah, you imagine.
All right, now, so let's go back to this coup here.
And as you say, what made her famous, you know, a household name or whatever like that kind of thing, is this audio that was leaked, I guess, apparently, as you say in the article, apparently intercepted by the Russians, but we don't know for sure, where she says, F the EU.
And, of course, everybody said, oh, my goodness, a diplomat using the F word was the news story, according to CNN.
But, in fact, the audio was of her and Jeffrey Piatt, the ambassador to Ukraine, plotting a coup d'etat.
That's right.
And so my question for you, though, is why F the EU?
Because wasn't the whole thing that they wanted to get rid of Yanukovych and replace him with Poroshenko and Yats and whoever because Yanukovych had balked at the last minute when they changed the terms of the EU trade deal in order to make it exclusive and forbid him from entering a like agreement with the Russians.
Well, the European ministers basically were not in favor of as aggressive an approach as our friends were pursuing.
They didn't really want anything to go to the point of a violent change of government or a takeover of government.
Because, after all, Yanukovych was elected legally in a fair election, basically.
And the fact is they wanted a more balanced transition.
Now, of course, Victoria was against that.
She was basically, as you know, plotting a coup.
And she was even conspiring with the U.S. ambassador to pick out the guy who would take over.
I mean, this should have really driven Americans crazy to hear that we're doing this sort of thing overseas.
But she kind of got away with it.
I expected in the aftermath of it that Obama would have to fire her, but he didn't.
And, in fact, as far as I know, he never really even made a comment directly addressing what had taken place.
I mean, you know, this is kind of outrageous.
It's absolutely incredible.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, it's important to point out that, you know, maybe the coup was successful in the sense that they got rid of the last guy.
But the plan, as described by Gideon Rose, who is not a government official, but he is the editor of Foreign Affairs, and when he described what was going on on the Stephen Colbert show, you know, he didn't say, oh, I think, maybe, or anything.
He was making it very clear what was going on was that while Putin was distracted with the Olympics, they were going to try to steal Ukraine and get away with it and create a situation where it would be such a fait accompli that he wouldn't be able to react.
Nothing bad would happen.
It would be a great little thing, and America would sneak off with Russia's girlfriend, basically, was the way that he put it.
And, you know, Colbert, pretend Republican, hooting and hollering over it and that kind of thing.
And that's not what happened at all.
It was a total disaster.
The first thing they did was outlaw Russia in the east or whatever and start a war.
Yeah, and this was a project, you know, that Victoria Nuland and Gerstmann, the head of the National Endowment for Democracy, had been working on.
They had spent $5 billion on democratization, which basically meant subversion in Ukraine.
And so this was something that was not exactly just, you know, off-the-cuff type movement.
The other thing to bear in mind is that the timing, as you point out, was specifically linked to the Sochi Olympics because it had a double effect in terms of embarrassing the Russians for the Olympic Games.
You remember that our glorious leader boycotted any official U.S. government presence at the Olympic Games.
So obviously this was part of another game playing out.
And, you know, to Gideon Rose's credit, he's actually run at least two very, you know, kind of thorough debunkings of the policy in foreign affairs in his own journal since then, one by John Mearsheimer saying this is absolutely all America's fault.
So at least he's willing to eat a little bit of crow.
But if you see the Colbert episode from it was like the night before the coup or no, it was two nights after.
It was February the 24th, 2014, his little interview on the Colbert show where he gloats about this great success, you know, his mission accomplished moment.
But at least he's run a couple of articles kind of saying, okay, yeah, that didn't work out so well.
Yeah, it's kind of reminiscent of I was talking with some people yesterday about the Syrian situation with the use of chemical weapons.
We have one of these situations where everything is phony and you kind of it kind of smells bad and, you know, it's phony.
And then suddenly the whole story kind of unravels.
And, you know, there's been a lot of that kind of stuff lately.
Especially when it comes to Russia issues.
Right.
