09/20/13 – John Glaser – The Scott Horton Show

Why does the U.S. support the tortured dictatorship in Egypt?
Because that's what Israel wants.
Why can't America make peace with Iran?
Because that's not what Israel wants.
And why do we veto every attempt to shut down illegal settlements on the West Bank?
Because it's what Israel wants.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to The Thing here.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is the show.
We had a little bit of a glitch there, but it's all right.
We got John Glazer on the line.
He writes for antiwar.com and you can find him also at the Washington Times.
Where else you write nowadays?
Oh, I occasionally appear at the Huffington Post and the Bailey Caller and sometimes the American Conservative.
Yeah, there you go.
Good times.
All right.
Thanks for joining us today.
First things first here.
Let's talk about Iran and the possibility of a nuclear deal.
Does Obama have what it takes to cut a deal?
Is he going to cut a deal?
Are they going to finally put the bogus Iranian nuclear issue to bed?
John Glazer, is it possible?
Ever since Hassan Rouhani's election, Western analysts from really across the spectrum, with the exception of a few hardline neocons, have said that this is just a wonderful opportunity.
We have a moderate reformist who's willing to talk.
Today I think, or it was either today or yesterday, Rouhani published an op-ed in the Washington Post saying we need a constructive dialogue.
There's been reports confirmed by both Obama and Rouhani that they've exchanged letters.
So there's some constructive things, and they might even meet at the UN next week.
So these are all good signs, but there's a problem.
Any sort of negotiations, any sort of detente, any sort of rapprochement between the United States and Iran, is doomed because of a single fact, and that's the fact that Ayatollah Khomeini, who holds ultimate control no matter who's president, is absolutely convinced that Washington is out to overthrow his government.
Worse still, he has good reason to believe it.
So in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs Magazine, the main establishment journal in the U.S., the journalist and Iranian journalist and political dissident Akbar Ganji wrote that Khomeini believes that the U.S. government is bent on regime change.
Khomeini spoke to the Iranian judiciary officials in late June right after Rouhani's election, and he says, I'm quoting him, the Americans say they are not after regime change, however they clearly show opposite in the statements and actions that they make.
So if in any situation where the U.S. could possibly be discussing things on a fair and constructive basis, I don't think that they have a lot of promise, unless the United States really changes its approach towards Iran and really persuades the Iranian leadership that we're not out to overthrow their government.
I mean, you know, it's interesting because some people think that covert regime change is this retired foreign policy tool of a bygone Cold War era, but the truth of it is that the last time that the United States seriously considered overthrowing the government of Iran was in the Bush administration, the very recent Bush administration.
If you read a book by David Crist, who is a senior historian for the Defense Department right now, and he's a former Marine, he wrote in his book Twilight War, the Secret History of America's 30-Year Conflict with Iran, that January 2002, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were shuffling around a national security document, a planning document, that strongly backed regime change.
There was a Pentagon memo that made it to the desk of President Bush that said, I'll quote it, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and this was backed by Dick Cheney, takes a strong position on regime change and sees very little value in continuing any engagement with Iran.
And of course, if you take the bird's eye view, the U.S. has waged two aggressive wars along Iran's east and west coast in the past 10 years.
We constantly flood the Persian Gulf with fleets of Navy warships directly to Iran's south.
We supply money and weapons to Iran's most threatening regional adversaries in Israel and Iran.
We started supporting recently the MEK, the Iranian Dissident Group, who wants to overthrow the regime.
We perpetrated cyber warfare on Iran.
We're imposing aggressive economic warfare as well that's crippling the economy, all as punishment for a nuclear weapons program that America's most informed intelligence agencies all say doesn't exist.
So if you take all of this and sort of swallow it, you realize that the Iranian leadership is perfectly reasonable in seeing the U.S. goal as regime change, and so in that sense, any real negotiations are going to be neutered.
Yeah, but you know what?
Here's the thing, though.
Is it reasonable for the Americans to have a policy of regime change?
