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I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the great Stephen Zunas.
He is a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco.
And over there at accuracy.org, they recently put out a press release about Susan Rice, who is likely, I guess, who is said to be on the short list to possibly be named to be Joe Biden's vice president in the upcoming presidential race here.
So they said, you know, you ought to talk to Stephen Zunas about who Susan Rice really is, because on the surface, TV will tell you, look, an accomplished black woman.
Isn't that great?
Who could possibly criticize that?
And then Stephen Zunas says, well, I read things.
And so I would like to comment.
So here you are.
Tell them what you know there, Stephen.
Well, Susan Rice served as Assistant Secretary of State for Africa under the Clinton administration.
She served as U.N. ambassador, United States Ambassador to the United Nations, and later National Security Advisor under the Obama administration.
And she got a reputation of being among the more hawkish members of the foreign policy elite.
You know, she, during the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, she was going around on the talk shows talking about what a threat Saddam Hussein was.
He supposedly had all these, you know, weapons of mass destruction.
And is that right?
I did not remember that.
She did.
Where was she?
Is that Brookings at the time or something?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So running around with O'Hanlon and Pollack.
Yeah.
Very, very much so.
And see, isn't that interesting?
OK, I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
And the thing was, what was particularly disturbing, I mean, you may remember Colin Powell's speech before the United Nations, which was widely ridiculed, I mean, because, I mean, he said these fuzzy photographs and said, oh, you know, it shows Iraq has all these weapons in there.
And somehow the inspectors that were crawling all over Iraq at that point had finally been let back in.
They weren't finding him.
And they said, oh, they were there anyway.
And you know, but he she she made a statement that said Powell proved that Iraq had these weapons and was hiding them.
And I don't think many informed people doubted that.
And I mean, this is Orwellian.
I mean, those who blindly accepted Powell's transparently false claims were well-informed, while U.N. officials, arms control specialists and others knowledgeable of the reality of the situation were presumably otherwise.
And she also talked about, you know, that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction need to be dealt with forcibly, and that's the path we're on.
It's clear that Iraq is a major threat.
And here's someone who clearly doesn't know the difference between real and imagined threats.
And yet she's praised as this expert on on foreign policy.
And it's not just on Iraq.
I mean, she.
You know what, though?
Stop at Iraq for a second, though, because she was in what exactly do you remember was her title in the Clinton administration there in the later years?
She was assistant secretary of state for Africa.
And that had more general foreign policy positions under.
Under under Obama still.
But it wasn't like she was she was, you know, Dick Cheney off in Houston working for Halliburton and with Enron or something.
She had been right there.
Oh, yeah.
And I had a front row seat to America's real policy against helpless Iraq.
And so had to be lying.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I have a hard, hard time.
She's as smart as everybody says.
She is.
Yeah.
Because we try to be charitable and say, well, maybe she was a damned fool, but now couldn't possibly be.
Not in this case.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And to be so to be so adamant.
Well, it's also kind of weird about it.
And, you know, there's this widely circulated article from The Chicago Tribune that said, oh, no, she did not support the Iraq war.
And technically speaking, if you look carefully, I have not found her saying, yes, let's invade Iraq.
But she everything she said was reinforcing the argument for war and denigrating the arguments against war.
Right.
And so she was trying to have it both ways, you know, because she wanted a post in the next Democratic administration.
And so she was kind of hedging her bets.
Yeah.
And, you know, so I mean, so not only was she wrong, I would argue that's pretty, pretty damn unethical to, you know, on the most important foreign policy decision of the decade, you know, of a generation, you know, to be trying to, you know, to have to have it both ways and in such ways.
Oh, I didn't really support the war.
I just helped make it possible.
Right.
When, of course, the case, the real case there was not just that the case for war was a lie.
It was that this is going to be an absolute catastrophe.
You're going to do.
The father deliberately decided not to march to Baghdad because of reasons.
And you're saying you're going to go in there and knock the whole thing over and stay.
