08/06/13 – Ted Snider – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Worden.
This is my show, the Scott Worden Show.
Full interview archives are available at scottworden.org.
More than 2,900 of them now, going back to 2003.
Proof that I'm good on everything for 10 years running, at least, and also that I have maintained this impeccable taste in guests this whole time, too, which is really my biggest point to my credit, I guess.
Okay, so first up on the show today, a brand-new guest never talked to before, Ted Snyder.
Welcome to the show, Ted.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
I'm doing well.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
There's supposed to be an author bio next to this piece of yours at antiwar.com, but unfortunately there's not one.
So could you give us your bio?
Yeah, I write mostly on analyzing patterns in American foreign policy and history.
My background is not so much in journalism as in philosophy.
So I'm not a journalist.
I don't try to dig up new news, but I look at the news that's happening, and I kind of analyze it and look for patterns and try to figure out what's going on behind the stories.
Okay, right on.
And then do you have a blog of your own or somewhere people can check out your stuff?
I don't really have a blog on this writing.
I've been sending it different places and publishing a lot on different websites, like Antiwar and places like that.
But I haven't been blogging.
I've just been sending in articles.
Okay, well, go ahead and name a couple other places where people can read some other things by you, too, if you want.
Most of my stuff is on Z, Znet.
I've published on Counterpunch and Rabble and Antiwar.
So I've got about 30 pieces in the last couple of years out on those places.
Okay, great.
Yeah, we're big Counterpunch fans around here, that's for sure.
All right.
Yeah.
Okay, so listen, this piece is great.
I just got to do the links in it.
Great.
I read through the whole thing here, and now I guess there's probably too many different ones to really cover them all.
But anyway, the piece is Obama's Silent Coups, and it's about these semi-violent and less violent regime changes and coup d'etats around the world, color-coded revolutions, perhaps, if you want to call them that, maybe without the colors, but same kind of thing.
And you really blew me away with this thing, because I just didn't – I can't keep track of them all, man.
I try, but I just didn't really realize how many regime changes have even taken place in the Obama year so far, five and a half years in now or whatever it is, four and a half years in.
And I also did not realize, especially I did not realize, how many of them really seem to have involved the Americans and foreign plans, conspiracies against the people of these countries.
So I guess, if it's okay with you, maybe we can start with the most obvious ones first, where it's like, say, 2009 in Iran, where America was really trying to hijack the Mousavi movement there.
And then we can move on, just tackle them in whatever order you want, and I'll try to come up with decent follow-up questions here.
Okay.
And I think, Scott, in a way, I think you just made the point, the fact that we haven't been aware that they've been happening under Obama is exactly the point.
I think, paradigmatically, in the past, when you had a coup, like the sort of famous coups in Guatemala or Chile or Iran, they were seen to be coups because at some point they involved the military coming in and firing on a presidential palace or taking over.
And although the workings were secret, they were seen at some point to be coups.
The coups under Obama, if you look at what's been happening in the world, a sort of pattern emerges that suggests a sort of coups analogous to the silent sort of drone wars, where Obama's wars are no longer seen to be wars because there's no boots on the ground, right?
There's just silent drones in the air.
But this idea of things that happen silently, they don't look like wars, people aren't aware of their wars.
Similar with the coups, they don't look like coups, and people aren't aware of their coups.
They don't involve tanks.
They don't involve assassinations of presidents.
And what the pattern suggests under Obama, or what it suggests to me under Obama, is that he's come up with a technique of using democracy to undermine democracy or to use the appearance of democracy to undermine democracy.
So as you said, in Iran in 2009, I think this was the first experiment in it where you use sort of what looks like a massive democratic expression in the streets to overturn an election.
So what you get in Iran in 2009 is Ahmadinejad running for re-election, and the Americans don't want him to get elected.
Then you've got Mir Hossein Mousavi running with this Green Movement, the sort of thing to be as a reformist movement.
Mousavi loses the election.
Ahmadinejad wins by a convincing 62.5%.
So Mousavi claims that the election was illegitimate.
This allows the Americans to support a regime change, because you can say if the election is illegitimate, then Ahmadinejad's government is illegitimate.
So what Mousavi does is you get these people in the street, and you get this 62.5% vote.
So one of the features of democracy, and it's a strength of democracy, it's a weakness of democracy, is that governments are chosen by the majority.
They're not chosen unanimously by everybody.
