Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and next up is John Glazer, Assistant Editor at AntiWar.com.
Welcome back John, how's it going?
Pretty good, nice to talk to you.
Good to have you here.
Now, we got lots of wars to talk about today, you've been writing about a lot of wars.
I want to start, if it's okay with you, with your most recent piece about Uganda at AntiWar.com/blog.
What's the news out of Uganda?
Well, you know, of course, just a couple weeks ago now, the Obama administration sent 100 combat troops to Uganda in support of the Ugandan military and government in their fight against essentially an insurgent group in the area.
And what's troubling is that just after that, Amnesty International now has come out with a report called Stifling Dissent, Restrictions on the Rights to Freedom of Expression and Peaceable Assembly in Uganda.
The Ugandan government is cracking down, placing illegitimate restrictions on freedom of expression in order to silence critical voices.
We shouldn't be too surprised at this.
Uganda typically goes abroad in search of monsters and destroy, when in fact it is in the interest of some dictatorial power, whether it's in the Middle East, Africa, Central America, wherever.
So, you know, no news practically has come out in the past couple weeks of the fate or activities of these 100 combat troops.
Mainstream media seems to think it's irrelevant.
So, Amnesty International has come out with this report going into deep, deep detail about the Ugandan government and its dictatorial practices.
So, you know, this is just another edge in that sword of dipping our military into that region.
Hey, you live in D.C., right?
That's correct.
I wonder if you could get a, you know, by hook or crook, somehow get a press pass to the State Department briefing and ask them some questions.
Apparently, there's no one in the Washington press corps anywhere who is even interested in, hey, whatever happened to the war in Uganda you told us about a couple of weeks ago?
Yeah, yeah, it's unfortunate.
And that, you know, that is an indication of what the war in that region now is becoming.
It's becoming a secret war that nobody in the government needs anybody else's permission.
They don't need Congress's permission.
The executive branch doesn't.
They don't need to tell Americans what's going on.
They view restrictions on their ability to wield military power in that region solely as a birthright, like a gift from God that they just can, you know, dip in there and do what they will and not have to explain themselves or justify it in any way.
I mean, at the same time that we've sent troops in there, Kenya has ramped up attacks on Somalia, particularly southern Somalia, fighting against al-Shabaab.
Now, never mind the fact that they're intensively worsening the humanitarian crisis in the country, but people are skeptical that the U.S. claims of not being in cahoots with the Kenyans in their attacks on Somalia, people are skeptical that's even true.
We know as late as 2009, according to embassy cables released by WikiLeaks, that the U.S. was lending security support to Kenya.
And we know that, you know, even though...
Well, we know from Scahill's reporting in The Nation magazine that the U.S. is running the entire war over there.
That's right.
I mean, so we can even sort of pan out a little bit.
Let's think about it.
Yes, the U.S. sent 100 combat troops to Uganda and southern South Sudan, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Okay, that sort of takes care of Somalia's western front.
Secret drone bases have been recently constructed and are now operational in Ethiopia and Djibouti, so that takes care of Somalia's north and northwest.
The U.S. has covert operatives and a lingering client state in Yemen, and may have a drone site in Seychelles, the island state off of Africa's east coast.
So that takes care of Somalia's eastern front, not to mention the U.S. warships patrolling the Arabian Sea.
And now to have Kenya attacking southern Somalia certainly fits, circumstantially at least, this sort of broader attack on the Horn of Africa.
So we shouldn't doubt it too much that the U.S. is now in cahoots with the Kenyan government in their attacks on Somalia.
Yeah, it's funny, isn't it, how this famine in Somalia was the biggest deal in the whole world?
I thought they were going to resurrect Michael Jackson and do the Hands Cross America and everything, and that was, what, three, four weeks ago, and then, oh, well, that's it.
Nope, nobody cares about the famine in Somalia anymore.
Maybe a couple of reporters were about to begin to connect it to America's war there, I don't know.
Right, but then there's this whitewash, because, again, this is a military intervention.
