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Well, not on Thursdays for them, but anyway.
All right, first up today is Phil Giraldi.
He's a former CIA and DIA officer, and he's also the executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
You just heard the spot for them a second ago.
And he writes for the American Conservative Magazine and for antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today.
So you used to be the chief of station in, not for all of Turkey, but for one city in Turkey, right?
Well, I was actually the deputy chief of base in Istanbul.
Well, what the hell does that mean?
Well, it means that CIA stations are always in the capital.
And that CIA bases are usually in the economic capital city, like New York or Washington.
For example, the CIA base would be in New York and the station would be in Washington.
That's the way it works.
It's just a matter of jargon.
I got you.
All right.
And for how many years was that or is that classified or what?
No, I was there for three years in the 80s.
All right.
Good.
Well, so maybe I know somebody who knows Turkey better than you, but if I do, I don't know that.
So you're the guy I turn to when things are afoot in Turkey and there's things afoot in Turkey.
A giant protest has started over a park.
And in fact, I read a thing of foreign policy that said, hey, this park thing is actually a pretty big deal.
But it's not all of what's going on here.
So I was wondering if you could please teach us what you know.
Well, the park, yeah, was the trigger to this problem.
The park is – I know it well.
It's near where the old U.S. consulate that I used to work out of was.
And it's the only park in that very crowded central part of Istanbul.
And the bulldozers moved in.
They were going to knock down these trees, which are about 200 years old.
And they were going to build a replica of an old janissary.
The janissaries were the soldiers for the Ottoman sultans.
A replica of their barracks, which was going to be a shopping mall.
You know, there are a lot of shopping malls in Turkey that have sprung up over the last 20 years or so.
And it would seem that knocking down the only – or destroying the only park in the center of Istanbul to do this was kind of a foolish thing to do.
And it comes on top of the opening last week of construction for a massive new bridge across the Bosporus, which is going to do huge environmental damage to some parts of the Bosporus shoreline that up until now have not been really developed.
And there's talk of even digging a tunnel – not a tunnel, excuse me, but a canal that would go from the Black Sea down to the Aegean and completely bypass Istanbul.
They've got that planning, and they're also planning to build a huge mosque in the middle of Istanbul.
I mean, Istanbul is already full of mosques.
So it's these grandiose high-ticket projects that are being carried out by the Erdogan administration without any local feedback, except, of course, to talk to local politicians who were all in his party anyway.
So it's kind of the people who finally got fed up with the autocratic nature of what was going on and what they were doing to their city.
It's sort of like when the Democrats and Republicans steal a neighborhood to build a ball stadium or something like that for their connected crony interests here, only apparently there people mind.
Yeah, people mind a lot there.
And of course it comes on top of a lot of sense that Erdogan, although he's moderate in many senses religiously, there's been a creeping Islamization in Turkey, which is undeniable.
I mean, I actually tried to deny it.
I've been a supporter of this guy, and of course I have a lot of Turkish friends.
And they've been telling me all along, I said, this guy is a lot more dangerous than he seems.
There have been silly things.
Like, for example, the Turkish International Airlines, a lot of the flights now, they don't serve alcohol.
And then they sent out a memo to the cabin staff, to the stewardesses, telling them that they have to dress modestly and not wear any makeup.
So, I mean, there's a lot of really stupid stuff that people say, well, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Once you establish the principle that the government can tell you what to do, how to behave and how you look, the government will never stop with this stuff.
Right.
Well, and now I think maybe we need a little bit of background here about Turkey, too.
Like, I don't know if you can tell the whole story, but basically at the destruction of the Ottoman Empire came the rise of this guy Ataturk, who said he wanted to make this country not an Islamist-type country at all, but extremely secular and European and appointed the military really to be the guardians of that new secular Turkey.
But that's really fallen away now.
I mean, and really kind of rightly, right?
I mean, democracy, the popular election has picked this Islamist government, and it would have to be the military to intervene quite undemocratically, quite dictatorially to stop them at this point, no?
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Your analysis is correct.
Ataturk saw the military as the guarantor of the secular constitution.
