Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and more compelling coverage of some anonymous sexual harassment accusation up next.
No, I'm just kidding.
I would never waste your time on such nonsense in this show.
It's M.J. Rosenberg from the Media Matters Action Network.
Hey, Scott.
Yeah, yeah, your phone sounds terrible.
What's the matter over there?
Does it really?
Oh, it sounds okay now.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, I just moved the wire.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, maybe a train was driving by in the background or something.
Yeah, okay.
No, no, okay.
You sound fine now.
It's M.J. Rosenberg from the Media Matters Action Network and Foreign Policy Matters, which is part of Media Matters.
And the piece is also reprinted at Al Jazeera.
We're linking to it today on AntiWar.com.
Attack Iran and AIPAC's infamous chutzpah.
Lobbying for a U.S. war with Iran, AIPAC is pushing a bill that would prohibit diplomacy between the two nations.
What an incredible set of assertions in your headline right there.
Please do tell.
Well, it's pretty amazing.
You know, AIPAC is right now really into beating the war drums for a war with Iran.
They don't say that it's war they want.
They say what they want are more and more sanctions, what they call crippling sanctions.
In fact, we already have crippling sanctions on Iran, but they want more.
So they have gotten their cutouts in Congress to put through a bill.
It's already passed the House Foreign Affairs Committee that bans any contact between any official of the United States and any Iranian official, flat out.
It bans any talking or negotiating or diplomacy whatsoever.
It has an exemption, kind of a waiver provision, which says unless the president certifies to all the relevant committees, which is the two House authorizing committees and appropriations committees and same in the Senate, all these committees, eight different committees certify that not having this contact would be absolutely deleterious to the security of the United States.
It's insane.
It basically is saying that no contacts of any kind, that means no informal contacts, no talking, no trying to prevent a war, no kind of hotline kind of thing like, oh my God, what's going on?
Did you just attack our forces?
None of those contacts would be allowed unless the president certified to Congress and eight congressional committees agreed that the diplomats could talk.
It's unprecedented.
It's never happened in any other situation in the world.
Wow.
Yeah, that is absolutely crazy.
I read that headline and I thought, now, wait a minute.
What exactly does it say?
And then here it is.
But now, are you sure?
Because I get confused with this language.
You know, maybe you're better at this kind of thing than me.
You're certain that this waiver authority, it must be signed off on by the committees.
Not just he has to tell them, hey, I've decided that this is an unusual and extraordinary threat, but they have to agree with him?
They have to agree with him.
These are, of course, eight Republican-controlled committees.
And actually, when it comes to this issue, it doesn't matter if they're Republicans or Democrats, they're all the same.
You know what?
Hold it right there, because I want to read paragraph four of this thing to you real quick and then make you prove it.
Naturally, the United States Congress, which gets its marching orders on Middle East policy from the lobby, which in turn gets its marching orders from Benjamin Netanyahu, is rushing to do what it is told.
If only Congress addresses joblessness at home with the same alacrity.
So prove to me, please, sir, that Congress gets its marching orders from the lobby and that the lobby gets their marching orders from Benjamin Netanyahu, because I tend to agree with that, but I think people would like to have the dots connected and the lines drawn clear if they can.
Well, I know this in two different ways.
One, I worked at AIPAC for four years back in the 1980s.
It was before I kind of saw the light on this Middle East issue.
And for anyone who questions it or would say I'm just trying to get back at an old employer, I left there on great terms and went on to a really good job afterward.
Years later, I broke with their point of view.
But I know how they operate, because from there I went to Capitol Hill and worked for three members of the House and one United States Senator, Carl Levin, and saw exactly how they operate in terms of they write the legislation, they provide it to the members of Congress, they write the amendments.
They being the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee?
Exactly.
Just that one organization.
Sorry to interrupt.
I just wanted to make that clear for listeners.
Yeah, it's not like some amorphous thing, like the pro-Israel lobby, like it's lots of different organizations.
It's one organization.
For instance, I worked for the House Appropriations Committee, which provides the aid package of $3.5 billion a year for Israel.
And the way it works is each member of the Appropriations Committee gets to send in a wish list of things they want appropriated by the committee.
Because if you're on that elite committee, you get to choose where the money gets spent.
Well, in every other instance, the member of Congress sits down with their staff and comes up, well, I want this bridge for the district back in Kentucky, or I want this food program, or I want this aid to Africa, or I want this whatever.
In this case, it's written by AIPAC and provided to us.
I mean, I worked there.
It was still in the 90s.
We'd get it in the form of a disk, and then we would just send it to the committee.
It would be AIPAC's language.
