03/19/07 – Joshua Frank – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
Welcome to the show, Joshua.
Hey, thanks for having me, Scott.
Who is this guy, Barack Obama, and why do I think he's a rock star?
Well, he's not Mick Jagger, but yeah, I think CNN and the rest of them would have you believe he is.
You know, he's come out of basically nowhere.
He's a rookie senator from Illinois, and he really made a splash at the convention in 2004, and outshined Bill Clinton and Howard Dean and the rest of the gang.
And from then on, he's been in the spotlight, not only in the media, but within the Democratic Party, as this new future, the new hope.
And of course, you know, he's black, he represents a contingency of the Democratic Party that doesn't have a lot of representation in Washington, and you know, it's a veneer that he's going to make some sort of change.
But you know, he's very gifted.
He's smart, he's been around, he knows politics enough that he's maneuvered to the top already, and we'll see what happens.
But again, you know, he's not offering anything that's substantially different.
He's just candy-coating it, much like Bill Clinton did in the 90s.
So this is like the real progressive, liberal base of the Democratic Party.
They are attracted to him, see him as different than the Democratic Leadership Council types, is that it?
Right, I mean, because he doesn't come from the establishment, and that's the difference between Hillary Clinton and him, and I think that's what he's going to be playing up over the course of the next year and a half, as he takes her on.
But yeah, he's seen as representing much of the grassroots Democratic Party, much like Howard Dean did in 2004, galvanizing people that feel like they were left out of the Democratic process or Democratic Party.
And he's really going after those voters, and I think we'll see a big push online to get more grassroots involved in his campaign and using a lot of those traditional routes.
However, I mean, that's just what we think he represents.
If you go down the line, I mean, he represents every major issue and all the big corporations, just like Hillary.
Now, some people that I've talked to say that he used to be okay.
He used to take some pretty decent policy positions sometimes, particularly on Middle East issues, but that's a quality of his that's wearing off.
Well, I think that, yeah, right, I mean, he used to stand up to a lot of these issues, and he was very pro-Palestinian when he was a representative in Illinois.
But that's since changed, and I think what's changed is he realizes he can't get to the top of the Democratic Party without selling out to the Israeli lobby and, in fact, AIPAC.
And he may, you know, deep down realize and side with the right cause, and I think he's smart enough to, but I don't think that he would ever do it for the political ramifications, even if it is the right thing to do.
And so you said the word AIPAC, and it was in a context other than you're on your way to the big meeting, so I got to conclude that you're an anti-Semite, is that it?
Yeah, I guess I'm a self-hating Jew, right?
No, you know, it's interesting that we can criticize, if we criticize Israel, somehow we're seen as an anti-Semite.
Those policies of a nation-state are much different than ideals of Jewish people at large.
And I'm actually not Jewish, but it was funny, I actually was having a beer last night with a friend who is Jewish and is definitely an anti-Zionist, and we were talking about this, and I was wondering to myself if I really hated Jews, how could I be having a beer with them?
Right, well, and you know, this is kind of silly, but I'm a little bit Jewish, like technically Hitler would have killed me, I guess, so I feel like I have a little bit of a free pass, I'm allowed to have Joshua Frank on to talk about the Israel lobby and the Democratic party, whereas I think a lot of non-Jews in America feel like it's a topic that they're not allowed to touch, and I don't think that's fair, I'm not trying to reinforce that.
That's exactly what they want, they don't want to have a rational debate about a serious issue that reflects not only our domestic policy, but our international policy.
They'd rather chop it off the knees and claim someone's an anti-Semite for criticizing Israel, instead of really truly debating the issue.
And I think people, when you talk to them one-on-one, Americans, they realize, they don't want to be sending billions of dollars to Israel, and they realize that the occupation of Palestine reflects all of our foreign policy and affects the way we are viewed internationally as well.
Sure, and you know, it's funny, just reading the news in the last few weeks, of all ethnic groups in America, Jews are most opposed to the Bush administration's foreign policy.
And even in Israel, majorities are opposed to war with Iran, for example.
Right, and of course, in the United States too, the general public doesn't agree with the Bush administration, but again, these are government policies, these are at the leadership level, and in Israel, the leadership is aligned with the U.S., and the public isn't.
