06/12/09 – Daniel Luban – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And I'm looking at an article titled, Neocons for Ahmadinejad, huh?
Daniel Lubin, he's been writing, I think I said that wrong still.
He's been writing for IPS News.
You can find him at Jim Loeb's blog.
It's IPS.org slash blog slash Jim Loeb.
And quite often on the blog at Antiwar.com as well.
Welcome to the show.
How are you, Daniel?
I'm pretty good.
Thanks for having me on the show.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining us today.
So why would a neocon, and which neocon, how many neocons, and why would they support the re-election of Ahmadinejad, rather than supposedly the moderate, at least the new guy, give us a new face to deal with, seems like would be progress, right?
Right.
Well, I mean, I think from a lot of these guys' perspective, Ahmadinejad is really a useful asset in that his constant inflammatory statements, his Holocaust denial, the call to wipe Israel off the map, which, as a lot of people pointed out, was actually mistranslated, have actually been very useful in rallying people around taking a harder line against Iran.
So, I mean, it seems fairly clear for a while that there were a lot of hardliners, both in the U.S. and Israel, who were secretly rooting for an Ahmadinejad win today.
But I was startled, actually, last week when I went to the Heritage Foundation to hear Daniel Pipe, who's the head of the Middle East Forum, very influential neoconservative pundit on Islam, to say, outright, if I could vote in the Iranian elections, I would vote for Ahmadinejad.
And similarly, Michael Rubin at the American Enterprise Institute was interviewed today and was asked outright, would you vote for Ahmadinejad, who would be rooting for him.
And he hedged a lot, and he never quite came out and said explicitly he would.
But he similarly said that Ahmadinejad's inflammatory statements have been very helpful, and that you would basically, the perspective these guys have is that the Supreme Leader calls all the shots, and any of these guys would basically be the same.
From a policy perspective, you might as well have the most inflammatory one in office to sort of rouse people and build support for a hard line against Iran.
Well, geez, that's sure an awful truth, it seems like, that the moderates ought to be marginalized.
I guess I wonder whether you think, or maybe you know if there's any evidence or anybody's really talked about this, when George Bush, you know, kind of railed against the people of Iran in July of 2005 and said, you better not elect a right-winger, you better vote pro-American or whatever, and they all voted for Ahmadinejad.
Do you think that was actually deliberate to provoke that backlash back then?
Well, yeah, I don't know if it was deliberate on Bush's part, but there is some evidence that hardliners here in the U.S. are actually going out of their way, perhaps, to pave the way for an Ahmadinejad win.
So in the last couple days we've seen Republicans in Congress try to fast-track a couple bills that would impose sanctions against Iran and divestment from Iran that weren't scheduled to go up for a vote for a long time, and they tried to fast-track them so that they would go up for a vote right now, which would be pretty much tailor-made to increase tensions with Iran, bolster Ahmadinejad, undercut Mousavi.
And as far as we can tell, that's probably the motive for doing so, and thankfully these moves were shut down, so it shouldn't be an issue.
But it does seem like, especially in Congress, people are perhaps going out of their way for an Ahmadinejad win.
Yeah.
Well, and to make it easier, to have what kind of conflict?
An actual war against them, you think?
Is that what Daniel Pipe said?
At the moment, I don't think anyone is outright saying we should go to war.
Well, with some exceptions.
For instance, Newt Gingrich at the AIPAC conference said he would support preemptive military strikes against Iran.
Hillary Clinton actually threatened on George Stephanopoulos, we could hit them, yeah, that's right, a first strike, the way we did Iraq, she said.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And Gingrich was also advocating going against North Korea in the same way.
But right now, most of the hawks are sort of gathering around sanctions, and there's a bill in Congress right now that would punish companies that export refined petroleum products to Iran.
And that's what they're rallying around, but most of us suspect that that's really only a first step, that no one really expects these sanctions to be effectual.
And then the main purpose of imposing them is just so that then once the sanctions fail, then we can take military action against Iran and say, oh, well, we've tried everything.