It's madness.
If I had asked you in 2002 or you had asked me in 2002, we would have told each other, this is absolutely crazy.
This isn't just wrong.
This is going to be a nightmare.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Ninety percent of many scholars, 90 percent of U.S. media scholars, and I'd say 80 percent of State Department specialists, you know, State Department veteran foreign service officers specializing in the Middle East, knew this was going to be an utter disaster.
You know, so it wasn't like the opinion was evenly divided or that everybody supported the war, as people are trying to say nowadays.
You know, there's a pretty broad consensus, you know, that this was, you know, I mean, it's a sort of go go around, you know, saying, you know, she had no way of knowing otherwise is ridiculous.
Exactly right.
Because, in other words, it was her and O'Hanlon and Pollack and some of those more prominent liberal hogs going along with Bill Kristol and Richard Perle and the most fanatical of the neoconservatives, while even Jim Baker and Brent Scowcroft were saying, don't do this.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
So, I mean, you know what Brent Scowcroft writes in The Wall Street Journal, don't attack Saddam.
Well, that's just it.
You know what I mean?
Anyone of who's worried about their credibility or whatever can just hide behind him.
The father's best friend, writing a note to the son for the father in The Wall Street freakin' Journal, saying, please don't do this.
Anyone, you know, even if you were just, whatever, a right-wing Republican of any description, anywhere on the right, you could say, I don't know, Brent Scowcroft seems to think that Saddam and Osama ain't the same guy.
I don't know.
You know, if you were paying attention and were looking for someone to, someone's authority to invoke, how about General Scowcroft, the father's national security advisor during the last war over there?
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Anyway, I'm just random raving all over your interview.
I'm sorry, but I just hate these people.
They're smug.
Unfortunately, Iraq is not an aberration.
I mean, you know, she, I remember when she was ambassador to the United Nations, she said that there was no daylight between the United States and the right-wing Israeli government and that there was no daylight between the United States and the right-wing Israeli government.
And this was when Netanyahu was pushing for a unilateral attack.
We can look at Africa, you know, which is her specialization, her support for autocratic regimes.
She helped suppress a United Nations report criticizing the government of Rwanda, a U.S. ally, for supporting the M23 rebels in Eastern Congo.
They were led by this notorious warlord, wanted by the International Criminal Court.
They wreaked havoc across Eastern Congo.
But she dismissed the report, saying, oh, it's Eastern Congo.
If it weren't for them, it would be some other group.
And then she also delivered a eulogy for the late authoritarian ruler of Ethiopia, Melissa Zolawi.
She referred to the dictator as a true friend of mine, calling him brilliant and uncommonly wise, able to see the big picture and the long game.
But she's most notorious, I think, about Israel and Palestine.
I mean, you know, she, you know, I remember Congressman Robert Wexler, he was then leading a right-wing pro-Israel advocacy group.
He wrote in an op-ed in Politico that, quote, Israel has, this is when Obama was in office, that Israel has no greater champion in the current administration than Susan Rice.
And she did her best at the U.N. to block the, I mean, yeah, it's true, the United Nations sometimes does go a little overboard in its criticism on Israel, but these, the resolutions she vetoed, she opposed, were quite reasonable, quite moderate.
They didn't question Israel's right to exist.
They didn't question Israel's right to self-defense.
They just said that Israel, like every country, does not, has to abide by basic international standards like the Fourth Geneva Convention and the United Nations Charter, and you shouldn't go around colonizing countries, nations that you occupy by military force, and you can't go around killing civilians with impunity.
And she said, you know, this is all anti-Israel crap.
They should not try to resolve the conflict.
It should be up to the so-called peace process, which is totally rigged in Israel's favor.
And she's really, and again, she's called the bombing of civilians, legitimate self-defense.
She's really hardcore on this issue as well.