This is the thing with Georgia in 2008, where I think at the very end of November, the beginning of December.
Four or five months later, the New York Times ran a thing on their front page called, Oh, yeah, sorry, we lied our asses off about who started the war in Georgia.
It was Georgia who started it.
And the Russians who were the Russian military was simply defending their peacekeepers that they had there under a deal with the United Nations and the approval of the United States of America.
So, oops, sorry about that.
Yeah, as you say, these stories tend to unravel.
But the fact that strikes me as incredible is that in spite of this is like our five or six military interventions over the last 15 years, all of which were failures.
And the same thing is true of these stories when they kind of float them.
And I guess they know there's a gullible media out there that's going to pick these stories up and replay them.
But it's always a matter of time before the thing starts to come apart.
And you wonder how stupid whoever it is in the White House that dreams up these things in the first place.
But this is a prime reason why Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are as successful as they are.
Because, you know, you look at these situations, you realize you're being lied to all the time.
Right.
Yeah, that was the reason so many people were willing to go from zero to libertarian when it came to Ron Paul back a few years ago.
Because no matter what this guy says about whatever issue that I may or may not agree with his opinion on the policy, people thought he's not lying to me.
I know he's not lying to me.
He's telling me at least his best estimate of the truth every single time.
And boy, is that, you know, like a ray of sunshine in the darkness compared to the nonsense that you get most of the time.
No doubt about it.
Yeah, it's true.
I mean, the government, the government really is in the business of peddling lies.
And it's become in our lifetimes the norm.
And I mean, as you said, there's no way that Bernie Sanders would have any kind of support at all other than he seems authentic as compared to Hillary Clinton.
Right.
Both of their policies are completely horrible and almost the same.
He doesn't seem like a damned liar.
And she's right there in the dictionary next to, you know, her picture next to the term.
I like her comment yesterday about the downing of the Egyptian airplane.
She basically said this proved that we Americans need to provide the strong leadership in the world to prevent this kind of thing.
I was trying to figure that one out for a long time.
What possibly could she have done to.
We have to start.
We need to have a war on terror, Phil.
We need a bigger war on terror.
Yeah.
And then she said, you know, and and correctly, I think she says, you know, Trump's Islamophobia and his proposed ban and whatever plays into the terrorist narrative about America and helps them.
Yeah.
Never mind killing them, though.
That's perfectly fine.
But insulting them with words and proposals for travel bans, that's really going way too far.
And here, of course, she's the one who, as we've covered on the show in in the Iraq war, she accidentally helped Bush give all of Western Iraq to Osama and Zarqawi.
But then as secretary of state, she quite deliberately took the side of the Libyan Islamic fighting group and basically the Libyan veterans of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Syrian veterans of Al-Qaeda in Iraq in their revolutions.
So for her to say that Donald Trump is the recruitment sergeant in the sense that people would react against him and join up.
Yeah, that's pretty bad.
All right.
But then again, she is outright guilty of the highest treason in backing these guys.
We're even in her own words, supporting the revolution in Syria is supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria.
Yeah.
I mean, I've often said that that Trump has no resume, but Hillary does have a resume and it's all bad.
Right.
Exactly.
He will kill a million people.
She already has.
That's right.
And will also kill another million, probably.
I would think that's a certainty.
Yeah.
All right.
So let me ask you about this.
And maybe I'll get back to Newland in a second when I think of more to ask you about Newland.
But I'm sure you saw the news that Avigdor Lieberman is now going to be the defense minister.
Phil, not the marginalized, ignored ceremonial foreign minister, the defense minister of Israel.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it's, you know, it's kind of inevitable.
Netanyahu has been playing to his own right wing for a long time now.
That's where he has solid support.
And some of the religious parties have been waffling on him.
And it's kind of inevitable.
Israel has a regime that would be very difficult to not describe as fascist in terms of the relationship of the of the government with the military.
And, of course, the defense minister, the opening came because even the generals were appalled by some of the policies.