We've tried lesser measures.
Well, they tried to do this last summer, right, and the peace movement beat them.
And a bunch of Congress people took their name off, people that co-sponsored the sanctions blockade bill, really, as you said, to try to ban the importation of refined petroleum to Iran.
You know, there was a big fight about it, and the good guys won last summer, huh?
Yeah, yeah, well, so far so good, and we get the sense that the Obama administration, most of the key players with some exceptions, like maybe Dennis Ross, are on our side, but there are a lot of forces in Congress who are pushing hard the other way.
And AIPAC, for instance, has made this sanctions legislation their top priority, and their allies in Congress are really pushing to have it imposed sooner rather than later.
Well, you know, Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector, has maintained for years that this whole thing about Iran's nuclear program is simply an excuse.
Anybody who examines the facts knows that, as far as their safeguards agreement with the IAEA, Iranians are completely in compliance.
The other side, I guess, of the IAEA's supposed investigation into their nuclear activities, which was basically illegally mandated by the UN Security Council, has turned up nothing except a Mossad-forged laptop full of supposed Iranian documents that implicate them in a bunch of nonsense.
And, hell, even Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence, testified under oath with the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency sitting next to him under cross-examination by John McCain in the U.S. Senate, said, we still stand by the NIE, the consensus of all 16 intelligence agencies from 2007, which says that they do not have a nuclear weapons program, and they have not even decided that they want to pursue nuclear weapons.
And that was just two months ago when that was sworn, and yet somehow the entire narrative and argument in public policy about what's to be done about Iran basically seems to just accept the Netanyahu version of reality rather than Dennis Blair's.
Why is that still, to this day, that we can't have a conversation about this that's based on the actual facts and evidence here?
Yeah, well, it's very difficult.
I mean, there are a lot of forces pushing in the opposite direction, who are trying to say that basically any uranium enrichment at all, any continued nuclear activity, even for civilian use, is too dangerous, and of course the Iranians are just hiding their intention to build a bomb.
But I think there's sort of a growing consensus in the mainstream media and in government that Iran's ultimately going to have to be allowed some kind of civilian nuclear program.
And that was one of the most notable lines for me in Obama's Cairo speech, when he said, I'm quoting from memory here, so I'm not sure if it's the exact quote, but roughly all countries have a right to access peaceful nuclear energy.
And there are signs that the Obama administration is moving in that direction.
That's probably the line we're going to have to draw.
Well, I'm really cynical about that, because the Bush administration said that, too.
They said, oh yeah, you can have a nuclear program all you want, but you better buy enriched uranium from Europe or Russia or somebody else.
We're not going to let you enrich uranium on your own soil.
So, I mean, Obama's just, you know, he's perfected the weasel word better than Bill Clinton, as far as I can tell.
He doesn't mean what he's saying there.
Or I don't see any, he didn't say, you can enrich uranium as long as it's only 3.6%, because, I mean, that's already the case.
Mohammed ElBaradei's guys are already there, verifying that they're within their nonproliferation treaty obligations.
So what's to negotiate, if he meant what he said, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
And it's been pointed out to me recently that ElBaradei is really the forgotten man here.
We hear a lot of alarmist reports in the U.S. media, the Israeli media, many of which are coming from Israeli intelligence and places like that, about Iran's nuclear program.
And we almost never hear Mohammed ElBaradei, who should be, you would think, the foremost commentator on these issues.
We never really hear his perspective, perhaps, because he doesn't see fit to offer an alarmist enough interpretation of what's going on there.
Right.
I mean, hey, I'd be absolutely lost in the woods without AntiWar.com and Gordon Prather, the nuclear scientist who's also a former advisor to senators, who knows all about nuclear weapons and all about the international law that explains all this.
But his work on the Bush administration's treatment of the axis of evil and their destruction of the nonproliferation regime is unparalleled anywhere.
And, you know, I don't know, I wouldn't be able to piece this together reading Braun Sanger and the New York Times, I know that.
