06/27/16 – James Carden – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing James Carden.
He is a regular writer for consortiumnews.com and The Nation magazine, and he's the editor of the website for the American Committee for East-West Accord.
And he previously served as an advisor on Russia to the special representative for global intergovernmental affairs at the U.S. State Department.
Welcome back to the show, James.
How are you, sir?
Thanks a lot.
That's quite a mouthful.
Yeah, that's a lot.
Well, I'm glad you're here so I can cite you.
Guess what?
I might not have ever left Austin, but I know this guy, Carden, and he knows what he's talking about.
Well, maybe.
We'll see.
All right.
So, man, you got this great article here, no doubt about that, Neocon Scheme for More Regime Change.
This is some of the lower downs in the State Department and their dissent channel letter that they leaked demanding that Obama launch some airstrikes against Bashar al-Assad.
So lots to go over here, but I guess, well, first of all, do you know it was the neocons behind that thing?
Well, it's a neocon position, so perhaps it was uncharitable of me to describe all 51 as neocons, but that is certainly the preferred policy position.
They haven't published the names of the actual signers, correct?
As far as I know, no, actually.
They shouldn't have published the cable at all.
The dissent channel is meant to be private, it's not meant to be leaked, and I can only wonder why they wanted to do so.
The most uncharitable spin, I guess, you could put on it is that it's an election year, and they darn well know that Hillary Clinton's preferred position on Syria resembles their own.
In fact, she's repeatedly called for a no-fly zone over Syria, as though that would be something easy to accomplish, when in point of fact, much like the position of the 51 dissidents, a no-fly zone over Syria would require the United States to disable Assad's anti-aircraft capabilities and Russia's, since Russia has S-400 anti-aircraft missiles in the area, which cover, I think, almost the entirety of Syria's airspace.
So both policies are, what they have in common is that they're both wondrously reckless.
Yeah, well, okay, so, it's my fault, James, that I just, it's, yeah, I don't know, it's a geographical thing, I guess.
I keep, I know it's a one-world kind of an imperial system here that we're working on, and yet I keep breaking it into pieces.
Well, why are we messing around with Syria?
As Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg, it's to weaken Iran.
Kind of a consolation prize, after giving them half of Iraq, well, at least we can take out their guy, Assad, in Syria.
But Iran is really just Russia, Jr.
The only reason we really don't like Iran is because they're a big key in Russia's imperial system, such as what's left of it, in the Middle East.
And isn't that a big part of what's going on here that I usually ignore, just because Russia's in a different region, and I sort of keep my focus zoomed in too tight?
Well, you sound like a good realist, because you still, you believe that nation-states, it seems anyway, are the principal actors on the international stage, and I would tend to agree with you.
I would add one other consideration as to why Assad has become the enemy du jour.
Of course, Vladimir Putin is the other enemy du jour, but you look at Syria, and you look at Assad, and Assad was actually very cooperative under the George W. Bush administration.
Now, he was cooperative in doing some pretty bad things for us.
He hosted black sites and the like, but he also provided intelligence, and for the most part cooperated with the United States.
He's a secular leader of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious country, and suddenly we have come to the belief that we should be overthrowing a secular leader, and we've seen what happens when we do that.
We saw what happened when we replaced Gaddafi, who no doubt was a very evil person, but what replaced Gaddafi was actually far worse.
ISIS is in the process of taking over the entirety of Libya, and now, because we have been attempting to overthrow Assad, along with the so-called moderate rebels, who are nothing more than Islamic extremists, ISIS took over large parts of the country, and the opposition, as I said, is mostly al-Qaeda, al-Nusra affiliated.
I wonder why Assad all of a sudden became an enemy, and what you hear is, well, he's connected to Iran, and Iran funds Hezbollah, and Hezbollah poses a threat to Israel.
Well, okay, Hezbollah is a problem for Israel, but Hezbollah doesn't have designs on the United States.
So I think that a lot of the emphasis on Assad has to do with the Iran-Hezbollah connection, but since I have this quaint notion that American foreign policy should forward American interests, I'm not sure why the fact that Hezbollah causes some problems for Israel, that the United States should somehow be responsible for overthrowing Assad.