All these bills, these sanctions bills on Iran, are written by AIPAC.
I've seen them.
Have you ever seen someone else write them?
No, nobody else writes them.
Actually, there might be some kind of obscure Republican conservative wacko members of Congress that AIPAC doesn't pay attention to, and who doesn't really know how the game is played, so maybe sometimes they write their own stuff.
But in that case, it would probably be just worse, right?
It would be worse, but it wouldn't matter.
AIPAC only plays their game with the congressional leadership.
In the case of these bills, in this particular bill, this Iran sanctions bill, the chairman of the committee is Eliana Ros-Littman, a Republican from Florida, and Howard Berman, a liberal Democrat from California, and they are in total agreement on all issues relating to Israel and the Middle East.
They are total AIPACers.
When the House changes leadership from Democrats to Republicans or Republicans to Democrats, it makes no difference.
They do it together.
You've made a great circumstantial case there, it sounds like to me, but do you know for certain that this particular bill was written by AIPAC?
Yeah, but I don't have it in writing.
I talked to one of the lobbyists who worked on the other side of it, trying to get better language, and I just said, point blank, this isn't AIPAC, Jeff.
He said, oh yeah, absolutely.
In fact, this person, she herself, a lobbyist for the peace side, was dealing with AIPAC and trying to get better language.
She wasn't dealing with the congressional office.
She was dealing with AIPAC.
But it is all circumstantial.
I mean, they're not crazy enough.
No, I don't think that's so circumstantial.
That's one credible source, even if unnamed.
Right.
I don't know if we could write a whole article based on just that, but still, it sounds right to me.
Well, you know, they are very quick to denounce accusations if they're false.
And I, you know, between my columns get plenty of play.
They have never, ever denied these charges that I make, ever.
I mean, I'm not the only one.
They have people much bigger than me make them all the time.
And they try to deny some, just not these accusations.
Oh, yeah, not these.
Because they can't.
There's no way.
When it comes to this Iran sanctions stuff, this is their baby.
This business right now of pushing for war with Iran, this is, AIPAC is the official lobby that's kind of doing it.
And then all around them are all these neocon writers and all these various people in the blogosphere, and, you know, Jeffrey Goldberg and Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post, the commentary crowd, National Review Online.
They're not the lobby, though.
They just write the stuff.
They just write their own stuff.
But there it is.
They are gunning up now to get, you know, to, they want a war.
All right.
Well, music's playing, so we're going to have to take this break, unfortunately.
When we get back, I want to ask a couple specific questions about the direct connections to Benjamin Netanyahu and AIPAC so that, you know, we get this chain of events in correct order here and established fully.
It's MJ Rosenberg.
The article is Attack Iran and AIPAC's Infamous Chutzpah.
It's at Media Matters in Al Jazeera.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Ward, radio.
I'm Scott Ward.
And, MJ, your phone sounds terrible again.
Really?
Yeah, it's background noise, I think.
No, they're, I mean, what, do you hear voices or what?
Yeah.
Oh, hey, guys, can you be quiet?
Okay, now I have to say that's a whole world there.
That's cool.
That's good.
You have extraordinary talent at that, apparently.
Oh, yeah, I'm very authoritative.
All right.
All right, yeah, no problem.
Okay, so we're talking with MJ Rosenberg.
He used to work for AIPAC a long time ago.
Now he writes for Media Matters, and they're reprinting this one at Al Jazeera.
Attack Iran and AIPAC's Infamous Chutzpah.
And I was hoping that you could, before we get back to the substance of these sanctions and this insane ban on negotiations, I was hoping you could connect those dots back from this legislation through AIPAC back to the Likud Party and Benjamin Netanyahu's office in Tel Aviv.
Well, first of all, I wanted to get back to one thing on the legislation itself.
I mentioned in the article how unprecedented this is, and I talk about the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Suppose the United States had legislation, had a law back in 1962 that said that before any diplomat or any representative of the United States talked to the Soviet Union, it would have to be approved by eight committees of Congress.
The way the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved is that the president of the United States' brother, Bobby Kennedy, went and met with the Soviets.
He met with their representatives in Washington, found out what the contours of a deal would be.
Kennedy then presented it to his brother.
Then it was discussed within the cabinet and all that.
Then Kennedy went back and forth with Khrushchev on the hotline or whatever it was, and the world was saved.
And nobody was consulted.
It was secret diplomacy.
We didn't find out about it for 20 years.
The fact of the matter is, that's the way you prevent war.
So essentially what this legislation does, if it does become law, which I doubt it will, but if it should become law, it would mean there would be no way to solve a war crisis with the Iranians.
