Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And our first guest on the show today is John Glazer, assistant editor at AntiWar.com.
He's writing all day long over there at AntiWar.com/blog, and also from time to time anyway, actually pretty quite often I'd say, News.
AntiWar.com, the news section and the blog section there.
Welcome back, how are you doing John?
Very good, thanks for having me.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
I have a whole John Glazer section actually in my tab stack here.
Let's start with how to make Syria much, much worse.
Ooh, teacher, I know, I know, but no, go ahead.
Well, no, it's basically a reiteration of what I've been writing for months now, which is that internationalizing the conflict will make things worse.
James Harkin at ForeignPolicy.com wrote about this recently, and he's been to Syria on and off for years and was last there, you know, just in February.
And he speaks of his own experience there and his contacts in Homs and in other cities of the opposition in Syria.
And he says that, you know, the Syrian exiled group, the Syrian National Council, has been exaggerating civilian losses.
They've been exaggerating the conflict in order to, specifically with the aim of poking the international community towards intervention.
Now, thankfully, you know, geopolitical realities cause Russia and China to basically not accept a UN Security Council resolution, and that was good because we probably would have already seen some sort of coordinated international military intervention in Syria.
So, thankfully, that was stopped.
But in the months following that, there's reports that Gulf states were, you know, sending in arms and aid to the opposition.
The U.S. and its allies, like Britain, have been sending what they call nonlethal assistance to the opposition fighters, which includes at least communications gear so they can be aided in fighting the Syrian army.
And this kind of thing is really just making things worse.
The fact that foreign agitators are involved in this conflict lends credence, first of all, to the Assad regime's claims that this is all about, you know, this is all the handiwork of foreigners.
And it also risks splitting the indigenous opposition movement, as Harkin writes, and empowering exactly the kind of Sunni extremist groups who are most likely to stoke sectarian tensions.
I wrote about this months and months ago in February when the first reports of possible al-Qaida fighters in Syria came forth.
Now, you know, talking about the fact that U.S. policy is explicitly merging with al-Qaida's policy apparently isn't enough to stop interventionists in their tracks.
But this is what's been going on, and it will get worse if the aid continues.
I mean, what we see now is that there are, you know, extremist elements that are rising in power in terms of the opposition.
The opposition is still very disorganized, but the people that are rising to the top, you know, crap doesn't roll downhill in this type of scenario when the crap are the people that are receiving arms and aid from foreign interveners who actually want to see the end of the Assad regime.
So this is not good.
Fortunately, we have right now the U.N. advisors or monitors in Syria.
There's six of them there now, and 24 are supposed to come within the week.
And the ceasefire that Kofi Annan brokered is broadly intact, according to one report that's up on the page by Jason Dick.
You know, there are scuffles and there are scattered, you know, breaking of the ceasefire throughout the country.
But for the most part, violence right now is down.
Civil war seems to have taken at least an intermission.
So we have to sort of wait and see.
Yeah.
Well, now, the hardest thing to tell from here really is the relative power of the rebels.
I mean, even if they're armed by the Qataris, the Saudis, paid by American taxpayers, whatever, supported this way and that, from anything I've seen, there's nothing that indicates that they have a hope in hell of sacking Damascus or anything.
This is not the Libya war.
And I had thought that the government had rolled their tanks into Homs and had effectively crushed the insurgency there and kicked them out of Homs.
And that was the one city that the rebels really held, if any.
No?
Well, yeah, my understanding is that, or at least I would speculate, that part of the reason that the ceasefire is held so well is that the Syrian opposition fighters very plainly can't fight anymore.
They don't have weapons.
They don't have the ability or the organization to stand up to the power of the very brutal and terrible Syrian army.
And they are incredibly weak.
They've been pumped up with some help by the international media to be these freedom fighters that are waging a civil war, perhaps a revolution against Damascus.
But that just doesn't seem to be true.
Their relative power, as you say, is extremely weak.
And I think that's part of the reason that the ceasefire is held so well, that they are beleaguered and their legs have been taken out from under them these past few months.
Well, and you know, I don't take any satisfaction in that or whatever from reading Neer Rosen and I guess a couple of other things.
I'm under the impression that you have just regular people who are sick and tired of living in a totalitarian police state and they thought they were taking the opportunity to overthrow it, whether peacefully or violently is really up to them, not me.