So in a country like Iran, even if you get this really convincing 62.5% vote, which has been shown by dozens of polls and studies to have been a legitimate vote, 62.5% will be...
You know, if Obama had won by 62.5%, that would be massive.
But even though it's 62.5%, that leaves 37.5% of the people in the minority.
And sometimes that means you have a dissatisfied 37.5%.
In a big country like Iran, where they had like an 85% voter turnout, which means 40 million people voting, 37.5% of 40 million leaves you 15 million possibly discontented people who can take to the streets and create what looks like a massive social movement.
Now, to be fair, the Green Movement of Mousavi never came close to 50 million.
It was never as big a movement as the Western media made it look.
But you get hundreds of thousands or millions of people out in the street, and you get what looks like a massive social movement that makes a lot more noise in the media.
Like a million people screaming in the squares of the street get a lot more attention in the media than people voting silently in a voting booth.
And so what you get is a change that couldn't be made in the polls being made in the streets.
You get a mass minority protesting in the streets that produces this loud, loud crying.
It seems like tons and tons of people, but it's still a minority.
The majority voted for the government in the polls.
And because the minority couldn't unseat that majority in the polls, they take to the streets, makes it look like a huge social movement, makes it look like something wasn't democratic, and this social democratic movement in the street justifies backing their demands for regime change because it seems so loud.
But this loud voice is really just the same minority that lost in the polls.
So you make it look like democracy, but you're undermining democracy.
So in other words, if we were to put the shoe on the other foot, George Bush, not my president, the Supreme Court nominated him, and I love Al Gore, cry all the Democrats, and they all go march on Washington.
Tough.
You lost.
And you know what?
I'm not a big fan of democracy.
I'm a libertarian, individualist type, and I think the majority can go to hell 99 percent of the time.
But if you do live in a democracy, I was raised up to believe anyway.
I'm not saying it's really like this, but it's certainly better than just bloody revolutions every time there's a change of power.
And that is that, you know what, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose.
And if you have to wait a few years and try again at the next election or maybe run yourself or join a political party and do a little bit, you know, assuming that there's a legitimate path to participate in the system yourself, you're supposed to grin and bear a loss and move on, not just go out into the street and demand that your small group of people who agree with you get to rule over everyone else any more than they get to rule over you, you know?
Right.
And in democracy you've got a social contract that says instead of each person doing what he wants in the state of nature, you'll agree to join a group and do what the majority of that group wants.
And for America to go around the world claiming democracy promotion but to be actually using the appearance of a democracy to undermine democracy is a subtle hypocrisy.
And what's happening now is because it's looking like democracy operating on the streets, it's not being seen to be a coup.
When that didn't work in Iran in 2009, the second experiment moved to Venezuela and the recent elections were...
Actually, wait.
Hold it right there.
Let's talk about Iran a little bit more here for a second because obviously this is in dispute but I side with the leverets on this that they went back and checked all the polls and they said Ahmadinejad won that election and sorry if you don't like it.
Maybe all the rich middle class and rich liberals in North Tehran or wherever they're from.
Maybe millions of them.
Maybe they don't like it but the religious conservatives of the countryside all over Persia turned out for Ahmadinejad.
And in fact this really speaks...
The recent election of Rouhani really speaks to the fact that within limits, just like in the USA, they really do have a constitutional democratic election system.
It's not like their president is simply handpicked by the supreme leader Ayatollah and the whole thing is a sham.
If you remember all of the western expert predictions before the recent election were that Ayatollah's handpicked guy was going to win and he didn't.
Rouhani won instead and it was apparently...
And I don't really know exactly how the factions break down but more or less I think this was the candidate of the Mousavi guys, of the Greens, and they won this time.
You know, more or less anyway.
Ahmadinejad's handpicked guy was not successful.
And so I forgot what my point was going to be other than...
Oh yeah.
Back to 2009 it was that they really...
It was a huge protest movement but it really was a minority.
They really did lose that election.
Right.
And it wasn't even that huge a protest movement.
The numbers were hugely amplified.
And although Iran's system of government is complicated...
Now wait a minute.
You know what my question was supposed to be?
And you can say whatever you want here.
I'll be quiet.
Turn off my mic.
But I wonder, what about the American role?
Because there was a lot of propaganda about how, oh, the election was stolen and the Greens are the good guys and all the neocons said Obama should do more to help them and whatever.
But what exactly do you think was the American role?
Because Green wasn't...
It wasn't like just orange in Ukraine.