You heard it here first, folks.
Phil Giraldi paraphrasing Martin Peretz.
Yeah.
Never happened again.
Right.
I mean, seriously, when when even Marty Peretz calls you an Israeli fascist, then that means you have crossed the line.
Well, now, let me ask you this, though, because he does say, well, because he's not Likud, right?
He's got a different platform than Likud.
And I don't know if he means this or not.
But hasn't he said in the past that, no, really, we ought to have a Palestinian state?
Because he seems to honestly recognize the contradictions of maintaining an apartheid system where Israel has at least de facto annexed all the West Bank.
And yet, you know, has this unsustainable system where all these people are ruled, but without any representation.
And he said, no, we should do the swaps and what have you and give up the West Bank and let them have a Palestinian state between the Green Line and, you know, more or less.
And the Jordan River, which is quite different than what Netanyahu has said about over his dead body, right?
Yeah, that's correct.
But but he has also said that part of that swap would be to swap out the the Palestinians who are actually Israeli citizens.
So he supported that policy, too.
In other words, he's he's interested in a two state solution with with Israel being, you know, 90 percent, 99 percent Jewish and the Palestinian state being everything left over.
I can see the logic of that.
I understand why somebody would say that makes a certain amount of sense.
But, of course, it's it's it's it's genocidal on a certain level.
Yeah.
I mean, an entire new ethnic cleansing campaign to kick all the Arab Christians and Muslims out of Israel.
Yeah.
So I would not I would not kind of characterize him as as someone who is a liberal or leaning in that direction.
He's someone basically who is who is not very smart and is highly but is highly he knows the audience he's speaking to.
He's clever.
He's pragmatic.
And in a way, he sounds like Trump.
Well, he lives on the West Bank right now.
Right.
Yeah.
That's not too pragmatic.
No, that's not.
Actually, it's not.
But he's the guy who said, well, maybe Mubarak would like it if we bomb the Aswan Dam and it was over.
Just a diplomatic insult.
Right.
Or Mubarak wouldn't come to Israel to kiss the ring.
He wanted to just meet with someone in Cairo or something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, he supported the policies of, you know, stripping Arab Arab Israeli citizens of their citizenship for criticizing the regime.
He supported loyalty oaths and he's you know, he's he's he's not exactly a model of Jeffersonian democracy.
Well, in fact, he's the guy who who proposed beheadings.
And apparently with no irony or anything like that, I wouldn't want to mischaracterize a statement like that.
But apparently he really meant beheadings for people deemed to be traitors.
That is Arab citizens of Israel who are deemed to be traitors.
Right.
Well, he's a you know, he's a he's a Moldovan bouncer from a bar who moved to Israel and and and latched on to the to the show.
We say the extreme right wing views of many of the people who are coming from this many alleged Jews who had come from the former Soviet Union.
And basically rose to power.
He's he's got nothing in terms of education or in terms of experience that would justify any of this.
But, you know, politics is all a game of convincing people that something is true when it's not.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so as foreign minister, they basically just dealt with the defense ministry.
I was reading the thing that said Ehud Barak was basically the de facto defense minister, at least when it came to dealing with the Americans, because he was persona non grata in D.C.
He came a couple of times, but they didn't really give him the time of day, that kind of thing.
But they can't really treat the defense minister like that now that he's the defense minister, can they?
No, I think the defense minister is front line in all the negotiations that are going on about how much money they're going to get and what kind of equipment they're going to get.
So they can't avoid them.
And I think that's going to be the case.
Plus, Netanyahu, pretty much whoever was nominally foreign minister, Netanyahu was pretty much running that portfolio.
Yeah.
And now, I mean, I think that I mean, I don't know if this is just politics.
It seems meaningful because it confirms my bias.
The outgoing defense minister, who's no dove at all, right, who is obviously personally himself soaking in blood, who worked hard to disrupt Kerry's kind of half assed effort at a peace deal back a couple of years ago and this kind of thing.
