09/03/09 – Mark Ames – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Our next guest on the show today is Mark Ames from Exiled Online.
It's ExiledOnline.com and he's got a new article here at Alternet that says Obama is leading the U.S. into a hellish quagmire.
Obviously a reference to the doubling down in Afghanistan.
Welcome back to the show, Mark.
How are you doing?
Thanks for having me on.
I'm doing all right.
So, you point out here what nobody else has said, and of course I'm too lazy and stupid, I guess, to have done the research myself, but you went and did the comparison and contrast and say that America now has more soldiers in Afghanistan than the USSR in the height of their war against the Afghans in the 1980s.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, I was pretty shocked too.
I mean, the war hasn't really been on the headlines and there are so many horrible things going on, you know, inside this country already that it's kind of hard to keep track of all these things.
But I saw this article that, you know, there's a report that came out totaling up the number of contractors plus military personnel.
As you know, Obama implemented kind of a surge earlier this year, so he's been doubling down with the amount of troops, but we don't really know.
We don't, for some reason, add in the number of contractors to the troop total, so it always seems a lot less than what's really going on.
And I'll be honest, I mean, this is something that, I was listening to your last show with Jeremy Scahill, it was a great interview, and I love everything Jeremy writes, and this is something he talked about as well, and it's really quite true.
And so when I looked at those numbers, I realized, because I spent a lot of time out in Russia, my God, we've now surpassed, you know, the Soviet troop totals at the height of their invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
We're more invested than they are.
We're supposed to be, you know, a thousand years ahead of them technologically and militarily, and yet we've got more boots on the ground than they had.
And I don't know how that war ended, the Soviet Union lost and the empire collapsed.
Well, and as you say in your article, the Russians must be loving this.
They must be sitting back just laughing, watching America bog down in their very same sand trap there.
Yeah, and you do see some, you see a lot of gloating, and, you know, and that's because it's sort of what we've been doing with each other, it's been a kind of Tom and Jerry show.
I mean, the Russians, you know, we always sort of blame the Russians for the defeat in Vietnam, for arming North Vietnam and Viet Cong.
And so we got them back by arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the 1980s and brought them down, and we were gloating over that, and now they're watching us go down.
And, you know, I've even, I've heard from some journalists who work out there and in Russia, I mean, there is speculation that the Russians are playing a bit of a double game there, that they don't necessarily want to see us win.
They don't want to see the Taliban come back, but they don't necessarily want to see us triumphant, because as we proved, you know, in the early Bush years, when we come into a place supposedly to fight terror, what we really want to do is stay, set up bases, and take all the resources for ourselves.
And moreover, you know, there's a lot of evidence that America has been playing some pretty, I don't know, double, underhanded, double-dealing games in the Caucasus region within Russia, in Chechnya, and perhaps beyond Chechnya as well, in terms of, you know, there's a lot of evidence and speculation that the Americans have sort of, they've been helping destabilize the Caucasus to keep Russia kind of pinned down, while America goes and takes all the resources around Central Asia.
So, you know, there's a pretty complicated and pretty dark game going on around there.
Well, you know, Russia, I guess Putin has opened up some supply lines.
It seems like they don't want us to win in Afghanistan, but they don't want us to leave yet either.
They want us to go ahead and have to suffer their same fate there first.
Yeah, and, you know, we're also taking care of some of their dirty business.
They just don't want to be left out and ignored the way, you know, they have been over the last 20 years.
I mean, the fact is we've treated them dismissively at best, you know, exploitatively in reality for the last 20 years.
So the point is they want, look, they don't want the Taliban to return there.
They see that as a threat to Russia and Russia's interests.
But they also don't want to see America, you know, have a strong hold on the place.
And I think from Russia's point of view, the ideal situation is America kind of keeps the Taliban out, but doesn't really take control of the place and needs Russia.
And it's sort of a messy situation.
And, you know, Russia probably gets more benefit out of that than pretty much anybody.
And we're walking right into that trap.
Well, according to Osama bin Laden's speech of October 2004, it's a pretty open and abrupt, very honest kind of thing where he says, listen, the whole game here is to get you people to bankrupt your empire and completely collapse and then get the hell out of our part of the world.
It's the only way to do it.
So that's why bomb the coal and bomb the embassies and all these things.
It's to try to get America to invade.
And so, I mean, if you wanted, you could have a KGB conspiracy theory where Ayman al-Zawahiri works for the Russians all along.
It's not necessary.
But the interests there coincide perfectly.
And he gloated about that in that speech and said, you know, this is everything that your government is doing to you, talking to us.
It's not in your interest at all.
It's only in the interest of me and a few of your politically connected corporations who benefit from all the war.