It was the color of Mousavi's group and the Islamic flag and like that.
Right.
So what you get with an American role with Mousavi in 2009 in Iran is you get the Americans using the situation to provide an umbrella for what's essentially a coup.
Because the Americans did not recognize the Ahmadinejad election, which other countries did, and because it gave credibility to the Green movement saying that the election really was illegitimate, even though Mousavi never produced any evidence of illegitimacy, even though Khatami said that it wasn't illegitimate.
So instead of recognizing the government and moving on with a democracy, you don't recognize the government.
You say the election's illegitimate, therefore the regime forces itself on the people over the people's choice.
You give space for the Green movement then to take out the legitimate government.
So what the Americans really did is by not recognizing the government, they made the government illegitimate, and therefore a regime change became legitimate.
By recognizing the Green movement, by amplifying their numbers, by exaggerating their representation, their significance, their claims, so by recognizing them and not recognizing the government, you create a space where you can say, okay, there's time.
There's this umbrella where the situation needs to be corrected.
But that's just a euphemism for regime change, because Ahmadinejad had been elected.
So this creates an umbrella to remove a legitimate government.
It creates an umbrella for a regime change, but it makes the regime change look like a mass domestic social movement and not a coup.
And so we don't see it as a coup.
It's never called a coup.
Right.
Well, and then in that case it didn't really work.
It didn't work in 2009.
And one of the main reasons it didn't work in 2009 is because the Ayatollah came out so clearly with a challenge to Mousavi to prove it.
And because the numbers in the streets were actually much smaller, the attempt to amplify what was really quite a small movement, the attempt to amplify the movement and make it look huge, the illusion didn't work.
The magic trick didn't work.
The people really weren't there.
And so when Mousavi started calling people out to the streets months later or a year later into major movements, they didn't come.
And so the slate of hand fell through.
The illusion didn't work.
Right.
Okay, now, well, you pick.
You want to go to Venezuela next.
Let's talk about that.
And then also I really want Honduras too, if you could talk about that.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, Honduras is the other way, because I think there's two ways that you make things look democratic.
So Venezuela was a repetition of Iran.
So I don't know how much time we have, so I don't know if you want to spend time there or go to the other one, but Venezuela really quickly was another case of a leader who the Americans didn't want to win, in this case, Khrushchev as a successor, winning by a smaller amount than we thought, but winning a majority government.
And then the opponent, the American choice, claiming the election was fraudulent, though he never produced the evidence, he never actually brought charges.
When he asked for recounts, the government said you could have the recount.
When he asked for a 100% recount, he actually withdrew his charges.
But he kept calling the people out into the streets.
So what you get is a minority who for 14 years has failed at the polls to unseat the government, taking to the streets to accomplish what they couldn't accomplish in the polls.
But, again, the election was legitimate, as in Iran.
It was certified legitimate by the Carter Center, by all kinds of South American organizations, by 150 monitors.
So what you get, again, is this minority in the street trying to overturn a result that they couldn't overturn in the polls.
And, once again, you get the Americans playing a role here, although their role in Venezuela is more active.
What you get is the Americans playing a role here by being the only country in the world, like actually the only country in the world not to recognize the Maduro government, Chavez's successor, and giving credibility to the opposition by saying, yeah, we really do need a recount.
Well, and it's really so transparent that they've had this grudge for so long against Chavez, and now he's dead, and here's his hand-picked successor.
We want the right-wingers, dammit, and we don't care what the election results are.
Right.
Right.
And this is after Obama had promised, you know, in the first election to deal with Latin America differently.
And here what you see is the same thing, except it's not seen, right?
What was seen in Venezuela in the news, because they didn't focus on that every other country had recognized the government, they didn't focus on the continuation of the Bolivarian Revolution, they focused on the mass movement in the streets, and they made it sound like the people of Venezuela were exercising their democracy in the streets and calling for a change in government, when what you in fact had was a minority of the polls whose voice on the street is louder than the majority voice in the silent poll.
But the people calling for change were the same people who were the minority that lost the election.
So you just get this same group who weren't heard in the polls being heard louder in the streets.
It's using the noise in the streets to overturn the results in the polls.
So did you want to talk about Honduras next?
Yes, please.
Okay, so in Honduras, you get what I see as a second way of using democracy to go against democracy.
So the first was this way of making the voice in the street louder than the voice in the polls.