He is denounced Lieberman and is denouncing Netanyahu and saying, according to the Associated Press here, he is warning of an extremist takeover of the government and all of this.
I mean, imagine if an outgoing secretary of defense in the U.S. said that the addition of the new secretary of defense replacing him meant, oh, my God, it's a terrible disruption in our entire system.
It's a signpost on the path to hell or what kind of thing.
That's a pretty extreme kind of thing to happen.
It doesn't sound like he's just personally upset that he got fired.
No, I think it's much more than that.
I think it's the same problem that people like you and me have with what's going on in the United States.
If you know, we have lousy politicians as a given.
But the fact is, you expect that somehow the system will continue at least to work where these people can't take over and and make the whole system work in their favor.
You always hope for that.
And I think in Israel, it's the same kind of thought that basically, even though the whole Netanyahu regime and everything like that has had a very mixed record, most Israelis figure, well, someday he's going to be voted out of office and the defense ministry and the generals will push back against him to make him be more sensible.
But, you know, the fact is, I think what the what the former minister is saying is that we've crossed the line here.
We suddenly have a consensus where there isn't going to be any pushback.
And and and what Netanyahu and these people are are advocating is going to become basically what we're all about.
And it's a pretty scary thought.
Yeah.
All right.
Hey, one more thing real quick about Kagan and Russia.
I meant to bring this up for Newland Kagan on Russia.
And that is I interviewed Mark Perry, who I know you're familiar with.
Investigative journalist writing for Politico magazine lately on this topic.
And he had his new thing about the generals and Russia policy.
But I asked him whether the generals believe their own BS about the rise of imperialist Russia and all of this stuff.
Or do they kind of admit maybe off the record a little bit quietly in the lunchroom or whatever that they know they started it.
They know America overthrew the government in Ukraine and and started the war against the refuse.
The people who refuse to accept that wrong term there in the east and started a war against them and and brought the Russians in.
Or I mean, so what's the deal?
And and Perry said, no, they believe their own nonsense.
I mean, if you listen to the officers at the highest levels in the Pentagon, talk about Russia, they believe all of their own lies.
Apparently, other than the very small faction that's debunking it.
But that whole fight is all wrapped up in whose doctrine, who's who gets the money and and which general gets their pet projects and whatever.
But as far as the vast majority of the Pentagon, he says the the group think is just solid.
Everybody knows that Putin is the new Hitler, the new Stalin or whatever he is.
And we must was it forward containment or whatever, their new doctrine.
They've got to help defend the West from Russia and that they really believe it, which I don't know.
What do you think of that?
Because it's such obvious nonsense.
Well, I believe it.
And Mark Perry is a very good source.
In fact, I was open.
I opened up this morning.
I don't know if you get the emails from Defense One, which is basically paid for by defense contractors.
And it has a lot of information on what's going on at the Pentagon.
The lead article is how the Pentagon is preparing for a tank war with Russia.
These people are nuts.
They basically your general today is not a George S.
Patton.
He's a guy who's a careerist whose ass is glued to his desk chair and he will do anything.
He will say anything to advance his career.
They they have no ethical grounding whatsoever in terms of, you know, bringing catastrophe to the world.
Their sole objective is to play the game as a player in terms of what their part is.
And that's it.
It's it's discouraging.
But I've heard that from a lot of junior officers.
And, of course, Mark Perry knows it far better than I do.
All right.
Well, good times.
Thanks very much, Phil.
Appreciate it.
OK, Scott.
Bye bye.
All right.
So that's the great Phil Giraldi.
He is a former CIA officer, but now he's a good guy.
And he runs the Council for the National Interest, the Council for the National Interest.
He writes for UNS.com and the American Conservative magazine.
This one is called Clinton's Hawk in Waiting about the horrid Victoria Nuland.
All right, John, that's been anti-war radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
My full interview archive is at Scott Horton dot org.
And you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
See you next week.
The.