I mean, never mind whether it's moral or not, but it seems to me like if you're going to do a regime change, you've got to have some friendly colonels in the army who agree with you or something, right?
They don't have a prayer of reinstalling any kind of Shah to ever be the ruler of Persia again at this point, do they?
No, but the fact that they were considering it in the Bush administration shows how illogical they are.
I mean, the regime that they so hate right now is the regime that came about as a reaction to their fumbled covert regime change in 1953.
This is the blowback.
These are the consequences, and they want to do them again despite the fact that the bad consequences of the hate so much are right in front of their face.
That said, I don't think that the Obama administration is seriously considering covert regime change in Iran.
What I think the Obama administration is doing is what the Clinton administration was doing.
It was not so far into the horrible sanctions regime that we imposed on Iraq in the 1990s that the Clinton administration said, you know what, even if Saddam comes within the provisions of the ceasefire resolution, we are not going to lift the sanctions unless he's been removed from power.
So it was an explicit aim at regime change, but it was slow, painful regime change, sort of kicking the can down the road until they decided they could do something else.
And of course 9-11 brought the perfect opportunity.
So that seems to me what the Obama administration is doing.
Impose harsh regime sanctions, you know, cry about this fantasy non-existent nuclear weapons program, and kick the can down the road until a more radical regime in Washington decides that they can actually do something more belligerent.
Well, yeah, you know, I don't know.
Even in the case of Iraq, which was a much weaker country at the time of invasion, it took an invasion to do it.
There was no covert plan for getting rid of Saddam, not that anybody would buy into or sacrifice men dropping them in there to do.
You know, whenever Chalabi would say, well, well, let's carve out a little safe zone or let's figure out a way to do a coup d'etat or whatever, it would always fall apart.
Everybody was always opposed to it, you know, like in the 1990s.
Yeah, I think it was a fantasy.
So I don't know what they think.
I remember, you know, there was Phil Giraldi's leak back in 2005 that Cheney had a plan that if there was another major terrorist attack that they would just start bombing the hell out of Iran and maybe even nuke them under that pretext if there was another major attack here.
But even then, you're still not going to sack Tehran.
What would it take to sack Tehran?
The army and the Marines and all them, they refused before they went and tried to do that, right?
I mean, come on.
This is comical stuff.
I think you're right.
I mean, I think that the latest thing that we saw with Syria is a good indication.
I don't think that, you know, what we had was John Kerry, his Botox face and like lazy eye in front of Congress screaming about the necessity of bombing Syria.
And right to his left, you had General Martin Dempsey, the highest military officer in the country, looking down, you know, all of his mannerisms were reluctant.
He had one word answers.
And we read in the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post how vehemently the military leadership and the military in general was against bombing Syria for no reason except to, you know, preserve Obama's tough guy image.
So I think that, yeah, neither people in Washington nor in the rest of America have any appetite for, you know, engaging in regime change with Iran.
However, you know, these sanctions and this approach of isolation and sanctions and pretty constant threats of war, that is a recipe for regime change down the line.
It actually has regime change as a long-term objective, but, you know, maybe they're just kicking the can out of the oven.
They don't know what's going to come next and they just don't know how to move on the Iranian situation.
Hopefully, you know, I hope I'm wrong.
I hope Obama somehow finds his own cojones and welcomes Rouhani's overtures for diplomacy.
I hope they meet with the UN.
I hope something changes.
But you know, it's hard for me to be too optimistic when the leadership in Tehran believes with pretty good reason that Washington wants the destruction of that regime.
Yeah.
Well, you know, this is how Nixon made it okay to lose Vietnam, was, well, never mind the domino theory and all that, because we're friends with Mao now, and so it doesn't matter, right?
Well, this is how they could, you know, defuse the whole crisis of the Shiite axis or arc of terror or whatever the hell thing Michael Ledeen calls it there.
Just befriend the regime in Iran.
Recognize their independence.
What's so hard about that?
They're too big of a country to really be a little satellite of ours and there's too many hard feelings.
As you mentioned, this is, the revolutionary regime is the blowback from the American dictatorship from 53 to 79 there.