Right.
Okay, so now that we have that out of the way, and the audience knows that you're not wearing a white hood on the other end of the line here, where we got sidetracked onto that was that Barack Obama used to believe in some sort of fairness toward the Palestinians, that he had some concept of fairness in how the Palestinians ought to be treated, and that now he's backed down from that stance quite a bit, is that right?
That's right, and even two weeks ago, he accidentally slipped up when he was campaigning in Iowa, and admitted that Palestinians are more harshly affected by the situation than Israelis, and even said that in order for the peace process to move forward, Israel will have to make major concessions.
And he took a lot of heat for that from the pro-Israel lobby.
A day later, he's in Washington at an AIPAC conference, and really trying to make up for that mistake, that he's obviously deemed a mistake because of the consequences of losing that support.
And so it's interesting that he's playing those cards for the support, not for, you know, he's playing politics, he's not doing anything other than that.
Right, and on the Iran issue?
On the Iran issue, and again, I think it's much to do with his influence from the lobby, and from maybe perhaps his own hawkish views on the situation, and he's in the past said he supports surgical strikes.
He has sided with the Bush administration, sort of preemptive Iran.
Well, he believes that Iran is the puppet behind the insurgency or the resistance in Iraq, which is complete baloney, which we can talk about later.
And so he's propping up a lot of the same propaganda.
He says he didn't support the invasion.
Well, he wasn't in the Senate to support the invasion four years ago.
So it's interesting to see how he plays these cards and what the fallout will be.
And you're saying he's picked up on the Bush administration accusations that Iran is supplying the Sunni insurgency against the Americans.
Right.
And here we are, you know, the Shia in Iraq make up 60% of the population.
And they now obviously dominate the government because they have the support from the population at large.
It's just interesting to see how Barack is playing this card to see where he wants to go with it.
In the end, it's really just him trying to out-hawk Hillary Clinton, who's going to take a harder stance on Iraq and Iran.
And now there's this phrase that apparently all the major Democratic candidates have adopted as their own comes straight out of the mouth of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and that is that all options must remain on the table for dealing with Iran, preventing them from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
And here we have Hillary just yesterday, and I think Barack will come out and say the same thing, that we need to keep troops in Iraq as long as it takes.
Even a small cadre of troops, even if we bring them home in 2008, whatever that means, or redeploy them to other regions in the Middle East, we'll still have a central team of troops in Iraq, which means again that what we are going to say in our presence will be very much a part of the future of Iraq.
And then Hillary is back to this.
She came out yesterday and said it, and I think we'll see Barack say similar things down the campaign trail.
Yeah, now let's do Hillary in a minute, but I wanted to point out your most recent article on antiwar.com about Barack Obama.
You say in there, which seems the obvious truth to me and something that this guy apparently can't get through his head, or at least is willing to keep silent about while he's playing politics, and that is that the current Israeli slash U.S. policy in the Middle East is a disaster for Israel by any objective standard, that all this war-making only makes matters worse for the people in that land, not better.
No, it's absolutely true, and I think that's why we see the population of Israel realizing this, that the more warfare and the more occupations and the more bloodshed within the region is only going to damage them.
And of course the leadership sees it differently than Israel.
They want to see a tougher stance than Iran.
They're afraid of their nuclear arsenal.
Forget the fact that in the region the biggest nuclear arsenal is Israel, but there's a lot of this contradiction within their context of warfare.
And it's interesting, too, that we see such a difference between the opinions of the people and the relationship with government, and I think that we see it here in the United States, and it's present in the so-called democracies in the Middle East.
Now, what do you think is the cause for that disconnect?
Well, I think the cause for the disconnect is simply these are not democracies, and I think that once people are in power in these leadership positions, they are tied to interests that aren't necessarily the interests of the people.
I mean, what does President Bush represent?
We obviously know he represents big business, big oil, and he's definitely profited.
His family has profited.
Cheney with Halliburton and the reconstruction projects in Iraq.
There's lots of reasons, and of course then there are some of those ideological reasons behind that, the neoconservative agenda as well.
So there's a lot going on in the context of why our leadership is so corrupt, and I think the same sort of standards should hold true for leaders in other countries as well.