Other than that, the rest of you are being completely screwed by this.
But here you go, continue to fall into my trap.
Fair warning.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, just because he told us the truth about what's going on doesn't mean anybody is going to listen.
People go nuts during war, which also works in, you know, the big corporations and powerful politicians' interests.
But, you know, this is a basic strategy, I think, of, I mean, I hate to use the word terrorist because in my book terrorism is also bombing countries, you know, from 35,000 feet up.
But in any event, it is a basic strategy of terrorists or guerrilla groups.
You try to provoke a reaction that is so huge that, you know, your population, in bin Laden's case, you know, Islam, rallies around you, rallies around the guerrilla group.
And the occupying power or the oppressive power winds up bankrupting itself and throwing everything it has at this war that it can't win.
It's a basic strategy, and it works a lot of the times, and it's working again.
Yeah, I mean, and it's not that complicated.
I mean, come on, this is simple judo premise here, right?
Like, I met you before.
You're about a foot taller than me.
If you and I got in a fist fight, my best hope would be to somehow trick you into running into the wall or something while I got out of the way.
Or a gun.
Yeah, or a gun might work too, yeah.
Or maybe I'd smack you in the face and then run down the block, and I'd have ten of my friends waiting with baseball bats.
Yeah, exactly.
Maybe that's the more apt metaphor.
No offense, Mark.
I'm such a little hostility here.
No, you're exactly right.
And yet, just because we know what the strategy is and everybody does know it, it doesn't mean that it's not going to work.
I think it does work every time because bin Laden and groups like that prey on the kind of inherent weaknesses of the oppressive or occupying power.
Not just their weaknesses, their vulnerabilities, their stupidities, which are pretty much built into the operating system of any power which is going to go invade and occupy an alien country on the other side of the world.
There aren't a whole lot of countries like America willing to do that, and the ones that are have a lot of massive blind spots that you can exploit.
Yeah, well, just to kind of rub in the point about how easy and elementary this action is in the reaction sort of understanding of terrorism tactics is, this is a short clip here, just 30 seconds or so, Mark, from Rambo 3.
This is John Trotman, the guy that's always getting Rambo into trouble and then saving him at the end or vice versa, explaining to the Soviet commander, the KGB commander, how this game works.
This is, I guess, what, 1986, 87 here.
You started this damn war.
Now you have to deal with it.
And we will.
It is just a matter of time before we achieve a complete victory.
You know there won't be a victory.
Every day your war machines lose ground to a bunch of poorly armed, poorly equipped freedom fighters.
The fact is that you underestimated your competition.
If you'd studied your history, you'd know that these people have never given up to anyone.
You'd rather die than be slaves to an invading army.
You can't defeat a people like that.
We tried.
We already had our Vietnam.
Now you're going to have yours.
You know, we're such morons.
I mean, we even want to gloat at people about how we supposedly learn from history.
You know, when we can't gloat about winning a war, we'll gloat about how we learn from history and you don't.
I don't know.
We're silly.
You listen to that because I know that that was kind of the country's mood at the time.
We were still sort of, you know, suffering from so-called Vietnam syndrome.
We weren't sure if we had the appetite yet to go around invading countries again.
But, you know, obviously we got that back in the next, what, about five, six years after that movie, four, five years.
Yeah, Operation Yellow Ribbon in 1991.
Oh, right.
Yeah.
Actually, it was a few years after that.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
George Carlin said, We left a few women and children alive in Vietnam and haven't felt good about ourselves since.
And that's why George Boyer Sr. had to say, This will not be another Vietnam.
This time we're going all the way.
Yeah.
Well, and that Saturday Night Live skit where Dana Carvey says, You know, we've learned the lesson from Vietnam.
Stay out of Vietnam.
I think that's pretty much all we learned.
Like, OK, let's not invade that country again.
Let's go a couple of countries over.
That's pretty funny.
I didn't remember that one.
All right.
Well, now, so you referred to what's going on in Chechnya there.
Now people can kind of dial their their map over.
I don't know how many thousand miles, a couple or so to the west of of the Afghanistan quagmire to the space over there between the Black and Caspian Seas north of Iran and Turkey over there by Azerbaijan and Georgia.
And then the Caucasus Mountains there, I guess, split the space between the two seas.
And on the north side of the Caucasus, that's Russian territory.
And on the south side of the Caucasus, that's Georgia and also the newly independent Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
And I hope I even set that up right.
And then but you were referring to American attempts to destabilize the region.
And made me think of headlines I've seen recently about bombings in Chechnya, police officers kidnapped and killed.
Of course, we all know, everyone knows.