And this is a time where, you know, polls show a vast majority of Democrats, you know, oppose the occupation, don't think we should give unconditional support for Israel anymore, certainly don't want us to go around supporting dictators in Africa or anywhere else, don't want us to go around getting in these overseas wars based on false or exaggerated threats, supposed threats to our national security.
I mean, what's far more important for the Democrats, if they're going to win in November, is not to have an African-American woman as their vice president, but have a vice president who can put a check on Joe Biden, who is as hawkish as Rice is, you know, and to say that, no, we're going to have, Joe's going to be a little more moderate as president than he was as senator.
The left-wing of the Democratic Party and the more libertarian-oriented independents who don't want, who want to get rid of Trump, what they need is a sign from the Democrats that we're not going to go back to the foreign intervention that has gotten us in so much trouble before.
And if he chooses Rice, it's going to be just the opposite message.
It's going to be saying, hey, folks, you better vote Green or Libertarian because you sure as hell can't get any hope from the Democrats now.
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Scott here.
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Man, I'll tell you what.
To think that anybody could support war in Libya in the year 2011, beginning before Osama was even dead, when we still got troops in Iraq allied with the Shia still hunting down with drones and special ops guys, the last remnants of what was then called the Islamic State of Iraq, Zarqawi's group, al-Qaeda in Iraq, to take their side in Libya in that moment?
I, you know, say what you will about invading Iraq.
Saddam wasn't in the middle of putting down a Bin Ladenite insurgency at the time that we invaded and took their side against him, for God's sake.
And you know, I'll never forget, and I'm sorry for repeating myself, everybody, but I love this story so much.
I'm driving down Sunset Boulevard in LA and I'm listening to right-wing radio and the host is a Rush Limbaugh clone, kind of typical sort of a guy, the guy that comes on after Rush and just parrots all the same stuff.
And he says, even Susan Rice says it's true that Gaddafi is giving all of his army Viagra so that they can rape every woman and girl that they find on their march east to Benghazi.
And if even Susan Rice says that's true, when everybody knows what a black, liberal, female, feminine woman she is over there at the United Nations, well then you know it's true when we gotta invade.
Yeah, it's, she has, and here's the whole point, is that on the key foreign policy issues of the day- Parentheses, that wasn't true.
Okay, sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, yeah, you're right, you're right.
On the key foreign policy issues of the day, Rice is far closer to the Bush administration than she is to the majority of rank-and-file Democrats.
And again, this is, and that's supposedly her expertise, and she really doesn't, that's the thing that, why Rice?
I mean, you know, for one thing, if you want to have a black woman, I mean, have someone who has ties to the black community, you know, like Karen Bass or somebody like that, you know?
I mean, she doesn't have particular close ties to the black community.
In fact, she's a resident of Maine, which is like the whitest state in the country.
I mean, you know, but she really doesn't add anything to the ticket, other than she's kind of a soulmate to Joe Biden.
What a weird way to get the VP slot, too, right?
That, you know, there's this quota of the identity of who this has to be, kind of thing.
Anyway.
And you know what, though?
And also, of course, there's the fact she's never run for anything before at all.
I mean, she is absolutely untested in terms of, you know, public attraction, her, and I don't know much about Karen Bass or how people feel about her, but I read a hilarious thing by Kevin Barron at Defense News saying, Rice has too much baggage, but Kamala Harris is a promising hawk.
She's a reasonable interventionist.
And I think that we could work with her.
How about her?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I remember, I remember this.
I had an article that came out when she was running for president earlier this year, that about how right-wing her foreign policy views were.
And in fact, she was, a prominent Zionist publication praised her as being more AIPAC than J Street.
In other words, you know, that she allies with the right-wing American Israel Public Affairs Committee than the more moderate J Street, which is a Zionist pro-Israel but anti-occupation group, and which, and more and more Democrats are identifying with the J Street wing.
It's not as critical of Israel as I am, but J Street is certainly better than AIPAC by a long shot.
But, you know, she still allies with AIPAC and their very hardline view on defending the settlements and the occupation and the like.