So you know, what would really be so hard about, you know, going along with the Leverett's plan and just going over there and saying, you know what, we promise not to bomb you if you guys swear to keep your enrichment at 3.5% or whatever.
We can be friends.
Why not?
As Dick Cheney put it in 1998, hey, the Iranians are people too.
Let's do business.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny because that, I think to a really cold calculating foreign policy maker in Washington, that is an incredibly good option.
And it's an incredibly good option because, for example, we're supposedly exiting Afghanistan, right?
And if you think back to the beginning of the Afghan war, the Bonn Council or summit in which Iran helped us oust the Taliban and helped us impose the Karzai regime and so on and so forth.
I mean, if a cold calculating realist sitting in Washington doesn't want Afghanistan to completely fall apart as soon as the last American boots leave, having a friendship and a baton with Iran would be incredibly helpful.
Also, you know, if we want the economy to boost a little bit, if we want the world economy to start picking up even further, if we want sort of the violence and sectarianism in the Middle East, not just between groups, but between states to settle down, it'd be nice to lift the sanctions on Iran and have the oil flow.
It'd be nice to get some of the oil in the United States that China is now getting and so on and so forth.
I mean, there's a lot of real politic benefits to befriending Iran.
And the reason that our policy continues to be so irrational, at least one of the main reasons is because of Israel.
You know, we we have so much political weight tilted in the direction of Israel that befriending Iran is just out of the question because of how Israel would respond to it and how I was just going to say.
Yeah, right.
John, you're talking like an American from an American national interest point of view, which has nothing to do with it.
Right, exactly.
This is why this is why so many of our policies are so irrational in the Middle East.
Like you said, it would be totally against our interests and totally a waste of time and a total eff up if we went ahead and did regime change in Iran.
But of course, that's what Benjamin Netanyahu desperately wants.
So let's consider it as a realistic option.
You know, this influence from Israel makes our policies so irrational that we end up losing our national interest.
We end up getting poorer and more bogged down in the Middle East and, you know, progress is blocked.
And the funny thing about it, too, is that if you just took the average American off the street, they know what's better for Israel than the government of Israel does.
And so if the Americans really loved Israel at all, they would tell Benjamin Netanyahu to sit down, shut up, and they would broker a peace deal with everybody in the neighborhood, disarm the Israelis of their nukes and chemical weapons and make a deal and and throw this clean break back into the trash and make sure to set Gaza and the West Bank and East Jerusalem free.
And then we could move on into the a bridge to the 21st century and a half or whatever without this constant crisis.
You know, there's an you just reminded me of another benefit that real political calculating real lives in Washington ought to recognize, which is that this kind of aggression, this belligerence towards Iran, this sanctions regime, the threats, all of the military encirclement has no has very little likelihood of pressuring Iran to to give up enrichment or give up its nuclear program altogether or anything like this.
I mean, that's just not going to happen.
From Tehran's point of view, they see Iraq and Libya open up their facilities to inspections by the West.
They end up having no nuclear weapon and they're eventually attacked, deposed and killed.
So, you know, Iranians are not unreasonable to say to themselves, look, we we better have nuclear weapons capability, even though we have a fatwa and we are morally against nuclear weapons.
We better signal to the Western countries that, hey, we are not going to we're going to have the capability to do this if, in fact, we are attacked and if we are, you know, invaded the lessons from Iran's perspective of Iraq and Libya and North Korea demonstrate that nuclear weapons are the only dependable deterrent against invasion and regime change.
You know, but again, we were talking about how irrational U.S. policy is and we're heavily incentivizing Iran to gain this breakout capability because of our threats.
And you know, before they would even get there, the trigger happy Israelis would probably bomb preemptively, which would draw the United States to what would surely become a regional conflagration that we can't afford and would be, you know, just a bigger catastrophe than Iraq.
So, you know, this Israeli influence really pushes us in some really irrational directions and it's harmful to any prospects for diplomacy, despite the decent signs that we're seeing in the last couple of days.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's funny, too, because if you just started listening, listing all the terrible negative side effects of this, you know, stay enemies with Iran, no matter what kind of policy from the way the Iraq war was conducted to the mess we're in in Syria right now, it's it's really just unbelievable.