And the government admits and brags that they're paying Jandala to do that inside Iran.
I wonder if that's what you're referring to.
Do you think that the CIA or the Special Operations Command are behind some of the recent violence in Chechnya there?
Well, you know, this is speculation, but there's a lot of put it this way.
And I don't have the name in front of me.
There is a some kind of advocacy group or NGO organization in favor of, you know, freeing the Chechen people.
And it has, you know, has all the big names from all the big neocon names in this organization.
And the Committee for Peace in Chechnya.
Exactly.
And, you know, these guys, Chechens are the only Muslims in the entire world that these guys love.
Anywhere else, they want Muslims, you know, penned up and walled up and shot or something.
But in Chechnya, certainly they just find their love for them.
And, you know, you have to be very, very skeptical.
What are these guys doing?
You know, why are their hearts bleeding for the Chechens?
And, well, the obvious answer is oil.
There's an enormous amount of oil in the Caspian Sea region, which is near the Caucasus.
And the only way to get the oil out of the Caspian Sea area is either through Iran, which obviously isn't going to happen, or through some of these newly independent states, which are on Russia's southern border, and which border Chechnya, as you know, is a province or a republic in Russia proper, but it's a sort of, Russia has a bunch of ethnic republics within the Russian Federation.
In any event, you know, and the thinking goes, and there's, again, a decent amount of evidence that the CIA and other Western agencies have been involved in kind of keeping Russia pinned down and destabilized in that region while we move in and take control of the Caspian Sea oil.
Cheney in the late 90s said that the Caspian Sea oil was the last great, basically, unexploited oil and gas reserve in the world, and it was a strategic interest of America to get a hold of it.
And, you know, we used the War on Terror to set up bases all in that region and basically turn or try to turn a lot of those states into American satellite states.
And Georgia in particular, pretty much, which is, Georgia is located between Azerbaijan and the Black Sea.
Azerbaijan is where the actual oil is in the Caspian Sea and Azerbaijan, but it's got to go through Georgia.
So we engineered the Rose Revolution in 2003 to put in a friendly pro-American leader there.
He quickly approved this Western British Petroleum Pipeline, and we had Green Berets there supposedly helping train the Georgians to root out Al-Qaeda cells in Georgia, which everybody knew was ridiculous.
Really, you know, we turned Georgia into a puppet state, and then that puppet state, as we all know, it went bonkers and wound up invading South Ossetia, which sparked a war with Russia, and, you know, and now we've got that mess today.
Basically, it's just one giant fucker-cluck, as I like to call it.
Well, you know, I read an interview with, I think it's Vladimir is his first name, Zirinovsky.
I'm sure you're much more familiar than I, but in the 1990s, he was a pretty large character in Russian politics, at least in American media, and it was a really interesting interview.
It was a female reporter, and she was on a boat with him going down the river for three days or something, and he had coke and whores everywhere and was partying and trying to seduce her the whole time and whatever.
So it made for a really interesting read, and he talked about how the obvious, you know, future is that Russia should join NATO and be part of the alliance, and there will be one big superpower, basically, of the White North versus the new enemy, Islamic South Asia.
And I just wonder, you know, why didn't they just go with the Zirinovsky plan?
It seems like, you know, it's more or less in congruence with the idea that the European and Western world ought to dominate the rest of the world forever, right?
Yeah, but, you know, everybody, first of all, everybody's just too damn greedy.
I mean, you know what I mean?
Like when you get a bunch of powerful people in the room, and we already do dominate the world.
What it is now, it's, you know, if you look at the powerful few countries as oligarchs, now they're all fighting amongst each other to carve up the resources.
I mean, the thing about Zirinovsky is he's an interesting guy.
He's very smart.
He says things.
He floats trial balloons of ideas, especially the wackier ideas that are kind of being discussed in the halls of power in Russia.
But he's a plant.
I mean, he was set up under Gorbachev.
You know, he's a former KGB spy of some kind.
And when Gorbachev, you know, allowed more and more democracy, they understood that nationalism and some kind of quasi-fascism had a pretty broad appeal.
So they had one of their own guys, Zirinovsky, who's a great actor, play that role.
And the funny thing is he's half Jewish.
He hid that for a while.
And Zirinovsky, in 1993, after Yeltsin, you know, Yeltsin sent tanks against his own parliament, then he held elections, and it was Zirinovsky who won overwhelmingly.
And at that time, he was saying he was going to take back Alaska by force, set up giant fans in Kaliningrad and blow all of Russia's toxic waste into Germany, and water Cossack horses in the Indian Ocean.
He's a wild character.
He's got to take everything he says with a grain of salt.