I don't care.
My only problem, of course, is their revolution being hijacked by Western powers, which is only to our detriment, doesn't ever help us.
It always hurts the American people and the future, how we live here at home and everything else when we mess around in places like this.
So, you know, hey, if there are a lot of individualists in Syria that can somehow create a free state where one has never existed, then great.
But instead, what we really have are basically sock puppets, not just of the West, but as you already mentioned, really radical elements, Al Qaeda-like elements anyway, and the sock puppets of the Saudis and the Qataris, they couldn't possibly be Jeffersonians because there are no Jeffersonians in Saudi Arabia or Qatar, certainly not in their governments.
That's certainly not their agenda, no matter how many times Hillary Clinton claims that that's what she cares about here.
That's not the agenda going on, trying to create freedom and liberty there.
So, you know, I don't mean to just sound like I'm taking the side of Assad or something.
Basically, all I'm saying is if the resistance, especially the armed resistance, is that few and that weak, then what are we doing at all other than setting them up for a worse failure?
We should just really stay out of this thing entirely.
That's precisely right.
I will agree with you.
I mean, Assad is a terrible person.
I hope he has a brutal fate ahead of him.
He's a brutal, terrible dictator.
And, you know, I definitely would like to see some, you know, improvements in governance and, you know, the progress in the economy and so forth in Syria.
As in other areas of public policy, people too often have this urge and good intentions, and they don't realize that the consequences of their intentions, when put into policy, are regressive and actually are counterproductive to their wants and desires.
I mean, it's the same thing with, you know, anything that libertarians talk about, whether it's welfare or, you know, regulation of banks and so on and so forth.
These things have a blowback potential, and so does going for, you know, trying to aid, you know, one side in the civil war and actually, you know, tweak the outcome.
And what's amazing is that I don't think anyone can really deny the way that you've just described the Syrian opposition.
Nobody can deny that there are extremist elements.
Nobody can deny that there are certainly no Jeffersonian Republicans in the opposition.
Yet you still have people like McCain and Lieberman, who recently went to the Turkish-Syrian border and met with Syrian rebels.
They met with people, supposedly, of the Free Syrian Army.
They met with defectors.
They met with refugees, you know, trying to curry, you know, trying to rally favor for, you know, taking the side in the civil war.
This is just, I mean, their ignorance and their sort of hubris is so palatable that it was hard for me to write the article that I wrote last week when they went to meet with the Syrian rebels.
It's just, it's amazing how short-sighted the interventionists are.
Well, you know, that's the thing, too.
Your blog post here, How to Make Syria Much, Much Worse, it's sort of the story told through what some of these other, you know, so-called foreign policy pundits are noticing, the kind of people that are actually listened to, I guess, you know, at foreignpolicy.com, that kind of thing, who are, you know, warning, who are basically able to see some of the truth of this at all.
And it's like, wow, they sound like people who must have been, you know, first-time listeners to my show a year ago or something.
This is, you know, you could pick up all of their greatest insights in one half of a paragraph of Eric Margulies' article here.
It's like they're rubbing their eyes and going, whoa, wait.
So, I mean, just because we had an idea doesn't necessarily mean it was a good one.
And, you mean, we might stop and wait and check for a second and see if we're doing what Ayman al-Zawahiri wants us to do or not?
What?
This is really the level of critical thinking of these, you know, Harvard and Yale and Georgetown graduates up here running our world.
I know.
I agree.
But you know what?
I applaud when people from, you know, headwriters on foreignpolicy.com or people like Ed Hussein from the Council on Foreign Relations, Mika Zdenko has also been good on this from the Council on Foreign Relations.
These people are part of the elite foreign policy, you know, academia.
And even they see problems with it.
It's really only the people, you know, the rabid, seething neocons and their, you know, counterparts in government like McCain and Lieberman.
They're the only ones that literally can see no farther than their own nose with this Syria thing.
So, you know, we should at least be somewhat content that the establishment is against, at least partly against the Syrian expansion.
Well, now, whatever happened to Libya?
Does anybody write at all about, wow, so here's the consequences of our regime change in Libya?
Or is that just happened in another dimension?
And maybe Qaddafi is still in power in this one?
I don't know.