The second one is by making a coup look like perfectly legal constitutional shufflings in parliament or constitutional moves.
So you make a coup look like a perfectly normal legal constitutional wrangling of a nation.
And that's kind of what they did in Chile back in the 70s, right?
Well, the Supreme Court begged the military to overthrow the president, that kind of thing.
Right.
The difference, I think, is that those coups, you see them as coups because they end up with, again, they're getting shot in the presidential palace.
You know, did he commit suicide?
Was he shot by tanks?
But you can see the films of the tanks.
It ran in 1953.
You know, you see the tanks in the street, right?
So everybody knew it was a coup, right?
You can talk about whether it was a good coup, bad coup, like another country, but it was a coup.
In Honduras, it's not seen to be a coup.
There's no tanks.
There's no guns.
Nobody dies.
What you get is the democratically elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, who's moderately left.
He's, you know, moderately in line with Hugo Chavez.
He's not the American choice.
He's certainly not the Honduras of, you know, Reagan's Latin American wars in the 80s.
So you get Zelaya changing things.
In Honduras, the Constitution says that you can't be reelected.
You can only stand for one term.
Zelaya introduced a plebiscite to ask Hondurans if they wanted a new Constitution, okay?
It hadn't even gone to a new Constitution.
The question was, do you want a new Constitution?
And one of the questions that would be considered in that Constitution was, should we allow presidents to run for two terms?
Zelaya never said, I'm going against the Constitution, I'm running for two terms.
He said, if we want a new Constitution, do we want to investigate the question of whether you want presidents to be able to serve for two terms?
The Supreme Court declared Zelaya's plebiscite to be unconstitutional based on the claim that he was actually trying to run for a second term instead of asking the question.
They declared it unconstitutional.
The military kidnapped him at gunpoint.
The Supreme Court charged Zelaya with treason and appointed a new president, and that was it.
It was a coup in constitutional disguise.
They made it look like they had to do this constitutionally, but what they actually did was replace the president on the totally spurious claim that he was trying to seek a second term.
So it looks constitutional.
So then, you know, you were asking the question earlier about American involvement, and, you know, they didn't want to call it a coup.
So what they did is they did – I call this coup cooperation as opposed to doing a coup, right?
So it's coup cooperation.
What the Americans did is they closed their eyes.
They said there wasn't a coup.
Yeah, if I remember right now, didn't they, Ted, say – didn't Obama originally say, well, geez, we're not in favor of stuff like that?
But then Hillary Clinton's best friend, Lanny Davis, was involved in – you know, with the coup plotters basically like that, and Hillary overruled the president on that one, no?
Yeah, you got a lot of contradictory statements from the State Department and the White House.
When you look at the players in Honduras, you find the same players in the early Chavez coup in 06.
So certainly there's, you know, there's American involvement.
Zelaya himself said that he saw American soldiers at the airport.
Zelaya said – I think the first time he said this was actually on Democracy Now!
I think he told Amy Goodman – I've got a quotation of him where Zelaya says he saw the Americans, there were Americans.
But the interesting thing, because this is blind, is that while the Americans were saying no coup, they were actually in receipt of this cable from the embassy, which is – if it's not so horrible as comic in its lack of subtlety, they didn't know WikiLeaks was about to let people see this.
They clearly thought it would never be seen because the embassy cable from Honduras to the White House was called – the title of the cable was Open and Shut, the Case of the Honduran Coup.
And in that cable, the American embassy says that there's no doubt it was illegal and unconstitutional coup.
And they actually go on to say that any objections by the other side hold no legal merit.
So the White House and the State Department knew it was a coup.
Their embassy had called it a coup.
Despite that, they not only didn't call it a coup, they recognized the coup government over the head of the Organization of American States, over the head of everyone else.
And then Clinton went to work not only having the government recognized but pressuring the Organization of American States to readmit Honduras.
So they assisted the coup by not calling it a coup, by recognizing the government, by reintegrating it into the international committee, all along making this look like it had been democratic because it was the Supreme Court defending the Constitution.
So what you get here again is a coup that doesn't look at all like a coup because it in fact looks like the defense of democracy, but it's not.
It's using the features of democracy to pull off a coup.
The same thing happened shortly later in Paraguay.
So we see a number of places where this is happening.
You get Iran, Venezuela, Honduras, Paraguay.
This, of course, makes you look at what might be happening in the streets of Brazil and Turkey, for example, where you again get massively popularly elected governments that have been in power in each case for a third term.
