All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and on the line is my friend Gareth Porter.
He's an independent historian and journalist.
He wrote the book Perils of Dominance about America in Vietnam, and he writes for Interpress Service.
We run every bit of it and then some at antiwar.com/porter, so I don't forward you on to original.antiwar.com/porter.
Same difference.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you, man?
Hello again, Scott.
I'm good.
Good, good.
I'm very happy to have you here on the show today.
So Intifada over there somewhere between Morocco and the Philippines, things are changing.
Give me some wisdom.
Well, you know, what I've done on this current situation this week is to do a piece that actually looks at the end of the Mubarak regime as a signal, yet again another signal, in a whole series of signals that have come to us over the last few years, that the whole U.S. strategy, regional strategy in the Middle East, is completely bankrupt, a failed strategy, has been a failure from the beginning and has been proven so time and again.
And I sort of go through the litany of the series of failures in the Middle East, basically going from the Iraq invasion through the U.S. encouragement to Israel to invade Lebanon in 2006, of course the failed war in Afghanistan, the fact that the whole policy of trying to put pressure on Hezbollah and Lebanon has now resulted in a new government being formed, which is essentially backed by Hezbollah as a result of, you know, indirect result of U.S. policy.
And so it goes.
And this seems to me the perfect moment for a complete restructuring of U.S. Middle East strategy.
But as I conclude at the end of my piece, and actually at the beginning as well, this is not likely to happen because the problem is that this policy was never based on any sort of effort to have an objective view of U.S. interests or of the realities in the region.
It was always a policy that responded to the interests of the two primary political blocs, power blocs as I call them, in U.S. politics.
One being the pro-Israel bloc and the other being the militarist bloc, that is, the U.S. military services and all of their bureaucratic and private sector allies.
So, I mean, when you're facing the two biggest political forces in regard to U.S. foreign and military policy, you know you're not going to see any real change in the policy as long as these forces can continue to influence the policy.
And so I come out of this with a very pessimistic view of the future of U.S. policy beyond the fall of the Mubarak regime.
Right.
Basically the proof that it's not going to change is the fact that it hadn't yet.
I mean, hell, go down the litany of failures, just 21st century blunders, never even mind the 1990s.
I mean, it's basically fair enough, isn't it, Garrett, to say that, well, there used to be a Soviet Union to point at and say, look, you would rather be allied with us than them, right?
Okay, good.
But now there's not one, and so what excuse does any local state politician have around the world to justify going along with America?
What pressure is there other than, you know, we'll threaten to bomb them or whatever, but ultimately we can't bomb them all.
Well, of course, in the case of Mubarak, you know, this is a perfect example of a client state who was clearly attracted to an alliance with the United States by the prospect of getting huge amounts of assistance to consolidate his power, and that's exactly what Mubarak did over the last three decades.
And he made out like a bandit, and so did his friends, and so did the Egyptian national security bureaucracy.
But, of course, the Egyptian people didn't fare so well, as I think the demonstrations in the street and the people actually essentially risking their lives now to bring Mubarak down attest to the fact that the Egyptian people did not find this alliance really was beneficial to Egypt.
Right, and so there it is.
I mean, you know, whether or not they're able to overthrow the government this week, or, you know, after September they have an election or whatever, like in Mubarak's plan, you know, one way or another here, the Americans can't really do anything about it, right?
That's the point here, but they're going to keep on trying to do something about it anyway.
They're going to keep on trying, and if I had the space and the time to extend this analysis, I think what I would have done and what I'm now working on is to essentially discuss the almost certain development in the U.S. policy toward Egypt in the coming days and weeks that the United States will continue to cultivate the military leadership of Egypt in the hope that somehow they can parlay that obvious deep relationship with both the military and the intelligence agencies of Egypt into a new basis or a continuing basis, I guess would be more accurate, of U.S. influence on the politics of the country in the hope that they can sort of influence the outcome of the elections so that the future government will be not out of line with U.S. and Israeli interests.
