Alright everyone, that's Anti-War Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM, in Austin, Texas.
And our guest this hour is Philip Giraldi, he's a former CIA and DIA counter-terrorism officer.
He's a regular columnist for AntiWar.com and a senior contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
Hello, Scott.
How you doing?
Wow, so right in the middle of the show yesterday, I found this blog entry you put up at the American Conservative Magazine.
Very interesting stuff here, we've been talking about it on the show second hour yesterday and the beginning of the show today.
Looks like this new spy case, this Israeli spy case, a guy who apparently was spying, passing nuclear weapon secrets and other things, supposedly, admittedly, to Israel back in the days of Jonathan Pollard and so forth.
According to your sources, this information came from anti-war factions in Israel in an attempt to thwart Dick Cheney and Ehud Olmert's plan for war with Iran.
Do tell.
Well, part of it is factual and part of it is just suppositions about what this all might be about.
The fact is, I've had it confirmed from a couple of sources, that the information that fingered this guy, his name is Ben-Ami Kadish, came from Israel, came obviously from government sources or intelligence sources in Israel.
The FBI had no idea about this guy or what he had been doing and there was an anonymous leak basically coming from somewhere inside the Israeli government that revealed that this guy had been a spy for Israel back in the 80s.
My sources also tell me that other people were named as spies back in the 1980s and 1990s and they are also under investigation by the FBI.
Now, the question of what it all means is, well, you have to ask yourself, why would they be leaking this kind of information and why would they be leaking it now?
And the one big thing that's going on right now in Washington is the Congressional hearings, closed door hearings on the bombing of Syria back last September.
And it's been suggested by people that I've spoken to that this could be the connection, that Israeli intelligence officers who were supposed to come and testify about the Syrian so-called nuclear program, now will be reluctant to do so because the questions will be of quite a different nature.
Right.
Well, that makes sense.
Now, let me ask you this.
Do you know when the FBI got the leak from the Israelis?
No, I don't know any of the timing on this.
I've been told by two different sources that the FBI initiated an investigation when this guy's name was forwarded to them and they were tapping telephones.
I heard that from one source they were tapping telephones of this gentleman in New Jersey, and from another source that they also were able to tap the phone of his Israeli case officer, his intelligence handler, who is now retired and living in Israel.
Interesting.
Well, I wonder if that timing is more than coincidence or not.
I guess it really doesn't matter whether that's the purpose behind it as much as whether that effect can be gotten here, whether maybe these scheduled hearings will be at least disrupted if not called off because of this.
Well, the hearings are underway, in fact, so I don't know if any Israelis will be appearing under the circumstances.
I don't know if you followed at all what's going on, but the U.S. is making a case based on, get this, a video provided to them by the Israelis showing the inside of this alleged nuclear facility.
And that's a chain of custody, I think, in legal terms that is really kind of bizarre based on what's been going on over the past seven years.
And anybody who would buy that would probably buy the Brooklyn Bridge at the same time.
Yeah, see, that's what I thought was interesting, that here they're holding these hearings.
The L.A.
Times quoted Daniel Pletka from the American Enterprise Institute saying, oh, well, you know, these hearings where we're going to go tell the Congress that North Korea and Syria are working together on nuclear weapons, this is just a box-checking exercise, you know, I guess, on the path to war.
This is just one of the little stops that they have to make or something like that.
But it seems to me like, I don't know, that's a pretty weak case, you know, even as just one of six bogus reasons to have a war or something.
I thought that this story of the nuclear program in Syria had been pretty thoroughly debunked.
Yeah, it has been debunked by a whole lot of different people, including the United Nations.
And, you know, my first question would be, well, how did you get this video from inside the building?
How did you do it?
How can I trust that what I'm seeing on this video, given the infinite capabilities to manipulate something like film, is really something that is as you're describing it?
And so on and so forth.
There are just a whole lot of questions that have to be raised here.
And, as usual, the United States and Israel are assuming that there are, I guess, a lot of gullible people out there that will buy into this.
Certainly the gullible people, I would imagine, would include probably the New York Times and Washington Post.
Well, you know, I guess if the smoking laptop is enough to prove that they at one time had a nuclear weapons program, this laptop which, I guess, best I know, came from or by way of the National Council for Resistance in Iran, a Mossad front, if that's good enough to prove that somehow they had a nuclear weapons program, then why shouldn't a video be good enough to prove that the North Koreans are helping the Syrians make some?
Yeah, I think it's the same standard of proof, actually.
Yeah, which, you know, it's funny because we joke about how in some cases they lower the standard of evidence for criminal suspects in America from probable cause to a reasonable, objective belief on the part of the officer that he wasn't breaking the law or whatever.