And this is at a time, you know, again, where rank and file Democrats have moved way to the left on this issue.
In fact, especially young Democrats, millennials, I mean, Israel-Palestine to them is, you know, what Central America and Southern Africa were, you know, to those of us who came of age in the 1980s.
I mean, it's a litmus test for one's view on human rights and international law.
And if the Democrats are going to win, they're going to need a high turnout.
And you can't have people like Rice and Harris and Biden in this awful plank that they push through the Democratic platform, which seems to, you know, essentially be indistinguishable, you know, from the, you know, hard line pro-Israel policies that have been going on for decades.
Yeah.
Well, I'll tell you what, I wonder if it'll even work.
After all, the incumbent always wins in America, as it is anyway.
And obviously Trump is aberration.
And in fact, if the old saying or the cliche or something that the old aphorism that anything can change in politics overnight kind of thing, that was ever true.
It's true with this character, our current president here.
But really, H.W. Bush is the only incumbent who lost since I was a toddler anyway.
And that was because he was running on 16 years of Reagan era, right?
So there was a real pendulum swing after 12 years already of Reagan and Bush.
And there was a strong third party challenge in the form of Ross Perot, which split the Republican vote.
Oh, that's true.
Absolutely.
Huge spoiler there.
I mean, Clinton only got a plurality of the popular vote.
That is true.
That is definitely true.
But, you know, in any case, though, but Clinton was elected twice.
Again, you're right with Perot's help.
But also, you know, Bush was not necessarily on a partisan basis.
Bush did, too.
Obama did, too.
And, you know, I don't know, man, I think I think Biden getting married somehow to a gimmick like it has to be a black woman, you know, to satisfy whatever faction on the left is.
Well, I don't even know if he's going to go along with it, honestly.
I'd only put out like 50-50.
I think he might balk at that because, after all, what would you do if they were trying to saddle you with Harris or Rice?
These people are a lead weight at best.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the thing is, is that they really want to go for a black woman.
They are far better candidates.
There must be millions of them.
When you start getting somebody who whose politics are as hawkish and interventionist as any white male politician, you know, that is that is that is it's tokenism.
Yeah.
No, you're right.
Look, you grab any idiot off the street of any description.
They're going to be better than Susan Rice and Kamala Harris, the butcher of Benghazi.
And I don't mean the Benghazi massacre.
I mean, the whole war there and the prosecutor of Northern California there.
Yeah.
You know, these people.
She's an attorney.
She's an attorney general of the state of California.
Yeah.
She's the D.A. for San Francisco.
And it's it would be particularly ironic, you know, given that there is growing awareness about the abuse by police and D.A., the district attorney's offices and things like that.
But they get they get someone who is part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
Remember how easily it's not it's not the main factor here.
Yeah.
And remember how easily Tulsi took her down, you know, nine months ago or so when she goes, yeah, you've locked up people for pot.
And then when they asked you if you smoked it, you laughed and you tried to keep a guy on death row, even though everybody knew he didn't do it by hanging on some technicality.
And the whole audience was like, oh, later's for you.
She was done.
She was out in like two or three weeks after that.
Yeah.
She had nothing to come back with.
Yeah.
Well, you like Syria or something.
A lot of who is reasonably smart and has a lot of promise.
But man, she really did blow her campaign again.
Susan Rice, as you noted, has not campaigned at all.
And I'm given given both, you know, Joe Biden's age and and and and pittance for for gaps.
The Democrats could really use a vice president who's a good candidate, is a good campaigner.
And again, neither neither Rice nor Harris add anything to that.
No.
All right.
I'm so sorry.
I just realized how late I am and got to go here.
And I'm very sorry for talking all over your interview.
I'll cut out half of it, at least.
But thank you very much for coming back on the show, Stephen.
It's great to talk to you again.
Always good to talk to you.
All right.
Yes.
That is Stephen Zunes.
He is a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS Radio dot com, Antiwar dot com, Scott Horton dot org, and Libertarian Institute dot org.