So Kemalists, as they're referred to, are people that are strictly secular.
They don't believe religion has any place in the government, and the military was behind this.
Now, what Erdogan has done is he's basically imprisoned a lot of the senior military officers, and he removed the role of the military as having a veto power from the constitution.
So now we have indeed a secular government, well, not a secular, but a popular government, in a sense, that has electoral legitimacy.
But the problem is that, like previous Turkish governments, Erdogan has interpreted this to be a license to kill.
Turkey has always had governments that are authoritarian, in a sense, even if they're elected.
And this is the tradition that Erdogan has obviously inherited and figures that he's entitled to continue with.
Now, so as far as the reaction to the protests, I mean, well, the protests in general are really about kind of a lot of this stuff, like you're saying.
The vast overreach, the urban planning is just one symptom of the unlimited power that Erdogan and his people seem to think that they have now.
And so that's what all this backlash is about.
But where do you see it going?
Well, they're talking, you know, I was reviewing this morning a lot of the Turkish media, and they're talking like, you know, this is the Turkish Spring, like the Arab Spring.
They're also talking, saying that the involvement of Turkey in Syria is Turkey's Vietnam.
So they're talking about a huge political impact because of all these missteps that the government has taken.
And Erdogan responds to all this.
So he'd say these people are his exact phrase was in Turkish, obviously, was that these people are arm in arm with terrorism.
I mean, that's pretty extreme.
And also it's just come over the wires that one demonstrator has been killed.
Well, and there were more than a thousand arrests, I think I read, correct?
Yeah, that's correct.
So, you know, we're seeing we're seeing some of the dark soul of Turkey.
You know, I love the country.
I love the people and everything like that.
But they have kind of a hard-headed way of looking at things.
And there's no question about that.
And they live in a tough neighborhood.
And, you know, but this guy has done some good things, actually.
And he's introduced a lot of legislation that's made it legal to speak Kurdish, for example, even though the local authorities have not enforced the legislation.
But he's still introduced the legislation at a national level.
He's managed to come up with a peace treaty with the Kurdish rebels.
So he's done some good stuff.
And the economy is booming in Turkey.
The economy has, I believe, tripled in the last ten years.
But at the same time, he's done it kind of in, you know, a Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago fashion with little concern for public opinion.
And just kind of full speed ahead.
Yeah.
Well, and he's even negotiated with the PKK, right?
Yeah, right.
He's come to a ceasefire with them.
And there is basically their peace talks going on.
So that's a major success for him.
But at the same time, you know, to what extent is a major success outweighed by the fact that he no longer feels himself accountable to the whole Turkish population?
He's got his own conservative fundamentalist religious base, which is most of the country.
But the fact is that, you know, still there's a 50 percent of the country that doesn't necessarily buy into his agenda.
And he's got to respect them in a constitutional system.
He would be aware of that and would be respecting them.
But the fact is his head is not working that way.
Yeah.
Well, now, you know, you talk about the press referring to these protests as their Arab Spring.
I think it was Eric Margulies that said the election of Erdogan in the first place was the real start of the Arab Spring, even though they're not Arabs, obviously.
But it was the first.
Because, right, Islamists won in Algeria in, what, 93?
And the Americans in the military canceled it.
And the only other democracy in the Middle East, because Israel doesn't count since the people of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip can't vote for the Knesset.
So that only leaves Lebanon, right?
Yeah, more or less.
Yeah.
So, yeah, no, there's not the, you know, one should not discount the significance of the change of government in a place like Turkey as a result of, if you want to call it the Turkish Spring, sure, that's what it was.
But, you know, what we're seeing now is, if that was the Turkish Spring, this is the Turkish Spring, maybe Phase 2, in which the endemic corruption in Turkey, which even under Erdogan has kind of become invisible, that endemic corruption and that tendency to rule in an authoritarian fashion, this has been traditional for every party, going back to Ataturk.
This is, we're seeing maybe a step up from this.
Note, for example, that the riots and everything over the past few days have not been covered in the Turkish media.