The same kind of thing going on internationally.
We used to have this thing where Adelaide Stevenson goes up there with the big blow-up pictures and says, you see they're putting missiles in Cuba, it's final proof, and he embarrasses the Cubans and the Soviets and everybody else in front of everybody live on TV.
We went from there to Colin Powell with his little vial of, you know, laundry detergent or whatever that was, to now, well, the Israelis gave us a laptop and we're going to go with that.
We have a videotape.
Yeah, that's exactly what's happening.
As I know I've recommended to your listeners before, this has to be the age of skepticism for us because of everything that's happened in the last seven years and all the lies that have been told about various countries that have been set up as adversaries.
I think you have to be absolutely skeptical.
You have to adopt the Ronald Reagan maxim of verify, verify, verify, and I don't see any verification in any of this.
Yeah, well, what do you make of General Petraeus now taking the place of Admiral Fallon as the commander of CENTCOM?
Does this sound as bad to you as it does to me?
Well, it sounds bad.
I think that it means that basically the current policies, which are policies that hopefully will get overturned in November, are what Bush is trying to do.
He's trying to fix the situation so that whoever comes in as president is at least for a certain time going to be locked into the current policies.
And I think that's outrageous, but that's I think what we're seeing here.
Right, and he's even basically said those exact words.
Well, we're going to go ahead and lock them in so they have a choice.
Yeah, that's what it is.
I think obviously Petraeus is fond of looking for...
Petraeus is, as Admiral Fallon put it, what was he, a butt licker or something like that?
Ass-kissing chicken shit, I think it was.
Chicken shit, butt licker, ass kisser.
And anyway, so he is that type of military officer, and he'll do basically whatever the politicians are giving him as his marching orders.
And I think that's regrettable.
I much prefer a Fallon type who speaks his mind.
Yeah, well, and it's pretty clear that this guy, Petraeus, will say whatever they want him to say.
I mean, he'll change his tune from one day to the next between who he's fighting and who he's backing and what the enemy is and how well the surge is working or whatever.
He'll say whatever they want him to say.
Exactly.
I think that's what we have, and that's unfortunately the product of our system these days.
Back in the days when military officers had a certain amount of integrity, those days maybe are gone forever, and now they're really thinking of retiring and what board positions they're going to get on defense contractors.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I don't watch too much TV news.
I think I probably should watch more of it because it's important to understand what they're telling everybody else.
You and I can sit and read foreign papers all day and know what's really going on, but that's only half the story.
The official narrative is a big part of it as well, and I guess I'm mostly under the impression that in TV land in America, oh, we're not really going to have a war with Iran.
It's not a subject of discussion that often.
And so sometimes I start to wonder whether maybe I'm just far too concerned about this and that actually all the different wide and varied reasons why it would be impossible to have a war with Iran.
Give me a break, that those are actually predominant and that it's not really going to happen.
But then I saw Chris Matthews interviewing John McCain, and it was funny the way he said it.
It was almost like he realized that this is the kind of thing that we don't usually talk about, but I'll go ahead and ask you a kind of thing.
And he was saying, you know, around here in Washington, there's a lot of talk about Dick Cheney's going to find an excuse to bomb Iran, whether an incident in the Persian Gulf or an incident in Iraq, that there's going to be some sort of pretext for war.
And so apparently this isn't just, you know, the talk around here at the chaos radio studio.
This is, you know, this is what powerful people are worried about up there, you know, on the East Coast where all the power is to.
Well, I think, you know, I think it still comes down to the possibility of a war.
I don't think Bush has the nerve at the moment, given the limited resources he has, to pull the trigger in any kind of active way.
But I think there's still a high possibility.
I wouldn't call it a probability, but certainly a high possibility of a war starting by accident through some incident or because the Israelis decide to do something about the Iranian program.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, it's funny because Kev Hall sent me an email yesterday and it was a story from a year or so ago, maybe more than that, where Ehud Olmert was openly saying, I don't know the exact context, but he was saying, ah, come on, the Iranians, we can deal with them.
We don't need to have a war with them.
And, you know, they talk a lot of smack about how great their nuclear program is doing, but actually they're not doing nearly as well as they claim and don't worry about it, etc.
Yeah.
Olmert has made a couple of comments in the last couple of days also to the same, sort of the same thing, saying that, oh, it looks like it's going to be resolved through diplomacy.
Everybody's very keen to get on board the diplomatic solution to this problem.
I don't know what he's talking about.
It doesn't seem to me that that's going in any positive direction at all.