I think the Coke and whores is much more his speed than anything else.
Yeah.
But, I mean, there was a point where Clinton was talking about bringing Russia into NATO, which I guess kind of begs the whole question.
I mean, if the purpose of NATO is containing Russia, then that sort of defeats the whole purpose.
But then again, I mean, Zirinovsky made the point that America's enemies in South Asia are Russia's too, except Russia is also our enemy in South Asia is the difference.
Yeah.
I mean, I think the thinking is there have been some nice words about that.
And I seem to remember after 9-1-1, when Putin opened up Central Asia, he green-lighted America, you know, going into Central Asia and setting up what he thought were and what we told him were temporary bases for what was supposed to be a limited war in Afghanistan.
You know, Putin took an enormous amount of criticism and shit when he did that.
He was suddenly very unpopular, particularly among the military and security services crowd, where he came from, for doing that.
They said, you've got to be crazy.
You can't trust the Americans.
They did this.
You know, they always make these promises.
Look what they did to Gorbachev and Yeltsin.
So Putin kind of stuck his neck out on that.
And then I seem to recall there was a lot of talk.
Powell was actually talking about bringing Russia in at a very high level into NATO.
But, you know, Powell was probably too sane.
He was definitely too sane for the Bush administration.
And that idea was basically shelled.
And I'm not even sure how popular it was among Russians because I think they mistrusted that idea, too, because it would mean putting Russian forces, you know, under subservient command under Americans, ultimately.
And ultimately, you know, Putin got shown up.
He had egg on his face because we ripped up the ABM Treaty within a couple of months and we decided we were going to stay in Central Asia whether Russia liked it or not.
And that's when the game started turning a lot nastier.
You know, we stayed in Uzbekistan.
When we said we wouldn't, we stayed in Kyrgyzstan.
We said we wouldn't.
Wrapped it up in Georgia and so on.
And so what you've seen is, you know, what they sort of called the great game 100 years ago.
It's been a sort of, I don't know, counterrevolution, I guess you'd call it, in a lot of these places.
In Uzbekistan, we eventually got booted out and the Russians are back in there.
In Kyrgyzstan, you know, we got booted out of Kyrgyzstan recently.
The Russians are better situated there.
And, you know, from my experience, I mean, I was actually there in Ossetia last summer at the end of the war.
So I kind of got a firsthand look at what happened there.
From my point of view, it just looked like, you know, that was sort of the last gasp of the American empire's expansionist policy.
I mean...
Yeah, when you come up against the Kremlin, I mean, there's a certain point where you can only annex so much of the world until you bump up against guys with hydrogen bombs, too.
Exactly.
And, you know, I think, I mean, Saakashvili, the president, is at least as arrogant.
He's an interesting character, but in any event, he's as arrogant and stupid at the end of the day as Bush and Cheney are.
And he just thought, I've got great uniforms.
I've got big friends.
Russians are, you know, primitive barbarian Mongols, that's what he calls them.
I'm going to win.
And he invaded like an idiot and got his ass handed to him.
And really, it was America that had its ass handed to it by the Russians, you know, more than anything, because we had advisers crawling all around that country.
In fact, there's even some evidence that some of our advisers were, you know, were working with the Georgian military in the early days of the war.
Boy, think about that, all you former Bush supporters out there.
Cheney and Bush actually had American soldiers on the ground in battles with the Russians in Georgia when you don't even know where that is.
Man.
Well, let me ask you this, Mark, and real quick here, last minute, and I guess I'll just keep you over time a little bit here, if I can.
Henry Kissinger, who is one of the architects of the siphon all the oil out from under the Caspian Basin policy.
And Zbigniew Brzezinski, who's known, of course, as probably more of a Polish nationalist than an American security national security adviser, who's always been extremely hawkish on Russia before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Soviet Empire.
They both have made pretty conciliatory statements about Russia and what American policy should be toward Russia.
Recently, I think Brzezinski just this last week had something saying we need to cooperate with them more and soften our tone much more.
A real reset.
Is that surprising or is that just BS or what do you make of that?
No, I think these guys as old school kind of American imperialists and Brzezinski, I think Brzezinski much more than Kissinger is.
He is a real deep lucifer on top of it, but these guys are pretty smart.
And I think anybody with a functioning brain understands the damage that Bush and Cheney did to this country.
We are America is a lot weaker than it was.
It can't do the things it used to do.
It can't play these imperialist games the way it did.
And, you know, if we keep pretending we can, we're just going to collapse in a heap like like the Soviet Union did.
I think they're they're kind of like practical imperialists.
They want America to.
We can't pick any more fights, especially with somebody as strong as Putin and Russia.