Yeah, well, there's certainly, I mean, there are just a lot of institutional forces working to put misinformation out there and alarmist information.
So, certainly, AntiWar.com has been doing some great work on this topic.
Well, and we've been really happy to have you writing on our blog, too.
We've been sort of, I guess, copying and pasting from the Loeb blog.
And, again, it's Daniel Luban.
Am I saying it right?
I'm sorry.
Oh, it's Luban, Daniel Luban.
Luban, I'm sorry.
Oh, that's okay.
And it's IPS.org slash blog.
You can find Jim Loeb's blog there.
And Daniel's been writing there quite often.
Is there a better site I can refer people to, by the way, here?
Well, it's in a little bit of flux right now.
I might be branching off to another site shortly.
But, for the moment, I think Loeb blog is the best place, and you can find stuff by Jim Loeb, whose coverage of the neocons is pretty unparalleled.
My colleague Eli Clifton, who's been tracking a lot of the convergence between sort of neoconservative and far-right Islamophobic extremists.
So there's a lot of good stuff on there, and I would encourage readers to check it out.
Yeah, for anybody who's not familiar with Jim Loeb, he's been writing about the neoconservatives as a weird sort of separate part of the conservative movement for 30 years or something, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, a lot of the ideas that we've seen become mainstream, and a lot of the commentary you see about the neoconservatives now, he was writing for decades now.
And I think he's still probably the best person to turn to for coverage of them.
Yeah, and in fact, when you mentioned Michael Rubin there, we know because of Jim Loeb's work that he formerly is of the Office of Special Plans, where they cooked up the lies to get us into war with Iraq.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I think you could do a very good chart just looking at the Office of Special Plans alums and what's happened to them.
I was just saying that William Loody, who oversaw the Office of Special Plans, has taken a job as a VP at Northrop Grumman, the major defense contractor.
And I think there are people who are responsible for propagating a lot of this intelligence that's spreading out along the military-industrial complex, if you will.
Yeah, well, I guess that's the iron triangle, right?
Everybody's got to reap their rewards.
Right, right, of course.
Yeah, you know, that whole Iraq War, there's a great article by Richard Cummings on playboy.com called Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, where basically the Iraq War, at least the initial shock and awe invasion is like that Transformers movie.
It's nothing but a giant Lockheed commercial where every single product on the battlefield is basically like a Lockheed promotion video put into practice there.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, it's certainly shock and awe.
You know, it's been said the Gulf War was really the first war devised for television consumption, and I think we certainly saw that in the early days of the second Iraq War as well.
All right, now, let's talk about Frank Gaffney here and your piece on the Loeb blog here about the Washington Times piece where, you know, and I guess this is kind of the convergence of the complete kooky side of the right that's completely disattached from reality and the actual mainstream intellectual leadership of the right, where they're really going with this Obama's a secret Muslim thing.
Yeah, well, I have to admit, you know, Frank Gaffney has a record of taking out pretty extreme positions, but I was a little bit startled to read that op-ed in the Washington Times in that it's something you would associate with people who are really on the fringes, people like Pamela Geller who's been propagating a lot of the Obama birth certificate rumors, the Obama is the secret child of Malcolm X rumors.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I would encourage any listeners to check out her 10,000 word or so manifesto on that topic.
But, I mean, I think, yeah, I think Gaffney, you know, from my perspective it was kind of a blunder because I think probably the Washington Times and Gaffney at this point realized that they'd triggered a backlash and they went a little bit beyond the pale, but it's just another sign of how neoconservatives are increasingly making common cause with some of these real far-right wackos.
Yeah, well, I mean, it's basically all they've got left, as far as philosophy goes, is support for war and torture.
There's really nothing else to it at this point.
They've kind of had to abandon everything else in favor of war and torture.
Yeah, well, I mean, and certainly the anti-Islamic movement, it's very, you know, it's a pretty nebulous line between the sort of neoconservative, anti-radical Islam position and the sort of anti-Islam in general movement that's sprung up.
