10/21/09 – Gabriel Kolko – The Scott Horton Show

I'm Scott Wharton, thanks for listening to the show today, and I'm very happy to welcome back to the show renowned legendary historian Gabriel Kolko, he's the author of course of The Triumph of Conservatism, well a list of books, a hundred long or so, but also After Socialism, The Age of War, The United States Confronts the World, and World in Crisis, The End of the American Century, and you can also find him somewhat regularly at counterpunch.org.
Welcome back to the show Gabriel, how are you?
I'm glad to be here.
I'm very happy to have you here.
And the article I wanted to talk with you about today is called Israel, a stalemated action of history.
It's from August 25, up at counterpunch.
And you begin by talking about your experience, I guess, beginning in 1949, taking Jews from Marseille to Haifa, Israel, you were the boat captain, is that it?
No, no, I was just doing a little work on the boat.
And I found out, of course, that Arab Jews have nothing in common with European Jews, and German Jews have nothing in common with French or Hungarian or Polish Jews.
Their basic definition of culture is their nationality, not their religion.
So it was quite a disconcerting experience.
And of course, when I got to the Holy Land, I found that there were Arabs there, no one had ever really taken that into account.
So Israel, as I pointed out in that article, has turned into a little Sparta, it has nuclear weapons, it has an army equal to any, its leading export is no longer oranges and citruses, most of which were stolen from the deserting Arabs, but the military technology.
So it was quite disillusioning.
So at this time, back in 1949, which is just after the very creation of the State of Israel, you decided then that this whole project was a bad idea, basically, is that what you're saying?
Yes.
You know, there were countless villages and Arab quarters of Haifa and other places that were dynamited.
So it wasn't very pretty.
Moreover, one has to accept the fact that most of those people would have, by choice, gone to the United States, Canada, or the Western Hemisphere.
They went to Israel because there was no alternative.
But the number of Jews who have gone to the Western Hemisphere far exceeds the number that have gone to Israel.
So Zionism has been a kind of artificial project.
But as George Tenet, the former head of the CIA said, no patch of the earth is now more important.
The whole Middle East is now hostage to this question.
And one of the problems that Obama has is that one of his key advisors, Bruce Reidel, has pointed out that, and I quote him, that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the central all-consuming issue for al-Qaeda, unquote.
And the key to Afghanistan, the key to much of the Arab world, is solving that problem.
The problem, of course, is that it will not be solved.
Israelis, the Jews in Israel, have put their foot down.
And it's just one of those seething sores confronting world politics.
Well now, at that time, back in the 1940s, you say that they could not come to the United States, it was just a matter of immigrant quotas, or what?
Well, it was a matter of immigrant quotas.
By preference, those people preferred to go anywhere.
To go to the Middle East, which is hot and dry, and a semi-arid region just didn't attract Jews from Brussels or European cities.
So the whole thing was artificial.
So if the policies of the Western countries had just been open-door policy, are you saying that Israel wouldn't have even really been created, that it only took effect because of those kinds of quotas?
Yes.
So I guess that's the answer to the, well, what's the better idea, isn't necessarily we'll give them the best part of Germany, or something ironic like that, but just let them go where they want, is basically the alternative.
Many of them are doing that now, the people with high skills are immigrating abroad.
There are now as many people leaving Israel as coming in, but the people who are leaving are people of tremendous skills and talent.
There are about a million Israelis living in the United States at the present moment.
They work in Silicon Valley, they work in high-tech, they work as doctors, etc., etc.
There are 50,000 in Amsterdam, etc., etc.
So the skilled people are getting out, and every crisis causes them to go, and the people who are coming in are given subsidies and fancy housing, and they basically have no skills.
So Israel is now in a dilemma.
If there were a unified state between the Arabs and the Jews, of course the Arabs would form the majority, and the idea of one vote, one person, is anathema to the very idea of the unified state, because the Jews would be outvoted.
So it's just a mess, among many messes, and it of course is the source of Arab radicalism, so-called.
Well, it's Gabriel Koko, a renowned revisionist historian.
Are you saying that basically Israel, the militarized, Spartan, Likudnik Israel, that we all know and love now, is basically inevitable?
That you cannot have a Jewish state made of European emigres that can last there without taking this kind of bristling with nuclear weapons, constantly bombing Gaza sort of approach that they've taken?