This is the new kind of military intervention in the modern world, the kind that the people whose government is committing these military troops and attacks don't have a right to know about it.
So therefore, the media obeys.
The media is subservient to the interests in Washington, and when they're not really doing their job, they're just regurgitating what the officials in Washington say, and if the officials in Washington don't say anything about it, we don't hear anything about it.
That's why we have places like antilove.com.
Yeah, exactly.
Good thing, too.
Yeah, so here we are.
We're back in this dictator in Uganda who's just become more of a dictator.
Our government won't follow up on our war over there, but now you say it was Amnesty Amnesty or Human Rights Watch has put out this report?
Amnesty International.
Amnesty.
And they're saying basically dissenters, anyone who criticizes the government, they're being charged with treason.
Right, which is a capital offense and could lead to, you know, executions.
Amazing.
It's just like Glenn Greenwald's blog where he quotes Hillary Clinton talking about the massive buildup in the Persian Gulf and saying, yeah, we're doing this in order to prevent any outside influence in the region.
Right.
And this is, as Greenwald said, We're here to spread democracy by sending a bunch of money to the kingdom in Saudi Arabia and Oman and the emirs of the United Arab Emirates.
And people buy this, because this is the propagandistic excuse so popular and so sort of, Greenwald called it a masterpiece of American propaganda about the Middle East.
And he was exactly right.
That article from the Times, it was on Sunday, was a reiteration of grand imperial strategy in that region for, you know, since World War II.
We are, the articles told us we were expanding military ties with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and Oman.
Okay.
So we're doing exactly what we've been doing.
We're just ramping it up because Obama was sort of forced out of a plan to keep troops in Iraq.
So now he's surging in all of these countries, particularly Kuwait, to continue to police the world.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know, man, I'm not sure you're right about that, because yesterday I was driving and I saw an Obama bumper sticker with a peace symbol for the O, and that seems much more believable to me than all these facts that you're reporting.
I'm not sure.
I'm sorry.
I'm just complaining.
Hang on.
We've got to take this break.
We'll be right back with John Glaser from Antiwar.com, everybody.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton talking with John Glaser, assistant editor at Antiwar.com, consistently tearing it up at Antiwar.com/blog, and helping Jason Ditz out too at news.antiwar.com.
All right, so where we left off was the big buildup in the Persian Gulf, and obviously this has a lot to do with Obama's humiliation in Iraq, at least partial humiliation, being forced to remove the army troops, anyway, out of Iraq, and also seems like perhaps this has a lot to do with a renewed push for strikes against Iran's nuclear program.
What do you think's going on there?
Well, you know, this is probably the most troubling piece of news in the past couple days.
Not only is both Israel and the UK explicitly stepping up plans for an attack on Iran, but the House Committee on Foreign Affairs just yesterday pushed two more bills that would impose additional sanctions on Iran.
They're doing this ahead of the release on Tuesday of the IAEA report on Iran's nuclear enrichment and its relationship, if it has any, to its military capacities.
We'll have to wait and see what comes out of that report, but Hans Blix, the former chief of the IAEA, he was head inspector in the lead-up to the Iraq War.
No, that was ElBaradei, he was from UNSCOM.
He was in charge of looking for chemicals and germs and everything else.
You're thinking ElBaradei was the head of the IAEA.
So Hans Blix just yesterday said that we need a new approach.
This is not getting any headlines.
The other ones are about stepping up pressure and being bellicose and whatnot.
Hans Blix said we need a new approach.
He said we need to reassure Iran that they do not need a nuclear deterrent.
Because, of course, for the many decades, we've been telling them in not so many words that you need a nuclear deterrent if you want to be able to prevent an attack on your country.
That's the message we've been giving them.
We've built a war to their east and their west, supporting dictatorships to be client states and do as we say to their north, flooding their southern Gulf area with warships and so forth, and using the most threatening rhetoric that you can imagine.
Obama was just meeting with Sarkozy in France, and he again reiterated that Iran better stop enriching uranium and so on and so forth, with the most threatening kind of rhetoric that you can imagine.