You could, you know, you could read about them or see them and read about them everywhere in the world, but in Turkey they apparently had a cooking show on instead of showing what was happening with the riot.
And this is indicative of the fact that Erdogan has been able to basically stifle the media, which used to be, in my days, the Turkish media was wild.
It was, you know, politicized.
You know, you couldn't make a misstep and your political opponents would be going after you and this, that, and the other thing.
It was a really open, wide open, active media.
And now it's dead.
Yeah, well, but there's always the Internet too, right?
Right.
Right.
And kind of just get right around the newspapers, hopefully.
Right.
So that's why he's blaming Twitter and he's blaming Facebook and he's blaming everything else.
But this is a pattern we've seen before.
Gaddafi was blaming the media.
Mubarak was blaming the alternative media.
In Iran, they've been blaming the alternative media for interfering with their elections.
So it's a common practice to say that information in and of itself is a dangerous thing.
Right.
Yeah, well, people with power don't like giving it up, do they?
They'll come up with anything to try to hold on.
That's right.
Absolutely.
So speaking of power corrupting things, how about the mind of John McCain?
He's over there in Syria.
You mentioned how the Turks have been intervening there and how the population.
You've been talking about this on the show for, what, half a year or something at least, how the population of Turkey is really over this Syrian intervention thing.
And they don't want any more of it.
But I guess a couple of questions then.
Can you talk about Turkey's role in Syria at this point?
And then can you give us your take on John McCain's meeting with this group, the Northern Storm?
At least one of these guys looked right into the Time magazine cameraman's lens and said, yeah, I'm a veteran of al Qaeda in Iraq.
What?
Yeah, well, I mean, the first thing, Turkey is still active in Syria.
There's no question about it.
They're facilitating the activity of the Free Syrian Army, which is based in Turkey.
Also, the civilian counterpart, which is falling apart at the moment, but is also essentially based in Turkey.
And so they're enabling this process.
They are probably giving the rebels small arms and that kind of thing.
They're probably giving them some intelligence information.
But, of course, we're doing that too.
And so their role is kind of limited.
The Turkish public is strongly opposed to any military intervention by Turkey in Syria.
So that's inhibiting Erdogan, thank God.
As for John McCain, I mean, John McCain, as far as I'm concerned, is the ultimate loose cannon here.
He's basically running his own foreign policy.
I suggested in one piece that I wrote last week that McCain is in violation of the Logan Act, which forbids anyone but essentially the White House and State Department from running foreign policy.
I'd like to see John McCain go to jail.
But at the same time, of course, he is foolishly meeting with people he knows nothing about.
And then it turns out these people are terrorists.
Yeah, but who are the voices in this guy's head?
I don't understand it.
I don't know.
In fact, this morning I got up and I turned on television, NBC, that idiotic morning show they have, whatever they call it.
And there was John McCain talking with Savannah Guthrie and explaining about all the danger coming out of Syria and everything like this.
Why do they give these guys a forum to talk about nonsense?
And the fact is that there's Savannah Guthrie nodding her head, the sage wisdom coming out of this guy who should be in jail for any number of reasons, John McCain.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, OK, I want it both ways here.
Help me out.
Is it OK if I completely deny that Al-Qaeda has, you know, lives anywhere outside of Zawahiri's basement, wherever he's hiding in Pakistan somewhere, that basically it's dead and that the what made them unique among jihadists was that they were attacking the U.S.
And that there's hardly really even in Yemen.
They're not really concerned with attacking the U.S.
They're concerned with their own problems that they have in their own local jobs.
But on the other hand, I want to have the other way where, hey, as long as they're cutting off people's heads and doing suicide attacks and saying that they're loyal to Zawahiri, that makes them Al-Qaeda enough that Obama bin Laden and John McCain up there are both guilty of treason for supporting them.
I mean, they're not I don't think Al-Qaeda enough that we need to go have a war in Syria against them or support Assad against them, for Christ's sake.
But we sure as hell shouldn't be providing them aid and comfort either.
Yeah, because obviously it's looking like if we have a war, it'll be for them.