I think that that is, again, going to be an illusion, just as all of U.S. policy toward the Middle East has been based on a set of illusions, that they're going to be following another illusion and believing that they can hold on to power in Egypt through the Egyptian military and intelligence agencies.
I think that despite the fact that the military has held de facto power for many decades in Egypt, that we are now seeing the emergence of a new political situation in Egypt and that relying on the military, particularly in the coming months, is going to be very parlous.
It's not going to bring the results that the United States and Israel might hope.
Well, I guess this isn't true in Washington, D.C., but apparently everywhere else in the world, ideas really do matter.
And the precedent has been set here in the mind of every dinner table in the entire Middle East, right?
That, hey, we don't have to put up with this.
Look, it's working.
It's possible.
And, you know, I wonder why any of these regimes should expect to last.
I mean, there's even protests, a BlackBerry flash mob protest in Saudi Arabia this week.
Gareth?
Yes, I think there's no doubt that this, particularly at this moment in history, this kind of dramatic demonstration that a popular demand for the ouster of a dictator can have just an electrifying effect on other countries which have something in common with that country where the popular uprising is taking place.
And clearly, other Sunni regimes in the Middle East and North Africa fit that description.
And I mean, I don't think that we're going to see, you know, a duplication of this situation in Saudi Arabia.
I don't think we're going to see the overthrow of Saudi regime or of other Gulf regimes in the immediate future.
But obviously, you can see the effect in Yemen, a very, very powerful effect there.
Already, Saleh is very profoundly on the defensive, may not be able to hold on to power.
Probably won't be able to hold on to power.
I think, you know, Jordan is shaky at the moment, no question about that.
So this has very profound effects throughout the region.
Yeah, well, I mean, that's the thing, too.
I mean, the king of Jordan, the government in Yemen both have had to very quickly back down in the face of these protests, you know, not resigning and leaving town like Ben Ali in Tunisia yet.
But seems like they're afraid of their own people pretty bad here.
King of Jordan sacked his government in a day.
And sorry, we're out of time for this segment, but we'll be right back with Gareth Porter after the break.
Anti-war radio.
All right, everybody, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm reading funny things in the chat room.
If you go to my blog, thestressblog.com and read the green writing on the right side of the page there, that's the instructions how to join up the chat room with the boys, hang out and say funny stuff back and forth during the radio show.
I'm on the line with Gareth Porter from Interpress Service.
And I guess, Gareth, in this corner we have the American empire lashing out as it collapses.
And in this corner we've got people power in the Middle East.
You know, wisely point out that there are still pretty powerful governments in the Middle East.
They're not just all going to roll over completely for their own populations.
And yet there are pretty early indications here that they're already running scared.
I saw where they had some protests in Jordan that weren't anything like what was happening in Egypt.
And King Abdullah just turned around and completely dismissed the entire government in a day.
I'm not sure that impressed anyone really.
But the king of Kuwait all of a sudden raised everybody's welfare payment to $3,500 a month.
You know, I mean, they're really feeling the heat here, right?
That's a very good example of the way in which this drama in Egypt has had such a huge impact on the entire region.
I mean, you're talking about things like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which are rightly called cradle-to-grave nanny states, where you have basically much more going for the government in terms of its social control than you had in Egypt.
And that's why I would venture to say that we're not going to see further changes in the present period in these Gulf sheikhdoms, but other countries, other governments, which are hereditary or non-hereditary and which don't have that kind of sociopolitical system, I think are in trouble.
And by the same token, I mean, U.S. policy is really skating on the thinnest kind of ice.
I mean, it doesn't have any ice.
It's really kind of trying to walk on water here.
And I mean, it's anybody's guess how they try to continue a policy that, A, tries to continue to support Israel virtually unconditionally in resisting the demands of the Palestinian people, on one hand, and project U.S. military power to the maximum in the Middle East, South Asia, and Central Asia.