And now it's unfortunately kind of threateningly reaching a bit of a tipping point.
And we should hope and pray that the War Party isn't able to twist and turn and contort this IEA report on Tuesday into an excuse for a military attack.
Well, you know, I think the Guardian piece about British preparations to go along with whatever Benjamin Netanyahu decides on this, where they kind of draw a new red line at Qom going operational, the one that they pretended was a secret atom bomb factory or whatever back in the fall of 2009, and they're saying that this thing would be so hard to hit with missiles, which they don't address, Natanz, which is under 85 feet of granite, that seems pretty hard to hit with missiles itself.
But anyway, they say that Qom is so hard to hit with missiles, that once it's up and going and operational, then that's a red line, because we won't be able to hit it with airstrikes, and they'll be able to churn out weapons-grade uranium.
And so this is what Netanyahu is pitching as the point where he's got to go to war to prevent the uranium, I guess, from ever being transferred to Qom by bombing it while it's still at Natanz or something like that.
And it should be noted as well that over the past few years, Iran has been receiving and letting in inspectors to check out their nuclear facilities.
Most of them are under IA safeguards right now, and they announced, I think it was last year, that they were going to start construction on a couple new sites.
They announced it as they're supposed to do, as they're legally required under international law.
We're going to do this, so on and so forth.
They have not committed any crimes.
They have not gone outside the restrictions of the IAEA, at least not in an approvable way.
And again, any sort of non-cooperation that the IAEA mentions or that any Western counterparts accuse Iran of can be solved by doing what Hans Blick said, which is to stop threatening Iran, stop setting intercontinental ballistics all over and aiming them directly at them, stop garrisoning Iran's surroundings with the most threatening and belligerent military in the world, and reassure them that we will not attack them, and you do not need a nuclear deterrent in order to prevent an invasion of your country.
That's what they want to hear, and that would ease tensions in a day.
But the political elites in America won't do that.
It's funny, because they always try to beat Iran over the head with the non-proliferation regime, when they've bent over backwards to fulfill every bit of the letter of it.
And really the IAEA's only real jurisdiction here is to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material.
And when they say there's leaks about what's supposed to be in this IAEA report about missiles, this and whatever, none of that is the IAEA's business.
And as far as I know, and I'm willing to be contradicted on this when the thing comes out, but as far as I know, all these are just the same old bogus accusations from the so-called smoking laptop, the Israeli forged alleged studies, and UN resolutions requiring that Iran answer every bogus question based on these already revealed to be bogus documents.
You know, another important part of this is to recognize that Iran has again and again, has repeatedly spoke favorably about and has expressed willingness to sign on to a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East.
The people, the only two countries that are vehemently against such a proposal, the whole Arab League is with it too, are the U.S. and Israel.
Why?
Well, because the U.S. is in violation of the non-proliferation treaty by assisting Israel in getting its nuclear weapons, as well as maintaining them basically in secret.
So that's another very easy out.
I've mentioned two simple solutions to sort of de-ratchet this rally to war, and the U.S. and Israel simply will not do it.
They refuse.
Well, you know, it really is the Nazi big lie technique where the entire debate in America is based on the theory that Iran is the other superpower in the world, and that they've got to be stopped and et cetera, et cetera.
When it couldn't be further from the truth, it might as well be a fourth world country.
I mean, Ahmadinejad and Khamenei got a monetary policy that makes Alan Greenspan look like Paul Volcker or something.
Their country is a basket case.
They have no offensive military capability whatsoever, and yet people really do, you know, from watching TV news and listening to talk radio mostly, they have this entire dream world, you know, fantasy basically of Iran that, you know, is ready to conquer all of Eurasia, I guess, if we don't stop them from getting that first A-bomb.
That's right.
I think there's an echo chamber of, you know, it gets louder and louder.
We know that the primary reason why Iran upsets a lot of people in the political elitist circles of America's politics is because it disobeys.