Well, you know, Robert Kennedy Jr. wrote a big piece for Politico back a couple of months ago, said it's all about the pipelines, and I think by the time you get to the end of the article, there's no denying he's, one, onto something, and two, way oversimplifying, and his conclusion kind of falls apart at the end, actually, because he doesn't know quite how to glue it all together, to borrow a phrase from Jeffrey Pyatt in his coup plot there, because, you know, he doesn't actually have the statements of the major players saying it's because of the pipeline, this is why we're doing what we're doing.
But on the other hand, he sure did seem to have a lot of circumstantial evidence that we have a couple of competing plans for, basically, one Shiite plan and one Sunni plan, one Iranian plan, one Saudi plan, for how to pump fuel through Syria to Europe or to port in the Mediterranean.
So how much stock do you put in that stuff?
I put some, I thought it was an interesting piece.
I wasn't surprised by his focus on oil, given basically his career occupation, pre-occupation has been as a very vocal environmentalist, but he's right in picking up there's another threat here, and that's the Saudi threat, right?
We have a clash between Sunni and Shia, and what we have a habit of doing, again, this is why we feel compelled to act this way is somewhat beyond me, but we feel compelled to further Sunni interests, right?
So we've been acting as a proxy to Saudi Arabia and Qatar and Turkey, who are all, they're all Sunni theocracies, and they all desire to be rid of Assad, because he's not part of that tribe.
So yeah, Kennedy was certainly on to something.
Well, you know, it seems like a lot of this has to do with kind of making it up to Saudi for getting rid of Saddam and empowering the Iranians, right?
That's the quote from, was it Prince Bandar, Prince Turkey, who said, we're sick and tired of the Shia and their day's coming soon.
He told that to Richard Dearlove in Britain, and over the Iran deal too, right?
We invaded Iraq and knocked off the Baathists, which empowered the Iranians and their sock puppets.
Then we're doing this, the nuclear deal with Iran, which, you know, on the face of it really helps protect Saudi Arabia by limiting and securing Iran's nuclear program much more than before, but it frightens them that they're maybe losing their position in our imperial system in the region if we're, you know, beginning to cozy up to their enemy across the Gulf there.
And so, and just like the bombing of the war in Yemen, they even said in the New York Times, this is kind of a sock to the Saudis for pursuing the nuclear deal with Iran.
And same kind of thing in Syria is, again, as Obama explained to Goldberg, that's right, Jeffrey Goldberg, we, you know, this is, we're trying to make it up to Israel a little bit here for, you know, and by taking care of one of Iran, you know, their worst ally of Iran on their border while we pursue this other attack on the nuclear deal.
Yeah, I mean, they all share a very strange premise, right?
We need to make it up to Israel.
We need to make it up to Saudi Arabia.
We don't need to do any of that.
You know, the sole responsibility of American foreign policymakers is to this country and to this country's interests.
And when we sort of stray from that, we find ourselves in a world of trouble.
Let's go back to Saudi Arabia for a second.
I really don't understand why we continue to do their bidding.
There has been, I thought that was a very convincing 60 Minutes report a couple of months ago that indicated that there were Saudi officials involved in the setup and in the planning and possibly in the execution of September 11th.
We have become, over the past decade, an energy superpower.
I do not understand how Saudi Arabia continues to have this grip over American foreign policy, except that perhaps old habits die hard.
But I can't see any benefit to our country by continuing to do the bidding of these odious regimes.
We've made a sort of cottage industry of vilifying the Russian president over the past decade or more.
What goes on in Turkey and in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, it's far worse than anything that goes on inside of Russia and anything that's been done by Putin.
Well yeah, it's definitely not the national interests, it's narrower interests, right?
Particularly weapons sales.
That's billions of petrodollars recycled right there.
And even though we don't buy that much oil from Saudi, really, it's 5 or 7 percent of American oil imports or something come from there.
But they spend a lot of that money on American government debt and connected corporations, weapons systems, and this kind of thing.
So that's a little iron triangle system right there, whereas, does the average Joe need any of this in order to guarantee that he can pump gas so he can get to work in the morning?
No, of course not.
They would love us to believe that, that all this empire is necessary for us to be able to drive our cars, but that's not true.
It's just particular vested interests here and there.
Certainly Houston, Texas, some parts of it have some very vested interests in Saudi Arabia.