I mean, it seems like if the Israelis gave up the West Bank and Gaza, and they forwarded full rights completely to the Arab-Israeli citizens, they wouldn't be the majority, right?
The Jews would still be the majority.
It's only when you the West Bank and Gaza.
I can imagine, not necessarily all the details, but I can imagine how Israel could be a Jewish state, whether one from the outside approves of that necessarily or not, or whatever, notwithstanding, and live in peace with their neighbors, you know, the Saudi peace plan sort of agenda, and they could actually have a long-term future as an Israeli state there.
Well, the demography is against the Jews.
I mean, the Arab birth rate is much higher, and demographically, the Jews have had it.
What will happen, of course, and then, of course, one thing is very important.
If you are not religious and have a draft exemption to pray all day, and there are increasingly religious people, men, who go and pray just to stay out of the army.
If you're not religious, you spend a good part of your life marching around as a military person, and people get tired of that, and many Israeli migrants out, not in, Israeli citizens are simply tired of marching every weekend or every month or every summer, and they want peace and quiet.
They want, basically, what was always promised by the Zionist ideologues before the First World War, a normal existence, and they don't have that.
They have only a military existence, and they have constant dangers and wars, and it's Gaza, Lebanon, etc., etc., and now, of course, they're threatening a war against Iran.
You make the point in the article that Iran does not pose a nuclear threat to Israel, other than the fact that they could shoot conventional rockets, that they do have, and hit, assuming their guidance is good enough, they could hit the Dimona nuclear weapons factory in Israel.
That would be the worst sort of dirty bomb nuclear attack that the Iranians could manage, would be to use their own nuclear weapons against them.
Well, at the present time, you see, Israeli strategists are pretty smart, and at the present time, there is a rather influential group of people who say, look, the Iranian bomb doesn't pose any threat to us, because we have 200 nuclear weapons, and we'll only have a situation of deterrence.
Now, deterrence existed with tremendous tension, but it worked, between the Soviet Union and the United States until 1991, when the Soviet Union disappeared.
So, there are Israeli strategists who are fairly calm about the Iranian bomb.
They say, well, the Iranians will have a bomb, so what?
We have 200, we could destroy them, and they're not going to engage in a military attack on us.
In fact, yeah, the head of Israeli Mossad said that in, I think, December 2006.
Well, they believe in deterrence, many of them, and they're right.
Deterrence is a lousy way to organize the world, but it works.
In this regard, the more nations that have the nuclear bomb, the safer it is.
There would be war between Pakistan and India instantly if there were not nuclear weapons on both sides.
So, deterrence does work.
The danger, of course, and this is a problem that concerns the United States immensely, is that Islamic fundamentalists will get a couple, just a couple of the 70 to 90 Pakistani bombs, and use them, because they believe that when they die, they go to heaven.
And if you believe that, then you're capable of using the bomb.
And if that does occur, and it may occur, then the world is in just greater danger, because the next attack on New York will be a nuclear attack.
A boat can be five miles offshore and blow itself up with a nuclear weapon and destroy New York City, easily.
But to change the subject slightly, I think it's worth making the point that really we live in a kind of world in which the future is open.
I can't predict, and no one can predict what will happen next.
That's not important from people like myself.
The problem, of course, is that the people in Washington have the same dilemma.
And there are people in the CIA, they're a minority, they're not listened to, who say, look, the future in 2025 will be very different than it is today, and much more dangerous, and we can't predict it.
And those kind of people are ignored, but they do exist.
And since 1945, basically, the world has been living through an extremely rapid transition.
But since 1991, there is no more Soviet Union, so the United States no longer has an enemy that it could identify easily.
And that means it has to have a threat, it has to have an imminent sense of terror in order to justify spending $600-700 billion a year on the military budget.
Well, you know, we spent the majority of this show today talking about the long war in Central Asia, and one of the guests was commenting about the incongruence between escalating a full-scale, multi-generational, 100-year or more term, long, permanent, really, military occupation of Eurasia, while at the same time, we're broke.
And the reality that we're just this little country of 300 million people over here in the middle of North America, and that it doesn't really make any sense for us to dominate Eurasia from here to eternity, it seems like that doesn't really have anything to do with the policy.
We can all see it from here that it doesn't make sense, but I wonder, you know, is this what empires do as they're collapsing?
That's when they extend the furthest.
That's when they do their very worst overextension, is when they're already falling apart, it seems like.