Now, Hillary Clinton, you brought her up in how she says the troops are going to have to stay.
I thought it was funny.
She was saying only two weeks ago, I think three weeks ago, that it would be the height of irresponsibility for George Bush to leave this mess for her to deal with.
It ought to be all cleaned up by the time she becomes president, but now she's saying troops are going to have to stay over the long term?
Right.
Well, it's reflective of what the Democratic Party really represents, or rather what they don't represent.
We know that they were elected this last round of elections with the mounting antiwar sentiment that they were supposed to do something about the situation, and now they've put up the smoke screen that they are doing something about it right now.
They've talked about it.
There's going to be a vote this week about bringing home the troops and cutting off some funding for the war, and of course it's going to stop.
Either the president is going to veto it or there's going to be a filibuster.
Well, if the Democrats really wanted to end the war right now, they could.
It would only take one senator to do so.
One senator could filibuster the appropriations bill, and they would take 60 votes on the other side to break the filibuster.
But as we know, we have the majority in the Senate are Democrats, so if 42 abstained from voting, we could end this war.
We could end the funding.
President Bush would have to come back with a compromise.
But the Democrats aren't going to do that, even though they have the power to do it.
In fact, the Republicans are more apt to use the filibuster at this point than the Democrats, which should say something.
Yeah, it wouldn't even, as you say, necessarily require the Democrats.
Just one, for one senator.
Yeah, just one Democrat, right.
And supposedly the majority of Democrats, including a couple Republican senators, oppose this war.
So if that's really the case, they could do something about it.
And it's not an irrational plan.
It's strategic, and it definitely could be done.
In fact, Senator Kerry, before he was senator back in the early 70s, he had a similar tactic to be used in the Vietnam War.
But now, of course, he's backed off any of that sort of anti-war sentiment.
Yeah, now that he could do it himself, not such a good idea after all.
He's lost his idealistic fervor of his youth.
Now, I know you've written quite a bit about Hillary and the Israel lobby, but everybody knows she's a fascist.
Seems like she'd be natural enemies of the Israel lobby.
Well, you might think that, but of any Democrat, she's actually, aside from Joe Lieberman, who may not even be a Democrat, she has the biggest financial support of the lobby.
And it's interesting to see what cards she plays in trying to garner more support.
And I think that's what Barack, if he was going to run an intelligent campaign, he might even want to think about challenging Hillary's stance on Israel and Palestine, because she really already has their support in the bag.
But again, I don't think that Barack is ideologically opposed to the policies of Israel.
Yeah, he's willing to come out for the Palestinians when it suits his audience, and willing to come out against him when it suits his audience, huh?
Right, and of course, when his audience is fattening his pockets more than the opposition, we know what side he's going to fall down on.
Yeah, well, I'll tell you, I live in Austin, Texas, and I'm already seeing the Obama Times stickers as everybody jumps on the bandwagon here.
And I guess all the details can all just go to hell.
We like this guy, which is basically how we got George Bush, right?
Sure, and I think that's, again, why we'll have someone similar to Bush, whether it's a Democrat or a Republican.
And I'm not sure that Barack is going to go all the way.
I think he's young.
I think that, well, maybe this didn't hold true for Bush, but I think that his fellow Democrats are going to play him up for not having enough experience on foreign policy issues, especially at a time of war.
So it'll be interesting to see those internal politics that play out.
But I really think that these elections, for me, are just nothing more than entertainment.
In the end, they don't really affect the direction of this country and the direction of the world economy.
They're really just entertainment value in the end, because those kind of real true policies aren't going to change radically either way.
Yeah, you know, it used to be always my complaint that both parties were the captives of the American establishment, but now it seems like both parties are captives of a foreign power.
Well, I wouldn't go as far as to say that they're captives of just one foreign power.
There's lots of influences, but they definitely are in line with exactly the same positions on the major issues of our times.
And that should be a very scary precedent that I think, looking down the road 50, 100 years from now, what kind of effects that could have.
And it's a scary situation, and I'm reluctant to think that any party or any one person within those parties can make a difference.
Now, let me ask you a little bit about the history of Hillary on this.
I remember back in the 90s, she got a lot of heat for suggesting that there ought to be a Palestinian state.