No way to talk.
It would be against the law.
On what basis do you doubt that it will pass?
Well, because it just seems so patently absurd.
I don't know, though.
I tend to have more faith in the Senate than in the House.
This so far has only passed the House committee.
The Senate tends to be a lot more reasonable also.
It's controlled by Democrats, though as I said, usually on this issue it doesn't matter.
I don't know, maybe it's a matter of faith.
Maybe the fact that it's so patently unconstitutional.
I mean, obviously the President has a foreign policy role.
There are certain things he's allowed to do, like the diplomats work for him.
And Congress can't jump in and say, your diplomats can't do diplomacy.
I mean, but then again, shouldn't their legislative councils have known that when they put the bill in?
So who knows?
We live in crazy times, but right now what the Netanyahu government is doing is trying to create war hysteria about Iran by saying that Iran is on the brink of getting a nuclear weapon or many nuclear weapons, something that the Israeli government has been saying now for five or six years.
This particular bill, this AIPAC push, is totally in sync with what Netanyahu is saying.
I mean, the timing is exactly the same.
I mean, the way it works, remember when Obama gave a speech back in the spring that Netanyahu didn't like?
He didn't like it because Obama spoke about going back to the 1967 lines.
So what's the very next thing that happens?
Eric Cantor and the Republicans invite Netanyahu to come and do a joint session, address a joint session of the United States Congress, where the entire Congress of the United States gives him 27 standing ovations to let Obama know, you're not in charge here, baby.
And Obama answered back, point taken, thank you.
Exactly, exactly.
So I mean, as far as AIPAC getting its orders from the Israelis, in all the time I first worked at AIPAC, like right out of college, and then I worked there again, and I have a lot of experience there, the only time that they didn't support what an Israeli prime minister did was they didn't support Yitzhak Rabin and the peace initiative.
Yitzhak Rabin, when he became prime minister in 1992, when he knew that he wanted to pursue peace with the Palestinians, met with AIPAC and told them to butt out of Israel's business.
He was going to work with the first George Bush administration to get a peace deal.
So the only time that they didn't agree with the Israelis was when the Israelis were pushing peace.
You know what?
I don't know if you remember the title offhand, but I'd like to recommend to people, they read your great article where you cataloged, I don't know, 40 or 50 years worth the peace side losing the argument, the war party getting what they wanted, and everything working out worse for everyone.
For everybody, absolutely.
And I think that's the, you know, the people who are always arguing with me and sending me hate emails and all that, they say, oh, I don't care about Israel, I want Israel to disappear.
Not at all, I care about Israel intensely.
The fact of the matter is, these policies of Netanyahu, of AIPAC, of these people in Congress who follow AIPAC, unless they're checked, they're going to lead to Israel going down the tube.
They're the ones who are anti-Israel.
These policies, I outlined one policy after another, where in the end, the AIPAC side is proven wrong, Israelis and Palestinians pay with their lives, but nobody says they're sorry, they just go on to the next stupid, you know, stupid policy and catastrophe.
But this thing with Iran, though, this isn't just about Israel.
If Israel attacks Iran, or, and I have to say here, it doesn't matter whether it's Israel attacking Iran or the United States attacking Iran, from the point of view of the Muslim world, it's the same thing.
I mean, they see Israel...
It's their American F-16s, there's no disguise in that.
Exactly.
So American interests, to put it mildly, I mean, we would be engulfed in the worst Middle East war that we've ever had.
It would make Iraq look like nothing.
You know, this goes to the narrative of the entire debate here, too, which, it's funny, you know, the exception that proves the rule kind of phrase, as irrational as that sounds, I've noticed it really sticks out.
When they ask Ron Paul about Iran, he's taken to turning the question around and saying, listen, I mean, your implication is that we ought to start another war over there, and I'm telling you, I'm the one with the reasonable, calm position here, and you guys are the ones who have the burden on you to say that this is really necessary to do something like this, and when he says that, it just, you know, it's a giant wow to me, just how completely pervasive the, yes, if your boys have to die in this war for Netanyahu, that's exactly what they're going to do, because that's what America does.
We're going to war with Iran to prevent them from making nuclear weapons.
If it doesn't happen this week, it'll happen next year, but it's going to happen.
Everybody just get used to the idea.
We all agree that sooner or later, it must be done.
And, you know, it really well said, and you can add to that, I think that's the reason, it is his position on that issue is the reason why Ron Paul doesn't get any coverage.