And, you know, in a sense it makes sense from their point of view, at least in terms of Saudi itself, that America's government role there provides stability for their business interests.
I'm glad that you mentioned weapons.
I don't know if you saw the report in the New York Times over the weekend.
I think it's very instructive and actually goes back to...
I was going to bring it up in a minute, but I'm glad you did.
It's called CIA Arms for Syrian Rebels Supply Black Market, Officials Say, Mark Mazzetti and Ali Younis.
Yeah.
I mean, what an extraordinary piece, right?
So only a week after the, or maybe it was, I don't know, only a week to 10 days after that dissent cable by the brave 51 souls who want to put young American men and women into harm's way over the skies of Syria, after they leaked their cable, this report comes out.
And I'll read it.
I'll read the first line to readers who maybe haven't seen it.
Weapons shipped into Jordan by the CIA in Saudi Arabia, city Saudi Arabia, intended for Syrian rebels have been systematically stolen by Jordanian intelligence operatives and sold to arms merchants on the black market, according to American and Jordanian officials.
Well, what better proof that the American policy of arming the so-called moderate Syrian rebels has failed than this report?
I mean, it's really, it's really quite extraordinary and it's still worse.
The reason American officials have gotten, got onto this scheme is because some of the weapons that were, that were stolen were then turned around and used by a, you know, Islamic radical to shoot down two Americans at a police training facility in Jordan.
So the FBI got on while investigating that, got onto this, uh, you know, onto this, um, weapons, uh, smuggling scheme.
It's really quite extraordinary, wouldn't you say?
Absolutely.
We need a, we need a good catchphrase for the name of this scandal.
It's a, it's, it's just another gun walking thing.
It's exactly like what happened in Arizona and Mexico there where they're arming up their enemies and then they're surprised when they get shot by him.
Little Benghazi, same kind of thing there too.
Yeah, someone, someone, someone, some, um, someone said over the weekend, I think that I think it was on Twitter or something that, uh, um, Hillary Clinton, um, is very concerned about, um, weapons, uh, and gun sales in the United States because they, you know, they cause more violence and crime and killings, but that doesn't apply overseas.
No, her thing is like, well, you know, no more weapons, uh, funneled into all these countries is going to solve the problem, but that doesn't apply in the United States where, you know, we have to, uh, shut down, uh, uh, gun sales and all that.
It's not exactly a consistent, uh, position.
Well, uh, you know, and I hope I'm not going too far into confirmation bias here, James, but it seems pretty clear to me that the American government party line all along has been at least the Obama line that, well, let's back the moderates a little bit if we don't go as far as Hillary and Petraeus and the others want us to all along.
And so when the New York times writes an article like this, or even going back to David Sanger's piece back in 2012 that said, Hey, the jihadis are the ones who are getting all the guns.
I read that as a concession by the establishment that basically this is so true.
They kind of have to admit it rather than it's an accusation by the times against the government that, Oh, we caught you slipping.
Um, and so in other words, here we are in 2016 and it's very easy to say that, look, never even mind any alternative source, even the New York times and the Washington post, according to their history of America's intervention in Syria since 2011, the terrorists got their guns and money from us and our allies.
That's just the story.
It's completely undeniable.
And if it was, if it was some birther who made it up, it would be the most crackpot conspiracy crap in the world.
But sorry, it's just perfectly true.
Yeah, you're exactly right.
You're exactly right.
So let me ask you this, and I know you can't answer it because it's a ridiculous question, but what's going on in Hillary Clinton's brain that she's and the rest of these state department people that they're willing to continue pursuing this policy?
James, I want to play this short clip for you.
It's only 10 seconds long here.
12 seconds long.
This is Hillary from February, 2012, beginning of 2012.
Um, and CBS news is asking her, why aren't we doing more to overthrow Assad?
And so she's making an excuse why we're not doing more to overthrow Assad.
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 in Syria?
So now it's a rhetorical question and there's no need to overinterpret it or anything.
She's saying basically by supporting some rebels, are we helping ones that we don't like?
Right.
That's what she's saying.
And she's saying that would be really dangerous.
We don't want to do that.
Right.
But then we know the history is she spent the rest of 2012 pushing for exactly that until she, until the end of her term as secretary of state.
And now her position is we should have done more.
We should have done more.
We should have done more.
Yeah.