And that's that's the fault of people like Lindsey Graham and John McCain.
But yeah, the point is, yeah, terrorism is a local issue in most cases.
It's it's people who are trying to replace the regime that's in place for any number of reasons and to take over themselves.
So it's a you know, it's kind of the you change the the power brokers.
But essentially, the situation remains the same.
Now, that said, there is such a thing as Salafist based terrorism, which is what Al-Qaeda was a part of.
And essentially, this has a broader role about the the broader vision about the role of Islam and the recreation of the caliphate and the return to to religious purity and all this kind of thing.
So they have they have they do have a serious international agenda.
But there are very few of these people.
And even this guy who was on television with John McCain.
Yeah, he's he's basically saying he's he's linked in with this structure.
But the fact is, he's still he's fighting in local quarrels.
That's what he's doing.
He's he's an Iraqi who essentially has has has migrated across the border and is fighting against another regime that he he believes is similar to Saddam Hussein, a secular oppressive regime.
So it's essentially it's still a local quarrel for him.
But not to not to minimize the role of the Salafists and everything like that.
But essentially, they've been greatly overinflated by propaganda from people like McCain and like the government in general to make them look like they're a serious international threat.
You know, I was talking with Patrick Coburn about how some of these Syrian rebels have been saying, well, you know, if we can't take Damascus, we might have to settle for secession and take as much of Syria as we can.
And then we'll just ally with the Sunni parts of Iraq and maybe create our new caliphate there.
So, you know, what's funny about that, of course, is that it couldn't even be a possibility except for American foreign policy over the last decade over there, getting rid of Saddam, who is keeping that kind of thing at bay.
But also.
Oh, but Patrick Coburn responded, of course, that that's a lot of nice wishful thinking.
But sort of like you're indicating there, Phil, they don't have the power to carry anything like that out.
It's like the Islamic Court's union in Somalia.
Maybe they want to be a totalitarian dictatorship, but they can barely they barely have the authority to close the local movie theater because they just don't have the manpower to to create a totalitarian dictatorship.
You know, just like they don't have the power to create a caliphate.
The only caliphate they can create is just a failed state power vacuum where America's wars left, you know, destruction in their wake.
Yeah, that's basically true.
I mean, we're looking at the whole terrorism issue.
We've got to look at what you know, what is the real threat against the United States represented by these groups and the places where they're active in.
And you come to the conclusion that there's virtually no threat anywhere, that all these things are being used for political purposes to to inflate defense budgets and to keep the government looking good.
And it's a it's the tragedy of our times that the United States never can quite get things right.
And this is this is that's why I fear that, you know, in spite of Obama's clear inclination not to get involved in some of these places, somehow I think the momentum is just going to be there and it's going to happen.
Yeah.
You know, speaking of which, I just finally finished Jeremy Scahill's book, Dirty Wars.
Have you had a chance to take a look at that at all?
Yeah, I'm reading it right now, actually.
Man.
So have you got to page 222 yet?
I don't think I'm that far into it yet.
Why?
What's on there?
Well, look, I'm sorry to spoil it for you and for everybody, but I can't get over this.
I keep thinking about it.
So we've been talking forever about Somalia and how America sponsored the war that basically forced the Ethiopians to invade at Christmas 2006.
And then by say, like the late summer, early fall 2008, Condoleezza Rice was running out of time on the Bush administration.
She cried uncle.
She made a deal with Sheikh Sharif to allow him.
And he was the head of the Islamic Courts Union to allow him to be the president.
After all, if he would only forsake the ICU and take on the form of the transitional federal government that the U.S. and the United Nations had created and were attempting to foist on the people.
Well, Sheikh Sharif made the deal.
And Al-Shabaab, of course, immediately denounced him as a traitor to the Americans and said, we're going to we vow to continue on the fight.
Well, then page 222 says that Phil, that was the plan all along was to keep Sheikh Sharif anyway.
The quote is, you know, it would be preferable if he was a bit weaker when we keep him instead of surrounded by these powerful guys.
And so they killed a quarter of a million people.
