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All right, our next guest is John Glazer, writer for AntiWar.com.
You can find him at News.
AntiWar.com and at AntiWar.com/blog.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, John?
I'm pretty good.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, good, and you're welcome.
I'm very happy to have you here.
So, Barack Obama, he went over to the United Nations in New York and gave a big speech yesterday.
And your headline at AntiWar.com reads, At U.N., Obama Falsely Claims America Sides with Democratic Change in the Mideast.
First of all, what exactly did he claim?
And then second of all, prove your case that it ain't quite right.
Well, what he tried to claim is what he's been claiming all along, which is that the United States is in support of the democratic revolutions and change throughout the Middle East and so on and so forth.
And he said this before, but something about him saying it at the U.N. irked me more than usual.
I figured, you know, at such a world event, when so many foreign countries are watching, he wouldn't have the gall to actually tell so many lies in a matter of 20 minutes.
But he did.
I mean, he talked about how, you know, America was inspired by the Tunisian protest that toppled a dictator, blah, blah, blah.
But he forgot to mention that, in fact, Washington had supported the Tunisian regime of Ben Ali all along.
He claimed that we insisted on change in Egypt.
The United States insisted on change in Egypt, not the thousands of people that protested and worked to oust our dictator Hosni Mubarak.
He left out the fact in his speech, while claiming that we support democracy in Egypt, that we propped up the dictatorial regime.
And he was a close American ally, who received tens of billions of dollars in money and weapons and so on and so forth over the years.
And as far as insisting on the change, I mean, we consistently supported Egypt throughout the entire revolution until the very last second, when it was clear the Mubarak regime could not survive anymore.
And immediately following that decision, the United States tried to help Mubarak's deputy, Omar Suleiman, his torturer-in-chief, essentially, to come to power in succession of Mubarak.
And since then, of course, we've been supporting the SCAF, the Supreme Council of Armed Forces, and supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, even as they roll back constitutional constraints on executive power and all this.
I mean, from the very beginning and throughout this entire democratic change in Egypt, we have been supporting the exact opposite of democracy.
We have been suppressing democracy.
And Obama has the gall to stand up in front of the United Nations and the entire world and say that we insisted on change in Egypt.
It's horrible to even think that he can actually do that.
But he goes on, he talks about Yemen.
We supported a transition of leadership in Yemen, so we could help out the people there that wanted to get rid of the corrupt status quo.
And once again, he's leaving out the fact that the outgoing dictator was our dictator, our American client, propped up with U.S. money and weapons.
And the change of leadership, which the U.S. supported and continues to support, didn't eliminate the status quo, it sustained it.
The new General Hadi, who runs the country now, is equally as terrible as the Saleh regime, and the United States continues to bribe that regime, that new regime, with money and weapons, so that they will allow us to bomb the country regularly with unmanned aerial vehicles, drones.
He went on to talk about Libya, of course, and that's a whole other issue.
I mean, we actually went to war in order to sustain the perception that we were on the side of the democratic change in the Middle East and North Africa.
But, of course, we supported rebel militias who, according to the U.N. and Human Rights Watch, themselves committed war crimes, and some of them had ties to Al-Qaeda, and we saw the blowback that occurred with the U.S. consulate recently.
Then he talked about Syria.
Okay, Syria is a very important case.
The United States is currently cooperating with Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, you know, those bastions of freedom and democracy and, you know, Jeffersonian republicanism.
Yeah, we're cooperating with them to fund Syria's extremist religious rebel militias, who have also committed crime, also have ties to Al-Qaeda, do not have the support of the majority of Syrians, and have demonstrated no desire that I can tell for any sort of democracy following the rule of Assad.
And, of course, you know, Obama left out important cases like Bahrain, where the United States has heartily suppressed the true democratic uprising that took place.
The U.S. tyrant there has cracked down harshly on democratic protests, using torture and tear gas and shooting people in the streets and cracking down on press freedoms and, you know, prosecuting medical professionals who tried to treat injured protesters and all this kind of terrible attacks on human rights.
And the United States continues to send that regime money and weapons.
So straight through the line, I mean, you can name every country in the Middle East and go through a similar explanation.
Jordan as well, Oman, all of them.
The United States has been doing everything it can throughout this Arab Spring to prevent the population from gaining any control over what their government's policies look like.
And we're still doing that today.