Well, in her recent speech in AIPAC, she did not mention a Palestinian state or a two-state solution.
Barack Obama did, so we can give him credit for that.
He did hear some boos when he said that.
But I think the reality also right now is, aside from what our elected officials worldwide feel about this issue, the general sentiment among the population, as you said, in Israel, in here, and obviously in the greater Middle East and much of Europe, is opposed to a lopsided Israel foreign policy that the United States is supporting.
And I think that that trend is such that AIPAC and a lot of pro-Israel and other Zionists are, they have their backs against the wall on this issue, and they are a minority right now.
So I think that a two-state solution, I would like to see a one-state solution, but if a two-state solution is what comes out of any sort of peace negotiations, I think that the sentiment behind them and the support behind that kind of thing is very, very large, and it far outnumbers representatives and supporters of AIPAC.
Right.
We have to really consider, I think, how America looks to the rest of the world when at least the front-runner at this point, as far as I can tell, money-wise and so forth, Hillary Clinton, is taking vacations to Israel where she goes to do photo opportunities at the apartheid wall and talk about how it's all the terrorists' fault that there is one.
Yeah.
And then she doesn't distinguish between Palestinians and everyone's a terrorist if you're a Palestinian.
And of course, that's aside from this silly term terrorist.
I mean, obviously, we know who the biggest terrorist in the world is right now, and he's sitting in the White House.
But it's an interesting sort of game that Hillary is playing, and I think that she doesn't see another option at this point.
And she may truly, truly believe in the positions that she's propping up, which are very much in line with the neoconservative agenda, which is interesting that so many Democrats who are so quick to criticize the neocons don't see the same tendencies in their candidates.
But again, I think that the population at large is starting to see those tendencies, the parties that let's aren't.
Now, there's, I guess, just one more major Democratic Party candidate running for president.
And that's the Brett girl, John Edwards.
And best I can tell, he's the worst of all of them.
Well, and on this issue, he's just as bad in it.
And he was recently down in Israel saying the same sorts of ridiculous assertions that Israel is the ones that have their backs up against the wall.
We already well, obviously, we know it's an asymmetrical relationship who's propped up by the biggest military power in the world who has more UN Security Council resolutions waged against them.
It's not Palestine, it's Israel.
And it's just astounding that nobody from either party, any major candidates from either party are taking on this issue because it obviously affects so much of our interest in the Middle East and obviously the war in Iraq as well.
And again, you know, this is the other problem here is, you know, it's not like we're talking about, you know, England is being bombed by the Nazis and it's in question as to whether it's really happening or not.
You know, we're talking about mythical threats that, you know, for example, there's no evidence whatsoever that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.
It's just a fantasy.
I mean, what we're talking about is preempting lies here.
Well, and the fact that they, we haven't realized or the greater public hasn't realized this after, you know, what happened four years ago and the lies that the Bush administration and their democratic allies dating back to the Clinton administration, they were propping up the same propaganda that there were weapons of mass destruction and there were ties to Al Qaeda and the rest of the baloney.
The fact that they're using the same sorts of tactics today to push forward this invasion of Iran idea is preposterous.
I can't believe more people aren't seeing through this.
Yeah, and I think the rhetoric is kind of, it's heated, but it's quiet in a sense.
And the mass population of the country, I don't think, is aware that we're right now in the middle of a march up to another war.
Well, and I think that's probably part of the policy of the Bush administration and their democratic allies, that they don't, they realize that there is such an anti-war sentiment growing that they don't want to make this a public issue.
I think they'll kind of do it behind our backs.
And it's not going to be the same sort of invasion of Iraq.
I think we'll see, I think they've told us what they're going to do, which is surgical strikes, you know, small scale invasions here and there to try to topple the regime, if indeed that happens.
I tend to think that it's not going to happen during the Bush administration.
I think that it's more likely to happen to a democratic administration simply because the Bush administration already is fighting to gain popularity.
And I think that the Republican Party domestically would take a huge hit if there were any sort of invasion of Iran.
And that really ought to be a shock, I guess, to people driving by to kind of snap out of it that, wait, you're saying, Mr.