In each case, there are governments who have angered America recently.
For example, Turkey and Brazil teamed up to broker an agreement with Iran that the Americans were furious about the nuclear thing with Iran.
And so now you get these protests in the streets again, and you wonder, is it the same pattern?
And I think we don't know that yet.
I think the question will depend on whether these protests in the streets are calling for the governments to behave differently, in which case that's perfectly legitimate democracy, or whether they're calling for government change, in which case you wonder again.
And, of course, this pattern raises interesting questions for Egypt as well, right?
Yeah, and I don't know if we'll have time to get to Egypt.
Maybe I was going to ask you a little bit more about why they're so interested in who rules Honduras, but drug wars and that kind of thing.
Obviously, there's the Egypt question, but this sort of – it makes me wonder, though, like in the case of Brazil, and I know very little about the protest movement and whatever, but, jeez, it seems so spontaneous.
And I wonder, is this just a problem of having the 800-ton guerrilla American empire in the world that nobody can ever have a legit protest movement against their evil nation-state without the Americans co-opting it and making it about their interests?
Yeah, and I think we'll have to wait and see whether the Americans are co-opting this.
When I think in Brazil, the feeling on the street is that there's legitimate protest against the Rousseff government, who's been a little bit different than her predecessor, de Silva.
But some of the claims there is that even though they're allied with Chavez and the social movement, that certain right-wing economic policies are still hampering the country.
But keep in mind, this is an election that's three times elected.
De Silva won 61% of the vote in 2002, he won 61% in 2006, and Rousseff won over 56% recently.
So, these are big, continuously popular elected governments.
Brazil and Turkey are both emerging world powers.
In many ways, things are very good there, but domestically, there really may be issues to protest.
And I think the question will be, are they just asking for these social changes, or are they going against the polls and asking for government change?
And I don't think I would even have looked at this, because you usually don't notice that a social movement's a coup until much later.
It's only that when you look at Iran and Venezuela and Honduras, you look at all these countries and you recognize that what's happening in Brazil and Turkey and Egypt looks a lot like that.
Then you at least open your eyes and you start asking the question, is that what's happening?
Maybe we won't know for a few years, but you start being aware and you start watching and being more careful about what you allow to happen.
You start talking about it.
Because in many ways, it fits the pattern.
Right.
Well, you know, Dan McAdams was on the show yesterday from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, and he was talking about the National Endowment for Democracy and the neocons back in the Reagan years, and how this is basically their whole deal is kind of taking the CIA covert action and just making it really abrupt and always calling it a push for democracy.
But then we can see all over the world, going back to the Bush years or even the Clinton years, where the NED is fomenting these revolutions all over the place.
Of course, in the Bush years, you had the Rose Revolution and the Orange Revolution, and then the Tulip Revolution or Pink Revolution in Kyrgyzstan.
You had the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, and they're just trying to push this anywhere and everywhere they can.
Right.
And when you get a lot of these democracy endowments or pro-democracy organizations, they're often seen in other parts of the world as being very different.
They've been kicked out of Bolivia recently for actually financing, fomenting change.
And there's been reports in the Egyptian movement that some of the leaders of the opposition movement there were heavily financed by these same organizations.
Again, you see this sort of picture of democracy promotion organizations actually funding people who are trying to push democratic elected governments out.
All right.
Well, we only got about 30 seconds here, but I'll just note I saw John McCain this morning on TV giving a press conference from Cairo.
And he said, you know, the law in America says that if there's been a coup, then we can no longer support you.
And how can we expect you to live up to the rule of law when we don't follow our own law, comma?
However, hey, let's all move forward and not look back.
Right.
And, you know, if I have one more second, it was recently said by a government official that although if we call a thing a coup, we have to stop giving them money.
Nobody ever said we have to look at a thing and decide whether it's a coup or not.
And it doesn't fit our foreign policy interest to decide whether Egypt was a coup or not.
Right.
So you get the same wonderful use of logic to just close your eyes to a thing.
Yeah, exactly.
Lindsey Graham was next and said, well, we're no longer going to have the politics of convenience where we do what's good for America at the expense of the people of Egypt.
That's exactly what they're in the middle of doing.
All right.
Hey, thanks so much for this great article and your time on the show, Ted.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
Appreciate it.
All right.
But that's Ted Snyder.
He writes for Znet and Counterpunch.
And this one's at antiwar dot com.
It's called Obama's silent coups.
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