So for Obama to really stand in front of the whole world and start to claim that we're on the side of the people and we're insisting on democratic change, it's just an affront to the sensibilities that are underlined.
Well, you know, the General Assembly can be, you know, kind of rambunctious at times.
Were there any laugh lines where people just outright, you know, couldn't help themselves in the audience?
No, not that I could tell.
But he tried to, when Obama was talking about free speech, he said he was defending free speech in the context of the Innocence of Muslims film, and he said something like, you know, as president, I know people say awful things about me every day, and I heard people laugh at that, but there wasn't any outright laughter.
Right, they laugh, because, yeah, we all agree that we know that none of that criticism is legitimate.
It's all just that he's from Kenya or whatever.
Yeah, even at the U.N. there's still sort of, it's still common to lie prostrate in front of the supposed leader of the free world.
That's amazing, isn't it?
Well, so there's a lot to go over there, but I guess first of all, did you see where Vladimir Putin was joking that they ought to take the terrorists at Guantanamo and send them to fight in Libya?
Or, pardon me, in Syria.
I ruined the punchline there.
Since America's backing the terrorists, well, in either way, right?
I thought that was funny.
No, it's a good point, and it exemplifies the sort of hypocritical stances that we continue to take throughout the Middle East, and supporting rebel militias who commit war crimes, and increasingly have ties to Al-Qaeda and are fighting under the banner of Al-Qaeda, which is a twisted foreign policy and works directly against our interests.
So Putin has quite a point there.
Well, now, the king or the emir or the sultan or whatever he calls himself of Qatar actually got right up there and said, like, hey, everybody, we ought to all chip in to help the regime change in Syria now.
Especially all Arab states should come together.
I thought that was supposed to be some kind of mostly secret that the Qataris had been pushing so hard for regime change there.
Yeah, you can hear that from Pepe Escobar, but not very many others.
Oh, it's quite open.
You can read it in the New York Times and every mainstream publication that Saudi Arabia and Qatar are sending weapons to rebels in Syria.
Domestically, these countries, I'm sure, have a lot of propaganda about what they're doing, because we're sending weapons to freedom fighters and not people who are fighting under the banner of Al-Qaeda and so forth.
But, yeah, it's quite open.
And the United States is quite open about sending non-lethal aid and helping in the delivery of Saudi and Qatar weapons.
So this is open policy.
This is no longer secret.
Yes, the CIA is the one that is currently carrying out the operations along the Turkish border with regard to Syria, but just because it's the CIA, that doesn't mean much, because this is open policy, what we're doing.
And it's supposed to be, because there's a lot of people in Washington, like McCain and Lindsey Graham, who push and push and push to do something, quote-unquote.
So there's bad stuff going on in Syria.
We must do something.
And so part of this Obama administration policy is just to say, hey, we're doing something.
Because deep in the Obama administration, these officials know full well and have talked openly about it in the New York Times that increasingly foreign fighters are coming in and fighting under the banner of Al-Qaeda, and helping these guys actually overthrow Assad would be probably more chaotic than we can imagine and stuff like that.
So they're actually, thankfully, reluctant, and they actually haven't, thankfully, chosen to invade the country.
But it's purposeful that this is out in the open.
They want it out in the open.
They want to tell people, hey, look, we're doing something.
Well, now, did you see Ben Swan's interview of Barack Obama?
Ben Swan?
Yeah, he's the Ron Paul-ian local TV news guy that does the reality check.
Yeah, I did.
Yeah, that was like a month ago or something.
I did see that.
Yeah, yeah.
And so he asked Obama about – and this was the only quote I had seen of the president himself doing basically what you just talked about, where he's saying, hey, look, there are Al-Qaeda guys there.
That's why we're not helping that much, because we're worried about that.
And, of course, Hillary Clinton famously said that to CBS News as well, that, geez, what are you going to do, intervene on the side of our enemies?
But then again, I guess the imperial logic of the, you know, attack all of Israel's enemies and anybody that could help Iran, which is one of Israel's enemies, just the momentum, I guess, the inertia of that segment of America's foreign policy is just unbeatable.
Even the president, secretary of state, musing out loud why they ought to not be doing exactly what they're doing.
And it's the very best reason of all, because these are 9-11 attacker types, you know?
Yeah, you're exactly right.
The best reason to not intervene that anyone could ever think of is that this is because Zawahiri wants you to.
That's why.
Right.