And Gaffney in particular has really been making common cause with some extreme figures and people like Geert Wilders, the far-right Dutch parliamentarian, Gaffney's been a big supporter of him, but with my colleague Eli and Ali Gharib, we were tracking how Gaffney and a few other neocons were actually sponsoring his tour across America.
So I think we are seeing something of a convergence between the neoconservative right and the far-right.
Yeah, which is, you know, it's funny, I don't know, this is a swamp, I guess, once we start going down this road, but it seems like the mainstream right, the Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich-type conservative movement, Republican movement, they're trying to disassociate themselves from the collective guilt that supposedly they bear for all their hate speech, because some Nazi shot some guy at the Holocaust Museum, and they're disassociating themselves from the supposed collective guilt that they bear by saying, well, you know, this guy hated neocons and hated Jews, and so therefore he's some kind of liberal rather than a conservative, because everybody knows that conservatism is whatever Bill Kristol says it is.
And, boy, what a mess, huh?
Yeah, certainly, and that's been one of the most surprising things, is how, especially in Europe, you know, in America you think of these hardline anti-Islam groups as being also very pro-Israel, velo-Semitic, but then in Europe you see that a lot of the anti-Islam far-right groups are also fiercely anti-Semitic, which include Holocaust deniers, neo-Nazis, and so on.
So I think there's been an attempt by people in America to kind of render these groups more kosher, if you will, and say, well, they may hate Muslims, but they're pro-Jews, they're pro-Israel.
But I think it just puts them in a very awkward situation, because a lot of these groups really do maintain some strong anti-Semitic ties, and if you try to make a coalition with them based just on, you know, your shared hatred of Islam, it's going to be very fragile, and you're going to have lots of public relations disasters.
Well, and you know, this kind of reminds me of Jim Loeb's story of Irving Kristol arranging for, I forget exactly who, part of the Israel lobby, to buy a giant jetliner for Jerry Falwell to go around the country, and he was criticized, and said, you know, this guy, he's supposedly pro-Israel, but only in the sense that he's trying to force Jesus to come back to kill all the Jews, and are you really sure this is a good idea?
And Irving Kristol said, yeah, well, it's his theology, it's our Israel.
But it seems like, you know, if you're, for example, the Christian right crazies, and the kinds of policies that they support in the Middle East, the Hageeites, I mean, you know, not the neo-Nazi types, but the so-called pro-Israel, right-wing evangelical types, it seems like that really is a detrimental alliance for the Israel lobby to have made, and that the kinds of policies they support are really bad for Israel, and has helped to get Israel in the mess they're in right now.
Yeah, yeah, I certainly think that's very true.
Blow back, if you will.
Yeah, we've seen an effort to make people like Hagee more kosher, more palatable to the mainstream.
So now, if you listen to Hagee talk, it's clear that he's memorized his talking points, and he says, well, eschatology has nothing to do with it, end times theology has nothing to do with it.
This is all just about Israel's security needs, and we don't think that Israel can trade land for peace, and so on and so forth.
But it's not really clear that that's what's underlying their positions.
I think if you look beyond it, you will see that many of these people have this kind of ideological commitment to greater Israel, to continuing the occupation, to settlements, which, as a number of people, including many prominent Israeli political figures have pointed out, is really destroying Israel, and destroying the possibility of a Jewish democratic state.
Yeah, I mean, that's really the thing here, too, is it's supposed to be beyond the pale to criticize Israel, and it's supposed to be anti-Semitic to criticize Israel, and whatever, but anybody who's really a student of any kind of international politics anywhere could examine if any other country was in the same situation Israel's in, and say, hey, listen, this is obviously a counterproductive strategy.
You can't move into a new neighborhood, and then immediately be the biggest bully on the block, and think that you can continue to act that way indefinitely.
At some point, you've got to be able to get along with your neighbors, or move out.
I mean, come on.