Nobody in the establishment is really writing about it.
I wrote a lengthy piece last week, I think, that not only talked about the consequences inside Libya, the fact that the rebels are basically terrible people, they committed war crimes during and after the war, they're setting up a less-than-democratic government, to say the least.
They're still actually fighting each other in a civil war, so on and so forth.
I mean, the list goes on and on.
So not only are those types of consequences, but also consequences in the region, like what's going on in Mali and many other countries in the Sahel region.
Nigeria, the Nigeria-based militant group, Boko Haram, is mixing with Mali's Toreg insurgents in the north.
And the U.S. intervention, the NATO intervention in Libya, has destabilized an entire region, not to mention what's going on in Libya.
Oh, man, and not to mention, when you talk about things like, oh, now the Toregs are mixing with the Boko Haram, that's another excuse for another American intervention.
Well, yeah, it's funny, because back in December, I know this is going back a little while, but there was a congressional report issued on Boko Haram which said, the head of the commission that wrote up the report said, and it was Patrick Meehan, some sort of a congressman, he said, while I recognize there is little evidence at this moment that suggests Boko Haram is planning any attack against U.S. homeland, lack of evidence does not mean it cannot happen.
That's the sort of brilliant, you know, genius moron that are heading the congressional committees that decide our foreign policy.
There is no threat, but what the point of it is, and this coincides with the U.N. report released in February, that said the consequences of the Libyan crisis reverberated across the region in countries like Algeria and Chad and Egypt and Mali and Niger and Tunisia.
The actions in the Libyan war further exacerbated already precarious situations in that region.
And remember, this was a humanitarian intervention, so it's definitely worth pointing out that this intervention has been bad from the beginning, and the consequences are all over the place, and the consequences of an intervention in Syria would be an order of magnitude worse, and they can't yet see it.
It's amazing.
And now, yeah, actually, on Syria, what exactly does it look like?
You know, where are we?
What exactly are they doing?
Are they going to actually carve out a space and call it the safe zone and this kind of thing?
They don't talk like that.
Are they doing that?
I mean, basically what that means is we're invading a little bit of Syria at a time to start.
You know, that could be one interpretation, but first of all, before any of that safe zone stuff happens, there needs to be more negotiations.
Kofi Annan has, you know, brokered this ceasefire, and then some sort of a, you know, more concrete and long-lasting deal is what he plans to negotiate in the near future.
But right now, all that's happening is that the ceasefire, you know, people are trying to keep a lid on this ceasefire, and six UN monitors, as I said, are on the ground in Syria today, and 24 others are expected to go into Syria by the end of the week.
So that's essentially what's going on now.
To tell you the truth, I don't have much predictive power in this Syria situation, because I didn't expect someone like Kofi Annan to come along and speak out against and advocate against international intervention.
I didn't expect that to happen.
I didn't expect a ceasefire to broaden, you know, for the most part, kind of work.
So I don't have much predictive power.
What I can say is that it does not look like the Assad regime is going to give way.
They're not going to, you know, I don't see any chance that he's going to accept some sort of a transition deal where, you know, he's given immunity, but he can step down.
I don't think that guy's stepping down.
But I also don't think that the opposition is going to, you know, say, okay, we give up, let's just go back to our lives.
Well, and that includes Obama and Hillary, right?
Well, yeah, I mean.
They have said he must go, Assad must go.
It's hard to get an American politician to go back on some words like that.
That's true, but they've already been backpedaling, because they see that it's not the case.
I mean, it was a couple weeks ago that Assad started to seem, you know, not in trouble of an actual successful revolution.
The reality of the weakness of the opposition was becoming clearer to everybody, and, you know, U.S. officials started to backpedal on their so-called honors, you know, Assad must go, and Assad's downfall is inevitable and that kind of stuff.
So we'll see.
I see the stalemate kind of holding for quite a while into the future.
But who knows?
Kofi Annan could throw some magic in there.
Who knows?
All right, now I want to talk about this piece, American Decline, What the Foreign Policy Elite Really Fear.
It's a blog entry at antiwar.com/blog.
And you talk about, you know, basically a bunch of New Yorkers and D.C. ers fretting about the chaos on the planet Earth when America's forced to withdraw from the world.
And I wonder, first of all, I mean, obviously you have powers like Brazil, India, China.
