07/25/12 – Scott McConnell – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, scotthorton.org.
Our next guest is Scott McConnell, founding editor of the American Conservative Magazine.
He's got a few articles here I want to talk about.
First, In Search of a Costas Belli.
Will Burgess do?
Welcome back to the show.
Scott, how's it going?
Pretty good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
It's been a while.
It has been.
So far, Burgess ain't good enough, doesn't look like.
But then again, I don't want to speak too soon.
I guess, first of all, can you just give us the background for people who haven't been paying attention?
Maybe they just got back from vacation or something.
What happened to Burgess, Bulgaria, the bombing, and what does it have to do with a Costas Belli for a war with anyone?
Well, a week ago, a bus full of Israeli tourists outside of an airport was hit by a terrorist bomb.
And there was in the media a guy who was shown walking around who was considered the probable perpetrator.
And from what I've seen, I don't think anybody knows exactly who it was and who was the network behind him or why it was done, except Israel, not even the Israeli intelligence services, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu jumped on it immediately and said, it's Hezbollah, it's Iran, it's Hezbollah, it's Iran.
And he very quickly got himself booked on major Sunday talk shows and was able and was essentially trying to spin this as an example of the threat Israel faces and America faces and why Iran can't be trusted.
And I mean, Israel, as you know, has been kind of trying to draw America and the West into the idea that a preventive war on Iran is necessary for a long time.
And both America and its NATO allies have been trying to restrain Israel from going to war by itself.
So I worry that this terrorist incident would be enough to kind of tip public opinion in the United States to be more supportive of an Israeli war.
And you know, there's also the part, Israel has been talking a lot about the possibility of an attack at the Olympic Games, which would also have the same effect on public opinion.
So I mean, that's where we are.
As far as I know, but I think it's certainly plausible that Hezbollah operatives killed Israeli terrorists.
Well, yeah, that was gonna be my first follow up was what are the chances you think that it was Hezbollah that would do it?
I don't think it's less than 50%.
I mean, there's been a shadow war between Hezbollah and Israel for a while.
A few years ago, Israel used a bomb to kill a major Hezbollah leader.
I'm not going to pronounce his name, but I'm not going to spell it.
And Hezbollah has vowed revenge for that.
And also Israel and Hezbollah is linked to Iran, they're both Shiite.
Israel has also been killing Iranian nuclear scientists in what can plausibly be termed acts of terror.
So I mean, there is a kind of shadow terror war going on between the intelligence agencies of those entities.
To hear Netanyahu tell it, Hezbollah is basically just a front for Iran, in that sense, that if Iran told Hezbollah, we want you to blow up a bus full of people in Bulgaria, then that's what they are.
It's just, you know, that's their role in the world is to follow those marching orders.
Is that true?
Do you think?
I think that's pretty unlikely.
I mean, they're Hezbollah are Lebanese, and they represent a significant part of Lebanon's population.
And they, you know, they have their own interests, but I'm sure they've gotten aid and assistance from Iran before.
So it's a more complicated question, but they're certainly not like Tehran speaks and Hezbollah acts.
There's nothing like that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, for Netanyahu, this sort of seems to be just he doesn't even need to actually say it.
Right.
It's just, you know, Hezbollah and Iran are the same word in a way.
Yeah.
I'm a little, I mean, a little disturbed with, like, the credibility of, I mean, that America TV is so quick to give Netanyahu so much airtime to raise his charges, because, I mean, all American knowledgeable Americans, which would be people in intelligence agencies, have been very circumspect about attributing blame for this.
But what you hear is Iran, Hezbollah, Iran, Hezbollah, and, you know, not much caution.
And there's obviously a pretty bad history of people who are in the, in the target lines of various ideological actors, like Saddam Hussein and his supposed nuclear weapons plant and stuff like that leading to war.
So I'm in false charges and manipulation of intelligence fund, and I worry that this is happening again.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I thought it was interesting that in the New York Times article, which Glenn Greenwald skewered for just really taking Netanyahu's word for it, him and an anonymous American official, that if they agree, then this is an absolute fact that, yes, it's a confirmed truth now that Hezbollah did it.
It was that article that said, well, you know, still this would have been tit for tat, which is actually pretty much out of the ordinary for the New York Times, right?
Which typically would say that anything anyone ever did to an Israeli would be an attack, and anything Israel ever did would be only retaliation for whatever happened to them last.
Yeah.
There are, there's some Israelis who have been, you know, who've said that typically they're right wing Israelis who are on the outs of Netanyahu, but in the defense infrastructure said, well, you know, you want a war with Hezbollah, you know, maybe you'll get one and this is what it's like, you know.
But you're not going to find many, it is a rare thing for an American to be saying that Israel is, or Americans for that matter, are always the pristine, completely innocent actors in the world stage who are, you know, only victims, which be surprising to most people in the world.
Yeah.
Well, you know, there's a lot of things that people in Washington, D.C. believe that the rest of us just kind of scratch our heads about.
