10/08/07 – Michael Hirsh – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, 92.7 chaos radio in Austin, Texas.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, and our first guest today is Michael Hirsch from Newsweek.
He's a former AP correspondent in Tokyo and now senior editor at Newsweek.
Welcome to the show.
Thanks.
Good to have you on here.
I really liked your article here.
Would you buy a used hawk from this man?
Yeah.
Pretty interesting title there.
And this is about the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, Rudy Giuliani, and the foreign policy advisors that he has surrounded himself with, most famously, neocon guru Norman Podhoretz.
Right.
And he is the senior foreign policy advisor to Rudy Giuliani.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Well, he certainly is one of the most senior.
I mean, the coordinator is Charles Hill of Yale, but Podhoretz is very close to the top of the list.
In fact, if it's all right with you, I'd like to play this clip real fast here of Norman Podhoretz for the good people.
All right.
Well, if we were to bomb the Iranians, as I hope and pray we will, it will unleash a wave of anti-Americanism all over the world that will make the anti-Americanism we've experienced so far look like a love fest.
Yeah.
So, this is the guy who writes that he hopes and prays that George Bush will bomb Iran, and from the outset there admits that this would be a disaster for America in terms of public relations.
We see the whole world is angry at us as we stand right now, and he says an attack on Iran would unleash a wave of anti-Americanism that would make our current situation look like a good one.
Yeah.
But he still thinks it should be done, needs to be done, because he thinks it's just unthinkable that Iran should get the bomb, and, you know, this has to be viewed as a real extreme point of view, even for the Bush administration and its hardliners like Dick Cheney.
And in fact, you say in your article it's actually even a hardline position compared to what Rudy Giuliani has said himself.
Well, Giuliani seems to have distanced himself a little bit from it.
I mean, Giuliani has clearly laid out that he would consider military action, and he says we have to send a crystal clear message to the Iranians that they cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon, but he hasn't embraced this idea that, you know, he thinks the bombing is necessary.
Right.
Well, in fact, you know, Madeleine Albright said that very thing yesterday.
Yeah, and, you know, partly it's a question of whether you can trust the people who are pursuing these policies.
I mean, there's a time-honored tradition to, you know, coercive diplomacy where you basically use the threat of force to get things done diplomatically, and that's, you know, part of this picture of forcing the Iranians, trying to force them diplomatically to back down, is to leave the military option open, as the Bush people never tire of saying.
That, you know, where part hearts is, is way out there saying we just need to bomb no matter what.
Right.
And you also, as you point out in your article, that a big part of the seriousness of having a guy like Podhoretz on is that he pushes this whole view that America's at war, World War IV, against Islamofascism, and this is the kind of thing where, you know, particular policy when it comes to Iran and whether we should bomb them, you know, today or two months from now, that kind of thing, is sort of beside the point when, if it's the case that Giuliani accepts Podhoretz's view that all radical Muslims everywhere are all part of this caliphate trying to kill us all.
Right.
Now, that's really the big, I think, flaw, the most worrisome aspect of this, even more than the overt call to bomb Iran, is this tendency to lump together all Islamist groups and to see them as a common enemy, which basically, if you take that view, you know, and Giuliani gets to be president, you're looking at another eight years of a war presidency and, you know, there's just no getting around it.
But there's many sensible people who think that that's way overstated.
These groups have always been different, isolated.
Al-Qaeda has had nothing to do, for example, with Hezbollah or Hamas in the past, has had nothing to do with the Iranian Islamists who indeed have been enemies of it because they're Shiite and Al-Qaeda is Sunni based.
But once you start lumping everyone together, you know, then you're really creating an enemy for generations.
And he says this over and over again in his speeches and the debates, the enemy is Islamic terrorism, which I guess means violent resistance by anybody who's a Muslim anywhere in the world.
Yeah, pretty much.
That's what it means.
It's a failure to define the enemy precisely, which if you really sort of look past all the other errors that the Bush administration made, I would say that was its cardinal error was a failure to say, OK, who is the enemy?
How many are there?
Rather than to sort of, you know, create this broad brushed set of enemies and lump them all together.
And, you know, in fact, the enemies after 9-11 were relatively few, but a thousand or so Al-Qaeda extremists, mostly that most of them in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the administration's failure to narrow the enemy to that to that level created most of the other disasters.
Now in your article, you mentioned some more of the neocon surrounding Giuliani, and I'm pretty familiar with Daniel Pipes, but I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit more about Martin Kramer, Stephen Rosen and Bob Caston.
Sure.
Well, Martin Kramer is an academic at the Olin Center at Harvard who, since 9-11, has sort of made it his personal mission to root out what he sees as Arabists in American academia who he thinks are sympathetic to terrorism, or at least apologists for terror, for Islamic radicalism.
And that really includes most of the Middle East experts who teach at our colleges.
So and Pipes, Daniel Pipes, has helped with that, Daniel Pipes is a commentator and also an Arab expert who, an Islamist expert who also takes some very extreme views regarding the Palestinians.
He has suggested in the past, for example, that Palestinian villages should be simply razed in retaliation for attacks on Israel.
He has openly and aggressively advocated profiling of Muslims in the United States.
And Bob Caston was a senator from Wisconsin in the 1980s and early 90s who lost his seat ultimately to Russ Feingold, but was known as this kind of Reaganite neoconservative, probably the most strident supporter of Israel on the Hill during the time he was senator during the 1980s.
Very interesting.
And yeah, Daniel Pipes, I guess I don't want to get too far down that tangent, but that's pretty eyebrow raising, a raise entire Palestinian villages where attacks are being staged from?
That's right.