And yet we continue to do it.
Now, I'm thankful that the policy has not extended, because it possibly could under, say, a Romney administration or something like that.
But for now, they've sent that small amount of non-lethal, and they've facilitated the delivery from Saudi Arabia and Qatar of weapons.
Well, so far as we know, but I would assume that the JSOC and the CIA are much more involved than they're saying.
And then, of course, you've got Eric Prince's guys and all that, too, whatever they call themselves now.
Yeah, I mean, there's probably a lot more going on than is in the headlines.
But, you know, it's known, just as you just said, that we're dealing with what could potentially be a regional conflagration here if the Assad regime falls and there's a power vacuum in Syria.
Oh, there'll be a civil war in Lebanon in a day, right?
Exactly.
I expect it to break out any day.
That's right, that's right.
So they are trepidatious about it.
We know that, at least.
But, again, even to mention, as Obama did in his United Nations speech, that we're on the side of, we're against tyranny in Syria and so forth, then why is it that we're allying with some of the most undemocratic, brutal regimes in the world like Saudi Arabia and Qatar?
How are our policies aligned in Syria?
The supposed leader of the free world who wants to spread democracy and freedom and these two undemocratic regimes that have some of the most authoritarian cultures and governments in the world.
That doesn't, you know, prompt any red lights going off in the audience in the UN or even in America.
I mean, people talked about, a lot of people talked about Obama's UN speech, but nobody that I could find there to point out the fact that all of his lies on the Middle East, I mean, every single country, we're not supporting democracy in Syria, period.
We're not supporting democracy in Bahrain.
We have never supported democracy in Egypt, ever.
And it goes through.
Or Iran, either, for that matter.
Or Iran, yeah, never.
They once had a prime minister.
Yes, they once had a prime minister that was Western educated, had to wear a suit and tie and nothing on top of his head, so to speak.
And we didn't like him.
Yeah, no tan jacket either.
Yeah, because he wanted to do something that was actually popular among the people, which was nationalize the oil industry.
What's funny is, it's actually not even that.
Greg Palast likes to discriminate and refine the point a little bit more.
He really was just insisting on a higher percentage cut.
He really wasn't nationalizing them at all.
He was just saying, you know, ultimately this oil belongs to us.
So all we're saying is, instead of paying us no percent, you ought to pay us one or some incredibly high number like that.
And that was the bridge too far for the Brits in Eisenhower.
Right, exactly.
It was unacceptable.
It was even worse back then.
Nowadays, they're just supposed to obey us, and they have a little bit more autonomy, these client states of ours.
But back then, it was pure imperial sucking out of these countries all of their resources.
And a democratically elected prime minister in Iran said, no, we don't like that setup.
And so he had to go.
The CIA through a process of murder, propaganda, bribery, and infiltration overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran and installed a dictatorship.
And now, you know, the consequences of that reverberate up to today.
All right, now, did you see this piece in the New York Post?
U.S. offered Israel advanced weaponry in exchange for delaying Iran attack.
I have seen the news of that in past months.
Is there a new one like that?
Yeah, I think so.
Well, unless I got it wrong.
Oh, no, you know what?
This is old.
But it is.
I forget where I got the link anymore now.
But yeah, it is.
But it is saying that Obama had promised Netanyahu refueling planes and more bunker buster bombs if he would just delay until after the election.
What do you think about that?
Do you think that is right?
He probably had told Bibi Netanyahu to his face, hey, anything we can do to delay your insistence on making this absolutely before the election and so forth.
I'm sure he has said stuff like that.
But actually what has occurred recently has been that it's pretty clear the Obama administration has been snubbing Netanyahu.
I mean, there's all this talk about, you know, he was on The Daily Show for crying out loud.
All of these network news, political racehorse-type commentaries were talking about how Obama is not meeting with Bibi Netanyahu or any leaders when he's at the U.N. in New York.
And so Bibi had actually directly requested a meeting with Obama, and Obama said no.
Furthermore, what we saw in the weeks where it was really sort of teetering on the brink of whether or not Bibi was going to either go to war or be put in a mental institution, you know, the Obama administration allegedly, they deny it, but allegedly sent a letter to the Iranians which said that we will not back an Israeli strike so long as you don't retaliate and hit American assets in the region.
And moves like that, you know, along with General Martin Dempsey's comments that, you know, we will not be complicit in an Israeli strike, it really sort of firmed up their resistance and reluctance to actually strike Iran.