Now here's something that, well, I don't know, no, I guess we'll have to start with this.
I want to talk about the Abu Nidal wrinkle at the end of your article here.
I just think it's great.
But that probably, we'll have to start the next segment with that because I don't think we'll have time to really let you explain the great irony in all of this, Scott.
But, well, I guess I want to go back then to your point about the cost of spelling and whether this really amounts to the kind of thing where they could launch strikes on it.
It doesn't look like they're going to really exploit it that far.
Gareth Porter had a piece we talked about on the show with him yesterday about how, well, they're trying to get the EU to put them on the terrorist list and that's really what they're pushing for with this at this point.
But it really does amount to one of, I don't know, 5,000 stories about those damn Iranians.
They are so dangerous and so crazy and so violent and all they do is kill innocent people outside of their own borders and all of these things and nuclear threat to the world.
And nobody ever really proves any of it.
And I'm not trying to be an apologist for Iran or whatever, but there are 1,000 stories like this and none of them really are true, but they amount to, I assume at least in the mind of the average person, a bunch of, well, a lot of smoke means there must be fire kind of a deal.
You know?
At some point, it'll be okay once the bombs start falling.
I mean, I hope we've learned something about this, but I fear not enough.
I mean, from the Iraq fiasco, but because, you know, I mean, I think Iran has, you know, people don't ask why would Iran, you know, either why would Iran want to build a nuclear weapon, maybe because it's surrounded by states with nuclear weapons, or why would it not want to, which is, I think, plausible because I think they don't want to, but, you know, it's a complicated question.
We know very little about it.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry.
We've got to hold it right here and go out to this hard break.
It's Scott McConnell from the American Conservative Magazine.
It's theamericanconservative.com in search of a Cossus Belli.
Will Burgess do?
We'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton, scotthorton.org.
I'm talking with Scott McConnell from the American Conservative Magazine, theamericanconservative.com.
Subscribe.
And we're talking about this piece, In Search of a Cossus Belli.
Will Burgess do?
And then I've heard this maybe once or twice before.
It might have been from you in the first place there, Scott, but it's the story of how Israel came to invade southern Lebanon in a chase after Yasser Arafat, I guess, back then, and create Hezbollah as a consequence, and a whole hell of a lot of the messes they've been in ever since, and how it was just like this.
One of these Burgess-style attacks where, you know, whoever was the Benjamin Netanyahu in charge in 1982 decided he wanted to blame who he wanted to blame, and created a disaster for everyone involved.
Well, it was Menachem Begin, who I think is kind of a role model for Netanyahu, though he was less fluent in the American media.
But Israel wanted to chase the Palestinian Liberation Organization out of Lebanon, and Israel was as much afraid of, maybe more afraid of, peace with the PLO, and a PLO that would say, you know, let's get a Palestinian state alongside Israel and make peace with it, and that was happening in PLO circles.
But there was a divisive issue, and there were kind of left-wing or whatever factions within the PLO that wanted nothing to do with Arafat or finding a peaceful accommodation with Israel, and one of them was Abu Nidal, and they, Abu Nidal assassinated, or tried to assassinate, the Israeli ambassador to London, and they shot him in the head.
It didn't kill him, but he died fairly recently.
But, you know, killing an ambassador is, I mean, almost universally a cause for war.
But of course, Israel didn't want war with Abu Nidal, they wanted war with the PLO, so they immediately, I mean, obviously they were looking for a cause's belly, and they had a plan to invade Lebanon and create a little Christian mini-state and drive the PLO out and, you know, reorganize the Lebanese government to their liking.
And you say it wasn't because they were afraid that if they didn't do some pre-emptive strike that Yasser Arafat was going to be some power and hurt them, they were afraid that they might have to sit down at a table and make a peace with him?
I think that's true, I mean, Israel is...
I'm sorry to interrupt and go back halfway through the story here, but dang!
Yeah, no, certainly the conversation within the PLO and within political Palestinians about accepting, making peace with Israel within the 1967 borders was pretty far advanced, and that's a conversation that started in Palestinian circles in the 70s, I guess.
This was in 1982.
And then there were already, like, rebellious groups, of which Abu Nidal was one.
And I suspect, I don't actually know or remember this, that they tried to shoot... shot the Israeli ambassador in order to create trouble, you know?
And they did.
All right.
So I'm sorry that I interrupted you on that just particular point, but you're saying, so then, after this assassination by the Abu Nidal faction, they went ahead and used that as the excuse to invade southern Lebanon to chase after Arafat and those that they could have made peace with?
Yeah.
Even way back then.
Yeah.
I mean, way back then, it wasn't, I don't think, overwhelmingly obvious in Israel then that you could make peace with the PLO, but it was pretty obvious, too.
I mean, if you remember, American diplomats were beginning to engage with the PLO in the late 70s.