They turn the entire they they picked on the weakest collection of people in the in the entire world, the Somalis, and beat the living crap out of them for what, like seven, eight years now for nothing.
When they meant to keep them anyway in the first place.
Well, that's astonishing.
I'm not surprised to hear that.
I mean, it's just that it seems to be symptomatic of our policies everywhere.
I mean, what can you figure out?
There's any policy in Lebanon, for example.
I'm trying to work that one out.
I don't know.
American foreign policy has been a joke ever since 9-11.
Well, yeah.
I mean, look, in Lebanon, what they do, they had the Syrians, the secular Baathist Syrian army ruled southern Lebanon.
And then what they do, Al-Qaeda kills probably Al-Qaeda.
It seemed to me anyway, I don't know about you, killed Rafiq Hariri in 2005, the former prime minister of Lebanon.
And they just pretend like, oh, it had to have been Hezbollah and Syria that did it with no evidence whatsoever.
And use that as an excuse to force the Syrian army out.
Well, who's going to fill the power vacuum in southern Lebanon then?
Stupid.
Except Hezbollah.
Oh, no.
Now we need to have a war against them.
And then what do they do?
Lose to Hezbollah and increase their power by 700%.
Now Hezbollah is intervening on the side in Damascus to back up Assad, the secular dictator they're working on overthrowing.
Oy, Gevalt, I just have no idea here.
It's crazy.
Yeah, I don't think anyone has an idea.
It's funny when you talk to these characters.
I was just at a conference in Doha in which some of these characters showed up from the government.
And were kind of coming out with these bromides about what they were doing.
And it's just, you sit there and you listen to them.
These guys are smart people.
And they're very plausible when they're talking, but they can't really believe what they're saying.
And, of course, these events are always structured in a way you can't challenge them.
Right, yeah.
You only get one follow-up, not a double back and forth there, right?
Yeah, they don't permit any of that kind of stuff.
And it's just awful.
It's like everybody's drinking the tea leaves here or drinking the tea here that's being brewed.
And nobody is in a position to say, well, this is nonsense.
Where is the emperor?
Where is new clothes?
And it's just crazy.
Right.
Is that the cot leaves that they brew the tea with there?
Yeah, I guess it's the cot.
I didn't have any of that.
I wish I had.
I read a thing in The New Yorker one time, Phil, where Connelisa Rice has dinner with Brent Scowcroft.
And they don't even have dinner because she says, we're going to create a democracy in Iraq.
And he goes, no, you're not.
And she goes, well, we're going to create a democracy in Palestine.
And he goes, no, you're not.
She says, well, we're going to create a democracy in Lebanon.
And everything's going to go right.
And he's going, what are you talking about?
And, OK, that's it.
I guess we're not friends anymore, Brent.
Bye.
And gets up and leaves.
They don't have a productive discussion at all, but she's living in la-la land.
She's the dictator of the world at that point.
You know, it's not like Bush is running things and he'd already sidelined Cheney at that point.
She was the one in charge and she didn't know the first thing about nothing and then couldn't even take the criticism from her own mentor.
Yeah, no, she's a particularly bad example.
But, of course, Hillary was not a whole lot better.
You know, it's a case where these people are blinded by their own hubris to think that the United States really matters in a lot of these places.
Sure, it matters.
But the fact is, it doesn't matter so much that it can recreate cultural traditions and realities and political structures and things like that.
It can't.
It can't do that.
It's never been able to do that.
Yeah, well, and the natural kind of evolution and maybe reformation of Islam has been put back generations by American foreign policy over there, where every lunatic, solifist, nutball screaming on the street corner is now made to look credible.
And all that crazy stuff he was predicting is all coming true.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
I mean, we are the best propaganda arm for solifist terrorism and every other kind of terrorism in the world.
Crazy.
All right.
Phil, thank you again for coming on the show.
I sure appreciate it.
Okay, Scott.
Take care.
All right, everybody.
That is Phil Giraldi.
He's a former CIA and DIA officer.
He writes for the American Conservative Magazine and for Antiwar.com.
And he's the executive director of the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
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