It doesn't simply—it's not subservient to the U.S. Empire.
It doesn't accept American money in order to follow orders and stuff like this.
And then there's this echo chamber that ratchets up things and makes it sort of the next Hitler as opposed to just someone who doesn't want to follow orders.
Right.
All right.
Hold it right there.
We'll be right back with John Glaser, everybody.
Afghanistan and Bahrain and Yemen news, maybe, if we have time.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton on the lines.
John Glaser, we're talking about some of America's wars.
You know, you can't fit them all in.
I want to stick with Iran for one second here, John.
I was talking with Gareth yesterday and said, you know, there's all this press about Netanyahu's trying to get his cabinet on board for a war and there's all this worry in the Obama administration that Netanyahu might be a loose cannon and go start the war without permission and then the British story about them preparing for war and all this and that.
And Gareth pointed out to me that, yeah, the only problem with that is really the only people in America who want a war with Iran, really, are the neocons who have much less influence with Obama, for now, anyway.
And maybe the Air Force.
He said, I wouldn't bet on the Air Force.
They like to believe that the world is a Lockheed promotional video or whatever, and so they'll go along.
But virtually, he said, you know, at least substantial majorities of the leadership of the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies are just against it.
They just say, no way.
We don't want to do it.
It'll do more harm than good and, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
And so, really, the only real risk here is that Netanyahu's crazy enough to just go ahead and push it or that, you know, Obama's bloodthirsty enough to go ahead and make the decision to do it himself.
It would be really hard to do that with the entire Defense Department saying, oh man, there's such a thing as biting off more than we can chew here and we don't want to.
No, and that's an accurate portrayal of the bulk of the national security sort of community.
They recognize how horrible and wasteful and dangerous and deadly and costly a war with Iran would be, and most of them recognize, especially after a decade of two of the most horrible wars in modern memory, that, you know, they can't do this.
It would be too big of a bite.
But, you know, we need to be on alert.
And if nothing else, the fact that we are on very high alert and responding promptly to these stories about UK plans to attack Iran and Israeli plans and so on and so forth, we need to start to make it clear to people in America that this is a game of rhetorical aggression and we need to be able to have most of America look at this and say, you know, that's BS.
I'm not going to stand for that.
We don't want this.
And have them not elect people who speak belligerently about Iran.
We don't want another war.
The American people don't want another war.
And the national security establishment, I don't think, wants another war with Iran.
It's clearly too much of a disaster to actually do.
So at least we have that on our side.
Well, I guess it really comes down to whether or not Netanyahu has the chutzpah to go ahead and launch F-16s and dare Obama to stop him in the airspace over Iraq or something like that.
If the pressure in the U.S. is strong enough not to go to war with Iran, then I think the Obama administration would use its leverage with Israel to stop such an attack.
Everything Israel does, it does with support and approval of the United States, even if it's tacit.
So I think that that kind of pressure that we talked about in the national security state should be able to pressure the Obama administration, even the hawks in the administration, to pressure Israel against war.
Well, you know, this is why I always go off about the Iranian nuclear program and what we really know about it compared to what they say and that kind of thing, is just to try to defuse the atmosphere of this bogus consensus of what a horrible threat Iran is.
It doesn't seem like anybody would be able to get away with, say, for example, talking the way Herman Cain and Bill O'Reilly did on the show the other day about the inevitability of this horrible war.
People just even knew that there was anyone saying, actually, you know, there's really no evidence they're making nuclear bombs, that kind of thing.
You just don't get that perspective on TV at all, not since November 07.
That's right.
That's right.
If you ask Americans generally, you know, what state in the world is the biggest threat to the United States, they'll probably say Iran or North Korea or something like that.
But if you ask, you know, the millions and billions of people across the world in the Arab world right now in the Middle East, you know, what state is the biggest threat to your existence, what state is the biggest threat to your well-being, they'll say the United States.
And that's very clear.
Why?
Because these people have been living under decades of dictatorship, supported vehemently by the United States government, and they've been supporting Israel against the Palestinians for even longer.