Well, China, I guess, was already counted as a major power.
But anyway, you know, what Barnett calls the seen states, those kind of middle power states, and they're just growing more and more powerful economically and politically and influence in their regions and whatever.
There is no Soviet Union to hurt everybody under, you know, our protection.
And so you have separate powers spinning off around the world in a multipolar world, as they say.
But it seems like what you're writing about here is a fear by the American imperialists that something really drastic is about to happen to their power, that they're going to really lose their entire power and influence over Eurasia.
And then, of course, comes the hypocrisy and, oh, me, oh, my, someone else might act just like Americans in Eurasia, and we can't have that.
But I wonder whether I basically have that right, that you're quoting Brzezinski and others here, that they really fear that the era of American hegemony is blown already.
Yeah, I mean, you have it right.
I mean, what has been popular in the past year and definitely in the past few months, Ian Bremmer wrote a book about it, Brzezinski wrote a book about it, and they basically go through what terrible consequences there would be if America did not lead the world.
And we're supposed to believe that without American leadership, there would be this generalized anarchy, there would be a free-for-all among broadly equal powers, and it would be just chaos.
And they try to say that this is the kind of thing that led to the First World War, without any hegemon to keep people in line.
But to really buy into this, and this is something that Thomas Barnett in World Politics Review actually said explicitly, is that without the West as hegemon, there won't be any referee.
But, of course, to buy into that sort of analysis, you have to assume that America has acted like some sort of an impartial referee over the international system, which is, of course, ridiculous.
The U.S. has been unilateral in its actions, it's been aggressive, it's done what it's wanted to do.
And what I was really just saying is that the people, Brzezinski and Bremer and Barnett, what they really fear is not that some benevolent empire and the global order that it preserves will disappear.
What they fear is that other governments, other states, will get to do the horrible things that we've been doing for decades.
You know, overthrowing governments that threaten the state's supremacy with impunity and not getting any punishment for it at all, that's the supreme international crime of unprovoked war.
You know, military bases spanning the globe supporting the world's worst dictators.
These are things that they fear will no longer be solely American prerogative.
China will get to do it, you know.
Russia will get to do it a little more, and perhaps India.
So this is what they really fear, and it exposes something that's very wrong with the way people, and especially the establishment view foreign policy right now, which is that, you know, American crime and American unilateralism and American brutality abroad, proxy wars and so forth, these things always have the presumption that they're benevolent, that they're good, that they're for freedom and democracy, and that we're, you know, maintaining global order, and that, you know, this is about justice and about freedom and democracy and so forth.
These are just drugs.
I mean, these are just intellectual patting themselves on the back, and they can't see that, in fact, what they fear China will do is precisely the thing that America has been doing.
And we're making it worse, because we're at a point now where the Obama administration has explicitly advocated pivoting to the East, pivoting to Asia, and expanding the empire there.
We're sending troops to Australia.
We're sending extra troops to the Philippines.
We've got them in Guam, in South Korea, in Japan.
We're boosting the naval presence throughout Asia Pacific.
And this is all to contain China, who has done nothing aggressive towards the United States.
Well, now, and this brings us back to Africa, too, actually, John, because, well, let me ask you, is there another military power in Africa competing with America at all?
Or that's it, right?
All the old colonialism is over.
The Chinese were just sending in guys with briefcases, not soldiers.
And now maybe those guys with briefcases work for the PLA, but still they, you know, they don't have, they never put troops there.
America's the only, we basically got Africa locked up.
And as we already talked about, every place we intervene turns into a horrible catastrophe and a great excuse to intervene some more, since, you know, history always began yesterday, and we can always just invoke saving people as our reason for doing more.
It seems like these fearful people have Africa locked up.
That's one of their major prizes, right?
Or what am I missing?
No, no, I think you're right, and this is part of, this is, you know, this is another strange part about the lament about the American decline, is that it's still not, it's a remote future possibility right now.
The United States still outspends the entire world in its military spending.
We still spam the entire globe with our military, so on and so forth, and we still, you know, even though the economy sucks right now, we're still the world's leading economy, and so, you know, we don't have much to worry about.
I mean, in the big news, new book, Strategic Vision, he explains how China-Africa trade grew by 1,000% from $10 billion in 2000 to $107 billion in 2008.