Well, the problem with the United States is, and the problem that Obama has at the present moment with the people around him, is the same problem that they had in Vietnam, and that's the problem of credibility.
As Madeleine Albright put it, what's the use of having military power if you can't use it, and use it effectively?
And all the big wars that the United States has fought, well, the Korean War was a stalemate, but it lost to Vietnam more militarily.
And it's losing the Iraqi War and the Afghan War.
It's been eight years in Afghanistan without a resolution.
In fact, at the present time, McChrystal says the situation, to quote him, the situation in Afghanistan is serious, but it's more than that.
But the United States begins wars that it can't win, so it simply has to accept the fact that this is not 1947.
In 1947, it had an economic monopoly, it had wealth, it had a control of economic resources.
That doesn't exist now.
China's coming along, India's coming along, emerging nations are making money, the U.S. dollar as reserve currency is declining, and the United States simply can't act as if it's the only player on the block.
It isn't.
There are lots of players on the block, and the world is going around in circles, and at the present moment, the very effort to impose a Germany leads to catastrophe.
Obama has been warned by Bershkinsky and others that the chances of his duplicating the loss of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan is very, very great, and Bershkinsky ought to know, because he was Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, and he started the Afghan adventure all along.
So, essentially, the United States has got to realize that it's one nation among many, and that the world has changed, and it's changed the way in which American power is no longer as great as it used to be, and it shouldn't be.
No nation should dominate the world, not the Soviet Union, not the United States, not China.
No nation.
Everyone should mind their own business, but that's old-fashioned.
Well, you know, Ron Paul often says that all this empire building is going to end, and it won't be because you listen to me, and I guess he could say it won't be because you listen to Gabriel Kolko either.
It'll be because the dollar is broken, and that's it.
All empires fall, and they fall for the same reason, is they end up being hijacked by people who are apparently so narrow and short in their vision that they just run the thing into the rocks.
Well, they're running it, and the United States now has a debt of $12 trillion, and it's going up and up and up, and people no longer prefer the dollar as a reserve currency.
It's hanging on, but it's losing its hold, and the value of gold is going up, and basically the United States is an empire in decline, and that's the thesis I've made.
The Europeans are very, very strong, and the European Union is very, very strong, and the Chinese are very strong, and the Japanese are very strong, and the United States is just one of many nations, and it has to accept that fact that it can't dominate the world.
It can only exist as a co-equal.
Well, you know, it's so strange.
The American state and their media organs, I guess you could call them, always portray anyone who's capable of resisting us at all as being an imminent threat to us, and that kind of thing.
But it almost sounds like, you know, you talk about the rise, or the independent power of Japan, China, Brazil, India, rising powers, the Seam States, I guess, as Thomas Barnett calls them, there's really no reason to have a state of permanent war.
In fact, I remember John Mueller saying that there's a shortage of UN peacekeeping troops, that ceasefires are breaking out all over the world, and I don't want to sound ridiculous and utopian, but we don't have to live in an age of permanent war at all.
We could actually live in an age of the most advanced interdependence of trade and economic circumstances, and people from all different cultures, and the ability to travel, the ability to communicate.
We could be heading, not toward total collapse, but toward a great expansion of the American way of doing things around the world, if only we would lead by example, and just show people how things ought to work, instead of beating them all over the head all the time and making them our enemies.
Well, there's one problem with what you say.
It's too rational, and rationality doesn't define the way diplomacy works.
Well, that's why this is Chaos Radio.
From 1914 onward, irrationality has basically dictated the power and the policy of nations.
The First World War was irrational.
The Second World War is irrational.
The Israeli war against the Palestinians is irrational.
The American war against the Vietnamese was irrational.
It's difficult to be rational in the world.
The only thing to defend rationality is the fact that there's no better way of thinking, because to iconize or glorify irrationality would lead to obscuredness, and we can't do that.
But you have to understand the limits of rationality.
The people in power are not very rational, and they're not going to be.
They seem to get away with murder, whether they're Germans or French or English or Americans or Soviets.
They seem to be irrational.
That's why wars break out, because of false expectations.
They expect wars to be over quickly, and the United States expected the Iraqi war in 2003 to be over in three to six months.
They're still there, and they expected the Afghan war to be over quickly.
They're still there, and they expected the Vietnam War to be over quickly, and they lost it after 20 years.
So irrationality, unfortunately, defines the way diplomacy works.
Great.
I enjoyed it.