Yeah, yeah, and once again, it's just striking how much narrower the range of acceptable public opinion about Israel in America is than it is in Israel.
People like Ehud Barak, Tippi Livni, have made a number of statements that would get a politician in really hot water here, and would never fly with AIPAC if an American congressman said them.
And it shows really what a restricted view of Israeli security that has been enforced in Washington by special interest groups, and so on.
Well, you know, when I talked to Jim Loeb, I guess a week or two ago, he was saying he really believes that Barack Obama means what he says about trying to push for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, and so forth.
I wonder what you think the political pressures in Washington, D.C. are looking like for something like that.
And I guess, really, if you could take into account in your answer, address somehow the amount of settlements that are already there.
I mean, as far as I know from the maps I've seen, you'd have to have I Dream of Jeannie blink three-quarters of those settlements out of existence overnight, or else there's just no way you're ever going to have some kind of sovereign state on the West Bank without it just being a bunch of Bantu stands and a big joke.
Yeah, well, there's a very striking image of, I think it's called the Palestinian Archipelago that was on the New York Times and a few other places recently, which just shows the West Bank with all the settlements and settler access roads and so on, represented as water.
And if you look at it that way, what the West Bank really is an archipelago.
It's just a set of disconnected islands, and it's clear that a lot of these settlements are going to have to be disbanded and drawn back.
But, I mean, once again, I think I'm somewhat optimistic about Obama's intentions, but it's clear that he's gotten bogged down in a debate that it's certainly not the ultimate battle he needs to be fighting, which is not to say it's not worth fighting.
But right now we're arguing about whether we should just stop natural growth in the settlements, or what is called natural growth, which often refers to something much greater.
But ultimately, if there's going to be any solution, there needs to be not just a settlement freeze, but actively disbanding some of the settlements.
And it's clear that a lot of the sort of Israel lobby organizations, their affiliated congressmen, the Netanyahu government, are fighting very hard just to draw a line around natural growth.
They're not even addressing yet the many other steps that are going to need to be taken if there's going to be any kind of viable two-state solution.
Yeah, I mean, it almost seems like a dialectic kind of situation, where Malcolm X's autobiography gets up there and says, Every black man ought to go out and buy a rifle right now!
Rah, rah, rah!
And then he sits down, and Martin Luther King is next, and Malcolm X leans over and explains to Martin Luther King's wife, You see, now whatever he says, the audience wants to hear it.
He'll be the moderate after what I just said.
I mean, really, that's the thing.
If Obama says, you know, we need to curb some of this natural growth, and Netanyahu says, over my dead body, then we're not getting anywhere.
I mean, Obama needs to be demanding a complete withdrawal of all Israeli forces from the West Bank yesterday, if he's going to get even a tenth of that.
Yeah, well, I mean, I can see the logic from the Obama administration's perspective that they want to move incrementally, and they don't want to sort of take a radical stand that's going to frighten away some of these moderates in Congress.
But on the other hand, I do think it's important not to get bogged down in these endless debates about, you know, where the Israeli government says, Well, we'll disband a few of the outposts, and then they'll be reformed.
Well, we'll disband all of the outposts, and then you're ultimately fighting as hard as you can just to get a settlement freeze, which is ultimately not the final step you want to be taking.
That's just an initial step towards a two-state solution.
Yeah, so in other words, we're going nowhere here, really.
Well, you know, I prefer to be optimistic.
I do think just the fact that he is fighting this hard for a settlement freeze is a promising sign.
But, you know, there are a lot of forces arrayed against him, so in some sense I'll believe it when I see it regarding a two-state solution.
Yeah.
All right, well, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time on the show today, Daniel.
Oh, thanks for having me, Scott.
All right, everybody, that's Daniel Lubon from IPS.org.
You can find him at the Loeb blog, Jim Loeb's blog, IPS.org slash blog slash Jim Loeb.
And that's it for Antiwar Radio this week.
I appreciate, or tell you guys how much I appreciate you tuning in.
We'll be back here next Tuesday through Friday for Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.