And in the face of the realities that have asserted themselves here, I mean, this is one of the great mysteries to me.
I don't exactly know how they will manage to continue this broad pursuit of these interests under these circumstances.
Well, but Gareth, I mean, come on.
When the going gets tough, the tough get going.
Man, it might be getting more difficult, but we've got to maintain this empire, or else what would happen if we had to give it up?
Well, of course.
I mean, you're now voicing the implicit response, I think, of an awful lot of people who have read the piece that I did this week, and who find, you know, I'm now sort of responding to what I've noted in terms of comments to my article.
A lot of people complain that the kind of analysis that I've offered does not simply say, oh, it's all about oil, or it's simply about Zionism.
And, you know, I mean, those are the two most common complaints which are put forward in response to this kind of an analysis, which, you know, I did a kind of historical analysis going back, tracing this general U.S. strategy of the Middle East back to the creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and then comparing that strategy and the current crisis of that strategy with what happened in Southeast Asia, when, you know, the U.S. national security state was so committed to the Cold War strategy of surrounding, isolating, pressuring, and trying to at least claim that the United States would ultimately see the overthrow of the Chinese Communist regime during the Cold War, and then ultimately were forced to give up, or not forced to, and yet the Nixon administration finally chose to give up that strategy, but not before, of course, hundreds of thousands of people had died in the Vietnam War.
And my point was there that the U.S. national security state is one of the two powerful political blocs in this country, and yet their interests, their bureaucratic interests, were at stake in this Cold War strategy in Southeast Asia.
They did it in East Asia.
They didn't want to give it up.
They didn't want to give up those perquisites of power.
And, you know, what I'm getting from an awful lot of readers here is that, you know, it's so obvious that this is about oil or it's about Zionism that it's kind of sacrilegious to really talk about the bureaucratic interests of the national security state as part of this picture.
And so, I mean, I'm really reminded just how much work there is to be done to break the stranglehold of this notion of, which comes from, you know, sort of traditional left...
I have a proposal.
We can abolish first the CIA employee union, right?
And those are some powerful lobbyists.
They've got to have a secret war going on somewhere or else they don't have a job.
Yeah, well, I mean, that would be one way of going in the direction I want to go, obviously.
No, I understand what you're saying.
I don't know how to get people to understand either.
The state itself has a tremendous stake in continuing down the same path.
And, you know, back to where we started here when you talked about, you know, the Israel lobby as well as, you know, the warfare state, the special interests involved in this.
In a sense, it's just one of those flaws of democracy.
I'm not sure what the solution to it is, but it's the squeaky wheel gets the grease, right?
So there is no, like, wise men, national interest at stake here.
It's all small, narrow interests, short-term interests, and a ship with no captain, really.
It is, and the obvious resolution to this or the solution to this is one which is nowhere in sight, as I point out in my article, and that is to have a popular movement, a mass movement, to press back, to push back against these interests.
I mean, that's the only way things are going to change.
And I'm beginning to sound like a broken record on this, but so be it.
We need to be talking about this.
We need to come together and think about it and come up with a way to do it.
There's no way to do it.
The military is the one institution Americans believe in anymore.
That's the problem, you know.
I would say the next major crisis here is going to be when everyone realizes on the same day that dollars are worthless.
And when that happens, where else are the American people going to turn except to the Pentagon to make sure that everybody has a bottle of water being rationed out and whatever?
Well, you're right.
That's a huge problem.
Not just the legitimacy, but almost the sacrosanct nature of the U.S. military is a big political obstacle to change, and we have to really break that down.
We have to delegitimize in the sense that the military is pursuing its own narrow interests at the expense of the interests of the American people.
We need to legitimize their behavior and their policies.
Right on.
Everybody, that's Gareth Porter, antiwar.com/Porter.
Thanks very much.
Thanks, Scott.