They're using the same sort of trepidatious approach that they're using in Syria, thankfully.
And again, I'm not quite sure it would be the same thing in an Iranian administration.
But yeah, I mean, Obama, in the lead-up, especially as far back as March, the farther back you go, the more sorry and sort of, please, please don't hurt me politically, you'll see from Obama towards Bibi.
But nowadays I think it's firmed up a bit and Bibi and Ehud Barak have inched back and dialed back their rhetoric because they see that the United States is not going to back an Iranian strike, at least right now.
We'll see after the election.
You know, typically wars in the second term are different because, you know, the Obama administration would probably waste the political capital to continue to negotiate with Iran.
The one thing that is unfortunate is that the Obama administration continues to use rhetoric like Iran can't be contained or a nuclear Iran can't be contained.
Well, that's just not true.
Of course it can.
As the renowned international relations theorist Kenneth Walt recently wrote in the Foreign Affairs magazine, the main establishment journal, a nuclear Iran could probably stabilize the region and prevent U.S. and Israeli constant threats and economic sanctions and militarily surrounding Iran and so on and so forth.
The only reason Iran has the posture it does is because U.S. policy strongly influences it towards attaining a deterrent.
And if they had one that would prevent the U.S. or Israel from militarily striking or imposing regime change or whatever it is, it could certainly be contained.
Especially since these wackos who claim that Iranians are mad mullahs who want to, you know, commit national suicide by provoking a nuclear retaliation.
I mean, that's out of the question.
Only psychos believe that.
So it's quite clear that for now there will not be a strike on Iran, I'm pretty sure, and at least a U.S.
-backed one.
But a nuclear Iran could certainly be contained if, in fact, they even had a nuclear weapons program, which the United States, the consensus in the intelligence community at least, is that they do not have one and have not had one since 2003, the latest.
Yeah, well, I think it really goes to show, and I think Stephen Walt has written about this, too.
I guess I'm also thinking of Andrew Bacevich's recent piece about the Israelification of American foreign policy where, you know, we used to have this policy.
And not that I'm for this either, but it was kind of offshore balancing or whatever, you know, where you sort of try to stay out of it.
I mean, this is as cynical and as mean as hell, but you play Iraq and Iran against each other, maybe even arm both sides or whatever.
But then that's still different than, you know, completely intervening in every way and trying to determine every outcome and hinging all of your bets on this outcome or that one and that sort of thing.
Where now, really, you can tell a lot of this policy is outsourced to the princes in Saudi Arabia, and they have a beef.
Maybe they're afraid of Iran, and so they need us to fight their war for them, too.
I don't know if they really want a hot one, but they certainly want us to take their side in the Shia-Sunni split, you know?
Definitely.
That's the prime concern of the Persian Gulf states with Sunni Arab Gulf states.
Like Saudi Arabia, there's a WikiLeaks cable that reveals that, I don't know if it was a king or some other high-level royalty in Saudi Arabia told a U.S. diplomat that you better strike Iran before they gain too much influence in the region.
It's not only Sunni and Shia that clash.
It's about geopolitics.
Iran is Saudi Arabia's one regional threat to dominance over that region.
Other than Iran, they only have Israel, and that's a different story in terms of geopolitics.
They're afraid of such Iranian power, and a nuclear deterrent would certainly give Iran that.
Yeah, definitely.
I mean, our policy is being outsourced to not only our client states in the Gulf, but Israel.
I mean, it was funny.
Ahmadinejad, in a press briefing the day before his speech at the U.N. today, told American reporters that, Hey, look, Americans probably don't like the fact that the prime minister of Israel is telling the president of the United States what his foreign policy should be.
He said, I bet people resent that.
And he was right.
I think they do.
I think even Republicans are getting a little bit ticked off at that.
The ones that have some sense, the ones that aren't totally in the bag for Israel.
But yeah, this is a reality of our imperial policies coming back to bite us.
We're doing the bidding of authoritarian governments in the Middle East and Israel.
And we can't even perceive our own national interest, it seems, in a sort of offshore balancing type of way, in a realist way, as terrible as that sometimes turned out to be in the past.
All right, that's it.
We're out of time.
Thanks so much for your time.
It's great to talk to you, John.
John Glaser, everybody.
Antiwar.com/blog and news dot antiwar dot com.
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