You know, why is America back in Al-Qaeda because Al-Qaeda is in a war with Hezbollah?
Well, even though Al-Qaeda is our enemy, Hezbollah is Israel's enemy.
So here are guys are our money.
Our guns are going to the loyal followers of Ayman al-Zawahiri in Syria over this policy.
It's high treason.
It's madness.
I mean, that's kind of hyperbole I usually don't like to engage in because, you know, I'm a spooner right on the treason issue mostly.
But, jeez, John McCain and Barack Obama, they swore a loyal oath to the damn thing, you know?
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, what we're talking, you know, it's interesting how how contradictory I mean, that's the broader sort of complexity of the situation.
But on a micro level, it's interesting how backward our policy on Syria is, you know, on the one hand, we are pressuring the, quote, unquote, moderate rebels, the FSA, to fight and battle against the radical al-Nusra and Islamic State of Iraq people.
And so it's causing more fighting in between them.
And at the same time, we're sending money and weapons into this area that we have no control over in terms of where they end up.
We know from a study by a defense contractor recently, James, that about half of the rebels are Islamists.
And we had a report earlier, I think last week, from Mother Jones that said the process for vetting people is shoddy and easily overcome by these rebel officers who are receiving these weapons and just want to sort of fight and win and don't have the qualms that Washington might have about these weapons getting into the wrong hands.
So, you know, we're engaging in such irrational fight, having these groups fight each other, but then sending money to them and weapons to them.
You know, and it's funny that I think that Washington knows this.
There was a report in the Washington Examiner last week that said President Obama, it reported that President Obama waived a provision in the federal law that was meant to prohibit the supply of arms to terrorist groups.
OK, why would you have to waive that provision if your money and weapons are only getting these very carefully vetted secular moderate groups?
It's funny that they would even bother doing that.
It's amazing how counter to the narrative that is that, oh, we're only arming the good guys here, but I guess they're afraid that in some cases the law might apply to them someday or something like that, because after all, they are guilty of the felony of material support for terrorism.
Right.
I mean, that's it.
But he could be impeached and removed and prosecuted.
A whole lot of them could.
And maybe, you know, one thing that might be putting them on their haunches a little bit and making them extra careful and trying to waive the law and say this one doesn't apply to me, is because there is a growing recognition even in the corrupt and terrible Congress that, look, you guys are way past what is acceptable now.
You're in the Reagan region of underground government supporting Contras and so forth.
Representative Justin Amash noted last week on his Twitter page that the Obama administration's arming of Syrian rebels blatantly violates the law.
I mean, he's a former lawyer.
And you know, you might know something about that.
But you have, you know, some of those Republicans like Rand and Justin Amash and Mike Lee and even some strong civil liberties type Democrats, Udall and others, that they're saying, look, you can't just throw money and weapons into this complex situation.
Robert Gates even, you know, said to the Washington Post that, you know, bombing Syria as Obama wanted to do is like throwing gasoline on a fire that you won't be able to control.
Hey, even David Sanger, David Sanger, the regime's most loyal reporter at the New York Times.
Well, him or Michael Gordon, they could have a race or something.
But anyway, a year ago, he wrote that, yeah, whatever we send there ends up or most of it anyway, ends up in the hands of the radicals.
Because who do you think's doing the fighting?
Moderates don't fight.
Radicals fight.
Come on.
Right.
And we're also using proxies in Saudi Arabia and Qatar to get these weapons to these rebels.
I mean, Saudi Arabia and Qatar aren't exactly the staples of freedom loving Democrats.
No, afraid not.
But there are guys.
So it's all right.
All right.
Well, maybe we're theirs.
I'm not sure how that works exactly.
All right.
Well, thank you very much.
It's good to talk to you again, John.
Thank you.
All right.
That's John Glazer.
He writes at Antiwar dot com slash blog, mostly also news that answer where I come.
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