That's why Andrew Young was fired from the United Nations, and why Israel so disliked Jimmy Carter, is the Americans were following through on all the overture from the PLO that now the time has come to settle this conflict.
So I mean, we're going back here, but Israel was, in a way, more threatened by Palestinians who come with an olive branch than those with a terrorist gun, because a terrorist gun can't do that much.
So now, this is really complicated, but I think, suffice to say, the Lebanese government, the way it is now, it's, I think they call it the confessional system, where every faction gets a certain number of parliamentarians and a couple of cabinet ministers and whatever, and it's this very careful balance, and maybe it's out of balance, I don't know, but it's an attempt to, at the end of the civil war that went on there for so long, to finally kind of give everybody a fair enough shake that they, in the power sharing, that they won't wage war all the time, and you're saying that what the Israelis wanted instead was just to empower the Christians to create their own state in Lebanon, or to take over Lebanon, is that it?
My recollection is that the Israelis wanted to expand their border northward to the Litani River, and then to create a sort of a Maronite Christian state with, I forget the name, but there were, I mean, the Christian left, the Phalangists, were significant players in military politics, and they were, they had been generally losing power for demographic reasons for a generation, and so many of them were willing to cooperate with Israel, but they weren't willing to cooperate that much with Israel, and I, there's a kind of a great passage in Avi Shlyam's book, where the Lebanese Christian who realizes what Israel has in store just says, you know, no, no, no, you have, like, completely the wrong idea, I'm a Lebanese.
But I mean, Israel's invasion of Lebanon was a disaster, it solved nothing strategically, it, you know, killed thousands of people, and bittered many people, and has left Israel with many more hardcore enemies than it used to have.
There never was a Hezbollah until 1983, right?
Right.
I mean, god dang, you know, I think it was Uri Avnery had a piece just a few weeks back where he talked about, he was there, and he saw the Shiites of southern Lebanon, who, the PLO wasn't their fight, and they kind of were standing back to see what was going to happen, and the Israelis made sure to make enemies out of them immediately.
Yeah, it's kind of astonishing that Hezbollah has become, like, the most effective Arab fighting force in all the Arab-Israeli wars.
I mean, they more or less fought Israel to a standstill in 2006, which was, really, other Arab armies had not done that.
And these were people who were not at all hostile to Israel 25 years earlier.
It really is amazing.
I remember one time M.J. Rosenberg wrote this piece where he said, the peaceniks were right, and then he goes through and he cites, I don't know, 15 examples starting in 1962 or something, where the peaceniks said, advised against the policy before it even took place.
And then the bad guys, the war party, went ahead and did it their way, and then this is the terrible thing that happened.
And then he's got 15 of them or something.
Every time they get in a war, it's always bad for even the stated goals of the war party in each case.
You know?
I mean, it's hard to say.
I guess if you're a right-wing Israeli, you can look at it and say, we have the West Bank and we're slowly ethnically cleansing the Palestinians from the West Bank, and the world says it cares, but it doesn't really do anything about it.
And so they can point to, I mean, there's a changing climate of opinion about this, but they can point to that it's never going to change fast enough that anybody's going to do anything.
I mean, it's not clear where we're going to leave.
There's one big victory, I guess.
Yeah.
Well, and although you would have to have a right-wing Israeli who's honest enough to talk that way to you about it.
Yeah.
That's just part of the story.
But yeah, certainly as far as having enemies in Lebanon, and you know, this is the same thing goes for Hamas in Gaza, too.
You know, Arafat and the PLO, they weren't great or whatever, but you would think that if you asked them that the Israeli government would say they would prefer, I mean, they certainly prefer Mahmoud Abbas to the guys, I don't know the names of the leaders of Hamas in Gaza, but...
No, I think Hamas's electoral victory in 2006 was almost completely, like, engineered by Israel, which refused to give the Palestinian Authority or Abbas, the Fatah faction, any victories to point to.
I mean, you know, and it just sort of continuously humiliated them, so Palestinians said, well, we don't like them that much anyway, let's vote for Hamas, how can it be less, how can it give us less?
Well, you know, I was just emailing back and forth with a guy earlier about this terribly inaccurate, I think it was an AP article, and we were going over the details of it, and I was saying how they were kind of half-right, even though they didn't mean to be, when they said that Hamas took power in Gaza in 2007.
It started out, they had a coalition, after they won the election of 2006 that Condoleezza Rice threw for them, they had a coalition.
But then, the Israelis, the Americans, and the Egyptians under Mubarak tried to arm up Fatah to overthrow Hamas, and it backfired, and Hamas just got all their guns.
It's in the Gaza bombshell by David Rose, in Vanity Fair.
Yeah, didn't Elliott Abrams play a role in this?
You know what, I would bet that he did, I'd have to go back.
Yeah, it is, Elliott Abrams, right here, it says at the top.
Alright, I'm sorry we're out of time, thanks very much, Scott McCollum, everybody, check him out in the American Conservative Magazine.