Why is it that, you know, I mean, I'm certainly not a Ron Paul fan, I mean, I'm a left-wing progressive, but the fact of the matter is, if you notice in these debates, when he makes his point on Iran and on more Middle East, the idea of more Middle East wars, they sort of like treat him like he's crazy, like there's something wrong with him.
Yeah, he's just so far outside the consensus, it's not even worth listening to.
Exactly, and when he, so he won a straw, I forget where it was, he won a straw, Paul, a straw, Paul, this weekend, that doesn't get any coverage.
But Herman Cain, this guy who is illiterate on foreign policy, probably on domestic policy as well, he gets coverage, because he stays within the consensus.
Truly, in my opinion, this is the only issue where if you stick your neck out on it, your neck's going to get chopped off.
It's really, it's just crazy.
And I don't really, you know, obviously it's more than, you know, it's more than just, you know, AIPAC, it's also there are all kinds of, you know, other lobbies involved, you know, weapons manufacturers, everything else, they're all, you know, it's the same, the people who have benefited from war since time immemorial.
But it's just crazy.
And you just watch the newspapers and no one questions anything.
No one says the most obvious thing.
If Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon, which, of course, everybody else in their region has, and Israel has 200 of them, isn't that all the more reason we should talk to them?
Right.
I mean, so they could develop a nuclear weapon, but we're not going to even talk to them.
In fact, that was the headline this weekend was Ron Paul told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday morning that the best way to handle a potential Iranian nuclear bomb would be to befriend them.
Exactly.
And the way the headline reads is, it's, I guess, supposed to just be self-mocking, that this is madness to think that an American presidential candidate would say, well, I'll just take away their incentive to make a bomb by telling them everything's fine.
Exactly.
You know, he's the one who's a nut, and the people who want a war, which would probably take nukes to win, against them, those people are perfectly rational, as long as they're, you know, between the Lindsey Graham and Jay Rockefeller position on the issue, I guess.
Exactly.
I mean, it's just nuts.
It's like we've learned, we learned nothing from the 20th century, you know, now it's the 21st century, and, you know, we know all our history, and we know how many stupid wars we've had that we shouldn't have had, starting with World War I, at least, in the 20th century, but we still keep going down the same path.
Well, why are the, you know, we dealt with the Soviet Union, we dealt with them, Roosevelt sat down with Stalin, how many times during World War II, nobody in the world was ever, with the exception of Hitler, who was worse than Stalin, but we talked to them, we negotiated with them, during all, you know, the Cold War didn't just end because the United States had more weapons.
The weapons weren't used because of all the talking and negotiating and dealing under President Trump, to Ronald Reagan.
Right.
And really it was the mutual trust between Reagan and Gorbachev that led to Gorbachev loosening up the perestroika and all that enough that then it spun out of control and he couldn't even hold the Soviet state up at all.
I know.
You know, I think in his own simple way, Ronald Reagan would say, well, why can't I talk to him?
You know, Ronald Reagan, he thought it was, he thought he was the most persuasive man in the world, and he may well have been.
He said, I can talk to him.
Sure.
What is this business you can't talk?
And the Israelis, lecturers, are not negotiating when they negotiated with Hamas to get the soldier, Gilad Shalit, out of prison.
But of course, you know, if anyone's imagination was to kick in at all here, I mean, hell, they did the war games at Brookings and everything.
If there's a war with Iran, then what?
They're going to fight back.
They have all kinds of asymmetrical ways of fighting back.
Israel's going to have to start there version of the war up on their border, probably with Syria, certainly in Gaza and southern Lebanon against Hamas and Hezbollah at the same time.
And at the end of the thing, who knows exactly how it's going to be, but it'll certainly be a much more hostile region for Israel all the way around.
Yeah, and they say that even with a, quote, successful Israeli attack, it delays them getting a bomb for three years.
Right, yeah.
All it's going to do, because no one can invade and occupy the place.
Exactly.
And so all it does is it drives them, finally, like Bolton always wanted, out of the NPT, out of the safeguards agreement, and then drive them to begin making nukes.
I guess then you have an excuse to really invade the place with a World War II sized army or something.
I don't know what they're thinking.
Yeah, exactly.
That's crazy.
I'm sorry, we're way over time and I've got to cut you off, but thank you so much for your time on the show today, MJ.
Anytime, it was great.
Okay, bye-bye.
MJ Rosenberg, Al Jazeera.net, and Media Matters, the latest piece, and I'm sorry we didn't stick on this topic, that they're actually trying to ban any negotiations with Iran.
The Congress is trying to make it a crime for the President to negotiate with Iran.
Attack Iran, and AIPAC's infamous chutzpah, is at Media Matters and Al Jazeera.net right now.