I think part of it is that she's trying to, um, I think her instincts are naturally very hawkish.
I'm actually, I had not heard that clip and I'm shocked by the good common sense that she, uh, that she showed in it.
Um, but, uh, we're four years away from that and she seems to, um, she's very much a captive, I think of the Washington foreign policy establishments, uh, group think, um, her foreign policy, um, advisors are all uniformly hawkish.
Um, she actually, you probably saw the report last week that the, uh, uh, leader of the neocons, Robert Kagan will be, uh, speaking at a fundraiser for her very soon.
Uh, and, um, she, um, has very hawkish advisors over at the, um, center for new American security.
Um, the woman who is thought to be the leading candidate to be her, uh, secretary of defense, Michelle Flournoy, um, recently said that, uh, she believes the United States, um, ought to be, uh, ought to be sending, uh, troops, um, into Syria.
That was reported, uh, in Defense One, which is a very, uh, you know, very reliable, um, defense industry, uh, publication.
Um, so she is, she's surrounded herself by hawks because she is basically a hawk herself.
And, um, I see, um, I think that if we get a Hillary Clinton administration, we'll, we will be, um, sort of wistfully looking back at the Obama administration for the good sense he's shown.
I, I think that we really are going to see something like a George W. Bush, um, um, recap or, you know, or return, uh, a sequel to the George W. Bush, uh, administration when she comes in, if her, if the advisors are anything to go by.
Yeah.
Well, like you say, Flournoy for Secretary of Defense, probably Kagan's wife, Newland for Secretary of State.
And boy, can you just imagine and probably keep Susan Rice and Samantha Power, just all these ladies sitting around drinking tea, agreeing with each other, telling each other how right they are or who they got to kill.
It's the world's worst nightmare.
I mean, I'm not trying to be too sexist about it, but just these particular women are just, they're every one of them as wrong as it could be about every stupid thing they think.
It's just ridiculous.
Um, and, and, and the kind of consensus that I could see them foraging in their little circle is pretty dangerous.
But so now let me ask you something about this.
Cause I was just a kid at the time.
And what the hell did I know?
I was a high school kid.
Um, we talked before, I think about, um, NATO expansion in Eastern Europe in the nineties and how, uh, famously, I hope, um, George Kennan gave a interview to Thomas Friedman of the New York times, the most valuable thing he's ever written.
That's for sure.
And, uh, this is in 1998.
And this is where George Kennan who helped, uh, really to invent the containment policy against the Soviet union in the cold war said, if we do this, uh, we'll be picking a fight with Russia.
And then when they react, all the people doing this will say, see, that's the reason we had to do it is because of Russian aggression, which is of course exactly what has played out.
But then here's the reason I'm bringing this up again is because I just read this new thing.
Uh, I hope you saw it.
I hope everyone in the audience saw it.
It was by Jerry Brown, the governor of California reviewing, uh, in the New York review of books, reviewing the memoirs of former secretary of defense, William Perry, who is now on a mission to try to abolish nuclear weapons.
And, but the anecdote here, uh, was that, uh, there was this letter in 1996, two years before that Kennan interview on the very first round of NATO expansion in 96.
Um, that was signed by Robert McNamara and Paul Nitze, who is my understanding is he sort of Kennan, but works right.
Kennan invented containment.
Nitze wanted to roll them back.
He was Dr.
Strangelove, the Hawk.
And here's Nitze and McNamara and Richard Pipes, Daniel Pipes, father and Soviet Cold War Hawk saying, don't do this.
Don't expand NATO.
Do you know that story?
Can you explain about what was going on there from the very beginning to have such cold warrior Hawks, uh, who they correct me if I'm wrong, but these guys didn't all turn into Pat Buchanan peaceniks after the end of the cold war, but they were definitely not for this kind of expansion.
Apparently.
Yeah, you're exactly right.
Um, I'm glad you mentioned that letter, uh, because it seems to have been a bit of a forgotten forgotten history.
Uh, Kennan's opposition, um, to NATO is now on, um, certainly because of the recent number of, um, you know, biographies and the publication of his diaries and, um, and, uh, Friedman, yeah, right.
That was, you're, you're exactly right.
That, uh, it's probably the only thing Friedman ever wrote that's worth reading.