So we need to we need to find accommodation with them until we get strong enough that I think in these guys minds, until we get strong enough that we can go back to trying to steal, steal more land in the future at some point.
Well, I got to tell you, I mean, honestly, it's such a relief to me to hear that.
It's your analysis that people in Washington, D.C. even have any grip on the reality of the American empire and its limits at all.
I mean, there's certainly quite a while there, I guess, mostly during the Cheney years where the idea, at least in my mind is basically you have no idea what this kook is going to do.
He could put troops on the ground against the Russians in Georgia, for Christ's sake, or something crazy like that.
And now, at least, you know, I like to believe that she's.
Well, as Lou Rockwell said years ago, it's a heck of a note to have to root for the Rockefellers.
But, you know, if Obama is listening to Brzezinski, I guess I prefer that.
Mark.
Yeah, I mean, I agree.
And it shows how far to the right the center of this country has gone or what's considered reasonable part of the right.
The establishment has gone in this country that these guys are like, you know, are the ones who would kind of have to hope Obama's listening to.
But let's go back to that.
Yeah, it's crazy.
But going back to Afghanistan, you know, OK, so we're not going to pick a fight with Russia, maybe.
And it does seem like Obama is getting much more practical vis-a-vis Russia.
But in Afghanistan, you know, he's already invested already kind of politically and rhetorically into making Afghanistan his showpiece war.
And, you know, there's just not enough criticism out there.
What Obama's done is he's moved very far to the right from the beginning, the same thing he did with the economy, actually.
He's adopted, he's basically adopted McCain's plan in Afghanistan.
It's probably, I would even say, to the right of McCain, because at least McCain is a military guy.
And he's the kind of guy historically who might be able to actually pull out and save face under the weird, you know, the weird politics of this country.
Nixon goes to China thing, right?
Exactly.
Exactly.
Whereas Obama is considered, you know, a Muslim liberal terrorist.
And so he's going to have to show his right wing credentials.
And he's just given carte blanche to getting deeper and deeper in Afghanistan.
And it's absolutely counterintuitive.
And there's not, there's almost no criticism, I mean, outside of your show.
And, you know, I've seen that Robert Greenwald and Katrina Vanden Heuvel and some others have been trying to get particularly, I think, progressives and liberals, you know, interested in paying attention to the war in Afghanistan.
Because, you know, oftentimes when you look back in history, it's something you didn't expect that winds up destroying you, right?
I mean, people kind of figure, OK, war was like a Bush era thing.
And now what we really need to focus on, like, that's no longer a problem because we have Obama in power, and he's a much smarter and much more urbane person than Bush.
So that's not a problem anymore.
Now we've got to, like, look at financial regulation.
And in fact, you know, this war, by doubling down yet again and getting deeper into that war in Afghanistan, the unforeseen consequences, I mean, anything could happen.
And anything has happened.
The Soviet Union collapsed there, and it's something nobody foresaw.
And so I do think people need to pay more attention to it.
Yeah, you know, Ron Paul always said that the empire is going to end, and it won't be because you listen to me, I guess.
It'll be because the dollar just breaks, and there's just no more way to do it.
And so we can either roll back our empire and bring it home like, you know, I don't know, sober adults, or we can just continue to act like Dick Cheney until the car finally crashes at the bottom of the cliff, you know?
Yeah, and that's the problem with Afghanistan.
We think we're not acting like Dick Cheney there anymore because we're not in some other areas.
But in fact, we are acting like that in Afghanistan, and that is the most important theater right now.
It's the most important one.
It's the most important decision in foreign policy.
And nobody's really paying attention to it.
Man, what does it mean when George F. Will is better on Afghanistan than MoveOn.org?
It's amazing and depressing.
But it says to me, and it's what I believe for the last 20 years, you know, despite all the hysteria about liberals and the left, in my opinion, the real opposition in this country for the last 20 years at least has always come from the right.
It's the only real opposition that has teeth.
It's the only one that is brave.
I don't agree with them, but they're the only ones, you know, who get themselves heard and who make a difference.
And yeah, I find it, I mean, I don't even know what to say about that.
It's insane that George Will is now the, you know, George Will had the Afghanistan War as Walter Cronkite moment.
I think it's just perplexing.
Well, let's hope it has as much impact as Walter Cronkite's moment had back then.
I agree.
I absolutely agree.
All right.
Well, thanks very much.
I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Sure.
Thanks for having me on, Scott.
Everybody, that's Mark Ames.
A new article at alternate.org is called Obama is leading the U.S. into a hellish quagmire.
It's a good one.
Good Soviet comparison.
Send it around to your right-wing friends there.
And check out exiledonline.com.