Rather Carthaginian.
Collective guilt, I guess.
Yeah.
That's basically a collective guilt approach.
And again, you know, it's important to have some balance here.
As I say in the piece, I don't think that Giuliani adopts all of these views, but the fact that these are some of his principal advisors and his advisors, you know, tend to be rather extreme in their views, I think, you know, you can apparently make a judgment of the candidate on that basis.
Well, and you remind us about his foreign affairs article that he wrote where he said there's just too much emphasis being placed on negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Yeah.
You're right.
He sort of backed off of the idea of a Palestinian state, which of course has become a key element to the Bush administration's foreign policy, though it looks increasingly unlikely to happen.
And Giuliani, you know, if you remember, this guy was a New York mayor.
New York City is the largest Jewish population in the country lives.
Giuliani has always been a very, very vocal supporter of Israel.
I wanted to ask you about your new North Korea article, but I guess one more thing on the Giuliani questions.
You talk about how casting this in a moral crusade rather than saying, well, Hezbollah is not exactly al-Qaeda and they don't want to go.
That casting it in pure good versus evil terms is that's really what wins elections.
That really probably is a pretty good strategy for Giuliani at this point.
America's mayor.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, in some ways it's almost his only strategy because unless he can successfully portray himself as the guy who can keep Americans safe and portray this as a moral crusade, he really is not going to be able to appeal to the Republican base, which is very conservative, which does not like his position on abortion, doesn't like the fact that he's been twice divorced.
So that's really almost all he can do, and he's playing it for all it's worth.
And as you can see, he's still leading the polls.
Oh, and one more thing on this subject, too, was that you point out that Mitt Romney, for example, is actually surrounding himself with people like General Zinni and General McMaster.
Yeah, he's talking to a whole range of people, and it is rather different from the approach that Giuliani has taken.
Romney is, I think, taking a much more judicious and prudent approach and listening to a whole range of advice.
Okay.
Now, if it's okay, I'd like to spend the last couple of minutes here asking you about your North Korea article, the lessons of North Korea for Iran.
And I guess the way I remember this was Dick Cheney was out of the country doing a tour threatening people or something, and Condoleezza Rice and John Negroponte caught Bush right before he got off work in the afternoon and said, hey, why don't you let us negotiate with North Korea?
And he said, eh, okay, go ahead.
Yeah, well, I don't know if it was quite that simple, but clearly there was a tilting of the balance away from the hardliners who were completely unwilling to negotiate anything with Kim Jong Il, called it nuclear blackmail.
And then what happened was, you know, a year or so ago, Chris Hill, who is a career foreign policy, career foreign service guy who worked with the Clinton administration, negotiated in the Balkans, was basically allowed to really negotiate, which is to do tit for tat, to do a lot of trading, horse trading.
And he did, and to a remarkable degree, I mean, here we are a year, almost a year to the week after the North Korean nuclear test, you know, they're on the verge of appearing to really move in and start to dismantle, anyway, the North Korean program.
And now, briefly, what are the terms of the deal that have been worked out so far?
Well, right now, I mean, you know, there are some areas that really need to be worked on, because right now all they're talking about is beginning the disablement, as they're calling it, of the nuclear sites, the Yangbyon reactive plutonium reactor and other sites, but not the dismantlement yet, even though they're supposed to be heading toward dismantlement.
And it's also not completely clear what will be done with the plutonium stockpile that's already there, but, you know, Chris Hill has made clear that the ideas that the North Koreans have to pledge themselves to getting rid of all of this stuff, in return for which they will get nearly a million tons of heavy fuel oil, and they will get, which probably is even more important to Kim Jong Il, recognition ultimately down the line, and possibly removal from the terrorism list.
And now, you're saying in your article, your point in your article here is, this is a pretty good model for how to deal with Iran, if everybody is so, they've already made up their mind that Iran just cannot be allowed to have nuclear weapons, this might be a way to negotiate them out of the possession of nuclear weapons.
Iran is, you know, Iran is not going to cut the same kind of deal, but it really comes down to whether you're going to negotiate head to head with a regime that you consider to be evil.
There has been this, you know, premise of the Bush administration policy that somehow we can get rid of this regime in Iran, and what they have to do is understand that that's not going to happen anytime soon, and put everything on the table and negotiate with the Iranians, and not sort of do it in the back seat the way it's being done now with the Europeans leading the talks.
I don't think that's going to happen, frankly, and therefore I don't think the diplomacy with Iran is going to go anywhere.
Well, it's the American premise to begin is that we, at this point, is we will not negotiate until they agree to suspend all enrichment whatsoever.
Right, but I mean that's not how a negotiation normally works.
You start to negotiate without preconditions, and then, you know, you make your way to suspension, and I think that they're going to have to just confront that at some point.
And now, Ryan Crocker has been negotiating with the Iranians a little bit in terms of Iraqi security and so forth, but you also mentioned here that Tom Pickering has been doing some back-channel negotiation with the Iranians?
Yeah, there's back-channels, but the key point is that these are just side issues.
I mean, you can't sort of artificially separate out the Iraq issue from the other issues.
The Iranians see them as all of a piece, and the Bush administration is just playing pretend diplomacy by doing that.
And so, Pickering's negotiations are only about Iraq's security, not about the nuclear program at all?
Well, Pickering's are not about that.
These are on other issues that actually he won't talk about, but Ryan Crocker's certainly are just about Iraq.
Right.
Okay, well, I really appreciate your time today and your insight, everybody.
Michael Hirsch from Newsweek.
You can find the lessons of North Korea, and would you buy a used hawk from this man at Newsweek today?
Thanks a lot.