Um, and yeah, so this was not, um, the opposition simply, it didn't simply come from someone who was a well-known, uh, well-known dove and critic of American, um, policy like Kennan.
Uh, the letter was, um, released in the summer of, um, the summer of 97 actually.
And, uh, you had people on the left or center left, you know, like Senator Bill Bradley, uh, who is now, uh, on the board of the American Committee for U.S. West Accord.
Uh, you had people, you had very distinguished scholars like, uh, Professor David Kaleo at Hopkins.
And you had, as you say, um, people who, um, were well-known hawks, people, you know, on the, on the exact other side of the debate, uh, as Kennan, like NHTSA and like McNamara.
Um, Democratic Senator Sam Nuttin, who, who's a Democrat, but a, but a well-known hawk, uh, signed the letter.
So there was a, there were, it was a wide spectrum of, of voices on the, on, on the left center and right protesting against this policy.
Um, and in his memoirs, the person who drove this policy is someone who is also in the running to be Hillary Clinton's Secretary of State, a gentleman by the name of Stroh Talbot, who's the president of the Brookings Institution today.
And he wrote a very valuable memoir at this time as Clinton's, um, she, he was Deputy Secretary of State, but he was also Clinton's main Russia advisor.
So his memoir is called The Russia Hand, and he recounts the debate, um, going on.
And, and these voices were well known to the administration at the time.
He recounts going to a dinner, I think it was up at Columbia, where everyone, uh, at his table spoke out very forcefully, among them Kennan, um, against the policy.
And he just kind of brushes it off.
Um, and, and Kennan was right.
It did turn out to be, you know, one of the biggest mistakes, uh, that, um, of the, of the post Cold War era.
And interesting to Talbot is the guy who wrote in 1992, that soon we'll have a one world government where every nation state answers to the United Nations Security Council on virtually every issue.
And then here he is boy, making sure that didn't happen, which thank God, but still it not necessarily in a good way.
Um, and then isn't he also the guy who last summer was it last summer put his name on that report, demanding an escalation of the war in Ukraine and that America should send offensive weapons.
Oh, defensive weapons to the Ukrainian army to fight the Russians, to make the body count go up, to make the debate go up.
That's a direct quote to make the debate go up in Russia about whether they want to keep intervening in Ukraine or not.
Same guy.
Yes, exactly.
Right.
That was, uh, a, uh, a report, a joint report issued by Brookings and the Chicago, uh, council on, uh, on, on global affairs.
And, um, you're right.
Talbot's interesting, um, kind of case study and, and kind of how a lot of Democrats have, um, evolved or devolved, if you will, during the Reagan administration, he was, um, he was quite a well-known journalist and, um, and a critic, uh, of, um, you know, Republican Cold War policy.
He was something of a dub.
And then, um, he was a, he was friends with Bill Clinton.
They went to, um, Oxford together.
Uh, so they've known each other forever.
And, uh, Clinton appointed him, um, as his Russia advisor at the state department.
And he, he and, uh, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton and, uh, numerous others transformed into, uh, really, um, uh, into hawks.
And, um, it's, it's been this, and they've been driving policy, um, hand in hand with, uh, with the neocons, uh, ever since.
And I think that the results speak for themselves.
I think that this, this policy of, of arming Ukrainians is just, um, extraordinarily, uh, dangerous and reckless, especially given the character of, um, of, of the, of the Ukrainian, uh, regime and, and the battalions, um, many of them privately financed by oligarchs, many of them with very sinister Nazi, uh, connections.
Um, I, I don't understand why we would want to throw our allot in, uh, with, with people like that.
I certainly, um, I have nothing but, um, disdain for, for people who think that, uh, that we should, that we should be getting involved, getting in bed with these neo-Nazis and neo-fascists, uh, in Ukraine.
I think it's disgusting.
Absolutely.
I'm sorry we have to stop right here.
We could start a whole new interview, but I gotta go for the next one.
Uh, but thank you so much for coming back on the show, James.
We'll definitely talk about Ukraine again soon.
My pleasure.
Thanks.
All right, y'all.
That is James Carden.
He is the, uh, editor of the website of the American Committee for East-West Accord, which is the most important project on the planet right now.
Okay?
The American Committee for East-West Accord.
He writes for The Nation and for Bob Perry's site over there at consortiumnews.com.
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