And so they recognize that, yes, the United States is the biggest threat to our existence as a people, the biggest threat to our rights.
But, of course, we don't hear those headlines.
Those polls have been done, and they have been borne out to say exactly what I've just said.
But, you know, we don't see those headlines.
We see headlines about how Iran is the next Hitler, and we need to seriously do as much educating as we possibly can to let people see that this is just a ratchet effect of people who are in power in America, and we need to show them that it's a lie.
Well, and some of the most ridiculous lies, too, like this terrorism plot, when the former CIA officers, Michael Scheuer, Philip Giroldi, Ray McGovern, Ray Close, Flint Leverett, and I always forget one or the other.
Anyway, six former CIA guys, oh, Robert Baer, the guy that Clooney played in Syriana.
Six former CIA guys came out and said, oh, come on, like the Iranians are going to do a terrorist attack against the Saudi ambassador in Washington.
This story is bogus.
Six of them in the first week, and yet still all the Iran articles, all the scariest ones from the last couple of days incorporate, yeah, I mean, they've obviously made the decision to go crazy and do things like assassinate a Saudi ambassador in D.C. as though everybody just knows this is true because Eric Holder, of all people, said so.
Yeah, I mean, it's unfortunate.
We do live in a political culture where evidence isn't needed.
You just need words from the people in power.
As long as you're lying, apparently telling the truth never works at all, no matter how good your details are, John.
We try.
We do try, we do, and we should keep trying, but we, for example, the United States, after much skepticism had been thrown at the Iran plot, the supposed alleged plot to kill a Saudi ambassador on American soil, after expert opinion, some of which you've mentioned, you know, threw a bunch of doubt into that, people started asking for evidence.
And then the United States, of course, said, well, we have it, but we're not going to show you.
We're not going to tell it to you.
We're not even going to describe it.
We're not going to hint at it.
And then the news cycle ended and the follow-up questions ceased and everybody switched to, you know, Herman Cain's past or whatever.
Right, precisely.
That's a schizophrenic type of political culture that we have, and it's unfortunate.
People feel perfectly fine in reading the tabloids of politics, paying zero attention, and then going to the polls every four years to devote themselves somebody else's money, and then, you know, meanwhile, electing someone who's a warmonger.
This is the central problem of American politics today.
Yeah, well put.
All right, now, can you tell us very quickly about Wolfowitz's and O'Hanlon's Columbia plan for Afghanistan in, like, I don't know, a minute and a half or less?
Well, I mean, Wolfowitz, strangely, said that, you know, we should use the successes that have been evident in our Columbia policy and apply them to Afghanistan.
Well, as I wrote, you know, that sort of depends on what your definition of success is.
I mean, in Columbia we have supported one of the most corrupt governments in the region.
We've supported right-wing paramilitary militias who consistently commit atrocities.
We've supported and bolstered the drug trade in there, which funds all these horrible things going on.
The murder rate and the crime rate and the violence in Columbia is off the charts when you compare it to the region, and that's in a violent region.
So, you know, we should really be questioning exactly what kind of success we should place on Afghanistan as a result of our Columbia policy.
He did admit, though, to some extent we have been applying that sort of plan.
I mean, yes, we've been supporting in Afghanistan, you know, basically thugs, you can call them paramilitary groups, who regularly commit massacres, killings, rapes, so on and so forth.
We have been supporting one of the most corrupt governments in the region.
Yes, that's the Afghanistan government, Karzai's government.
Yes, we've been using targeted military strategies and so on and so forth.
So in a way we have, and they've both been failures.
Wolfowitz is just too much of an idiot to recognize it.
Yeah.
For me, the most valuable thing about that was just seeing O'Hanlon piling around with Wolfowitz again a couple of days before Iraq.
You've got to love the Brookings guys.
All right, we're all out of time.
Thank you so much for your time.
It's been great, John.
Thanks, Scott.
John Glaser, everybody.
News.antiwar.com, antiwar.com/blog.