Expert on the Democratic Party and so forth, that you think it's more likely that the Democrats will bomb Iran than George Bush?
I mean, people like to believe that there's this there's this Cheney cabal that is doing all this stuff and that if the Democrats had the power, it would be completely different.
But you're saying now you think that Hillary or Barack would be more likely to bomb Iran than George Bush?
Sure.
I mean, and it's because they wouldn't have the same sorts of pressure on them not to do so like the Bush administration does right now.
The same people you're talking about that would question my rationale for that, I think are sort of part of the problem, because when we have a democratic administration in power, there's this belief that they aren't going to be as egregious militarily or whatever.
And hence, there's not as much pressure put on them to not do so.
Right.
And then the opposition in Congress is calling them wimp all day.
Right.
Right.
So they have to prop up their military prowess and show their guns.
Which is pretty it's a pretty thick display.
Well, now, in the 1990s, in the 1990s, a lot of the right, they didn't just hate Bill and Hillary.
They really started hating the government in a lot of ways.
And I really appreciated that about them.
And I thought that a pretty good percentage of them realized that George Bush was just the son of George Bush and that he wasn't, you know, any kind of you know, he was a representative of some tiny elite that doesn't have anything to do with the rest of us.
And that they would continue to hold that same kind of attitude and skepticism toward the Bush crew that they did against the Bill Clinton crew.
And boy, was I sorely disappointed as they all joined the cult of Bush.
And, you know, only within the last couple of years have they finally dropped out.
I wonder if you think that, quote unquote, the left, the mass of the progressive leftist movement in America, when if the Democrats take the White House in 2008, are we going to see all these bloggers and all these people who've been fighting so hard against the war party all this time?
Are they going to all just become defenders of the state?
Sure.
And that's the common trend.
And it's interesting, I think, even to look back at the last election and see what happened, that everyone that considered themselves anti-war, whether it was progressive or left, whatever you wanted, however you wanted to define that, they backed a pro-war candidate simply to expedite the process of getting Bush out of office.
And it completely backfired.
I think any time any group ideologically puts their values aside to support someone, especially a candidate, that doesn't represent their issues, they're going to lose in the end.
And I definitely think that that's a situation that's going to come up again in 2008.
And if they happen to pull it off and win, I don't see that these people holding a Democratic administration's feet to the fire the same way that they've tried to hold the Bush administration's feet to the fire.
And that's a very problematic thing for any sort of movement.
And again, I think it would backfire tremendously.
Well, what about the rest of us?
What about the libertarians who never went along with either of these administrations?
What about the right-wingers, the paleoconservatives who never liked Bush any more than they like Clinton and who have seen through the lies all this time?
And the good progressive, liberal, Democratic, whatever you call them, who stay on the side of reason against the war when the Democrats take power in 2009.
Is there any chance that you can see for forging a realignment in this country, an alliance between libertarians, paleoconservatives, and real anti-war liberals to somehow break this duopoly control on our political system?
I'd really like to think so.
I'd like to think that people would align themselves against the most important issues of our time, which I think is the policies, the foreign policy of the United States.
Until we can grapple with the fact that we are an imperialist country, we're never going to be able to really debate the differences between socialism and free-market capitalism and those sorts of things, which are very important discussions that I wish we were at a state where we could actually have an honest debate about those.
But right now, we are in a warfare state, and we need to challenge that, and people need to come together that have different ideas around other issues.
Because this is, to me personally, I believe, the central issue of our time, and in order to really challenge that, we need to break these sort of political ideologies down and align ourselves.
And I think our conversation today is an example of doing so, because I'm much more of a socialist than a libertarian, but this is an issue that I think is of greater importance at this time.
You know, I look at the libertarian party, and people want to say, well, you know, let's just agree about social security or whatever, and it's perfectly okay to disagree about the war, which to me is completely backwards.
Right.
What's a bigger issue at this time?
Is it the war, or is it social security?
And I think the Democratic and Republican parties would want us to think it's social security, because it's an easy diversion from the real things that are at stake here.
Yep.
All right, well, I recommend everybody check out dissidentvoice.org and brickburner.blogs.com for Joshua Frank, he also writes for antiwar.com.
Thanks so much for your time today, Joshua.
Thanks for having me.