1,000%.
Now, that's an indication that China's economy is growing, and that their economic influence is growing, and that is an unacceptable development to the American imperialists.
They can't have it.
They don't want to accept that China has an emerging economy that could eventually, sometime in the future, surpass the United States.
So this is an indication, you know, this is an illustration of just how twisted the mindset of the imperialists are.
Well, and of course, this is what caused World War I, is our side refusing to let your side have a trade agreement with that other side.
This is what caused the 20th century of death.
It's an indication also of what the state actually is.
The state is just, you know, it absorbs everything, it's constantly expanding, and it doesn't want anyone else to expand.
So not only is military expansion unacceptable, and supposedly poses an automatic threat to the United States, but also economic influence.
That's unacceptable.
So we have to keep people weak and poor throughout the entire globe so that American hegemony can reign.
And that's the real issue here.
It's an insane sort of, it's psychotic to just want to keep the entire world weak and poor so that the power of America can be unchallenged.
This is the essence of the imperial grand strategy, and it's precisely the problem.
It's why we're spending ourselves into bankruptcy.
It's why the American empire cannot stop expanding and getting us into more conflicts that are unnecessary and, you know, criminal.
And I think this fear about China and about a post-American century is really just a lot of hogwash.
What they're scared of is a loss in their own influence, and that other countries might act in the horrible way that America has.
Yep, for sure.
All right, now, can you give me two good minutes here real quick on the change of heart, change of mind of many Latin American leaders as of late to start moving toward legalizing drugs over Uncle Sam's objections?
Sure, I'll try to be quick.
There is an increasingly large course of nations in Central America, led by a number of current and former political leaders, which say that, you know, the drug war has failed, we want to move toward something like decriminalization because that will undermine the power of the cartels and so on and so forth.
I mean, things have got so bad in Mexico and Guatemala and Honduras and others that they're actually having the gall to stand up to America and the Obama administration and say, look, this needs to change.
There was just a recent summit between all the Central American leaders and the United States, and what the Obama administration focused on, well, first of all, they said, no, we're not going to do decriminalization, so you can forget about that.
And then they just complained about Cuba.
And, you know, some nations wanted Cuba to actually participate in the summit.
And, you know, going back to the 60s, you know, all Obama can really care about is this antiquated, you know, Cuba, America, you know, enemy kind of thing.
It's just absurd.
And there's a very easy solution to cut down on the bloody, bloody drug war that is costing trillions of dollars, and the United States will not do it because it affords them control over Central America, which is what they want.
This is their, you know, pre-imperial backyard, and they want to keep it.
Well, and you know what?
Maybe this reflects on the Africa discussion as well, that basically all these American policies are just the lashing out of a dying empire, and it's, you know, everything goes out, nothing comes back, and it's all just self-destruction.
And really, even if we militarize Africa, it doesn't necessarily mean that our power and influence, you know, rules the way things are there, especially if they can look ahead to a short-term or medium-term future where America will be too bankrupt to continue to rule them.
That's, you know, the same thing as the Taliban holding out in Afghanistan until we finally leave.
That's all they've got to do to win.
That's just for people hegemonized worldwide, you know what I mean?
So maybe that's the same kind of thing going on here in South America, is they've really thrown off their American-backed dictators and installed real bottom-up democracies for better or worse, you know, for their own sakes.
But they've really gained a lot of independence, and it seems like that's what this really signifies, is just how...
For not, it always...
You know, certainly since the 1980s, many Central American countries have gained independence and, you know, kind of gotten away from the U.S. domination.
But it still persists.
I mean, the Obama administration has been supporting the coup government in Honduras.
You know, unfortunately, it's a bad government.
It came to power in a military coup that was deemed unconstitutional and illegal, yet the Obama administration continued to lend support to it.
And we're giving them weapons, and we're setting up drone bases there, and so on and so forth.
Same sort of stuff with Colombia.
We're still supporting atrocities by the paramilitaries in Colombia.
And government lawlessness.
Like, recently, there have been...
The government in Colombia has done away with privacy protection in order to...
It's a sort of natural security state.
They have...
Sorry, John, I've got four seconds.
This is John Glazer, everybody.
Antiwar.com/blog.
News.antiwar.com.
Thanks.
Thanks.