So while I welcome diplomacy as a solution to this, I'm wondering if there's some kind of hidden agenda here.
You talk peace while you're planning something else.
Right, because the agenda is still you must cease all enrichment of uranium and basically all of your nuclear program before any negotiations can begin.
You have to give up everything.
That's the American and Israeli position toward Iran.
That's right.
And as long as that hasn't changed, then what progress could he possibly be referring to?
I don't know.
As I say, I read things coming out of the Israeli government and the American government now, and I just assume that it's probably 180 degrees off of what the truth is.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Scott Ritter talks about in his book this, they call it the conception or something.
I don't know why you're supposed to pronounce it all funny, but this theory of intelligence over there in Israel where this is tantamount to that, and it doesn't matter whether this is that or not.
We'll just throw the word tantamount in there so that the policy becomes if Iran can master the fuel cycle to enrich to a measly three point something percent for their electricity program, that is tantamount to them being able to produce nuclear weapons, et cetera.
So really all this talk about, you know, when Martha Raddatz asked Dick Cheney, so what are you doing?
Everybody thinks that when you come to the Middle East, you're planning for war.
He says, hey, listen, a nuclear armed Iran would be very destabilizing for the region.
That's his answer.
He's really dealing in fantasy.
He's dealing in this Israeli model of intelligence where this is tantamount to that, even though in reality it is not.
Well, the Israelis have very successfully sold a bill of goods to the United States.
And that bill of goods is essentially that anything that's a threat to Israel has to be a threat to the United States.
And that's the thinking.
And one of the worst aspects of this has been the way they've sold the concept of terrorism.
We now are fighting a global war against terrorism.
And groups that are essentially national liberation groups like Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorist groups.
And the key to that, of course, is once you have a group that's a terrorist group, we can't talk to them.
And if anybody looks for any solutions in places like Lebanon or in Palestine, Israel, you have to talk to these people.
But the Israelis have kind of set the rules for how the United States will behave in terms of its own national interest.
And this is the ultimate absurdity.
Yeah, and I read the headline the other day.
I forget if it was MSNBC or something where it was Bush, State Department, Israel.
I guess it wasn't the headline, but it was Jimmy Carter has gone to the Middle East, to Syria, to meet with Hamas in defiance of Bush, the State Department, and Israel.
Just right there, as though Israel is the department of the American government or something.
I guess you could say that it is.
Yeah, well, maybe the other way around.
Depends on, I guess, whether the tail's wagging the dog on this day or that.
Well, it really is incredible.
And now, what you're talking about, everybody's a terrorist, and so therefore you can't talk with them.
That was what was going on there with Jimmy Carter.
As Jimmy Carter said, well, I don't care what you say, I'm going to go ahead and talk to them anyway.
Because how are you going to get them to stop being terrorists if you refuse to deal with them?
And I saw where Ken Silverstein pointed out on the Harper's blog, the response or one of the public statements of the leader of Hamas.
Basically, I think what he said was, well, we can't quote-unquote recognize Israel, but I'll tell you what we'll do.
We'll give you a 10-year ceasefire to prove our recognition of you.
And they said, not good enough.
Not good enough, we'll never deal with you, we'll never talk with you, you're a terrorist.
When basically what the leader of Hamas was saying is, hey, we can work with you guys.
We're willing to basically recognize Israel within 67 borders.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, I'm not a cheerleader for Hamas by any means or for Hezbollah.
But these are groups that have basically a political constituency.
They're political entities.
They are groups that we can deal with on certain levels.
And again, back to the Reagan-Maxim, verify, verify, verify.
Don't give them a lot of slack or anything like that.
And when you have agreements with them, you have to be tough and you have to watch everything that's going on.
But the fact is that until we're willing to talk with all parties in the Middle East, and that includes Iran, we might as well throw that in, there's not going to be any peace there.
And the United States is going to be the party that's going to suffer the most because we have the most significant international equities that are going to be damaged by all of this.
And, you know, it's a tragedy for our country that we've gotten into this position and maneuvered into this position by the Israelis and their friends here in the States.
And it's a real tragedy.
Did you see the news story about Ayman al-Zawahiri denouncing conspiracy theories about 9-11 and it being done by the Mossad as being an invention of Hezbollah and Iran?
How dare they?
They're trying to undercut our glory, he said.
Yeah, it's an interesting story.
And, of course, it shows you that the animosities between these various groups run real deep.
And the lesson I would draw from that is that it tells you that, you know, if we would just get out of this mix and leave these things alone, these people would be at each other's throats.
These people we're calling terrorist groups, they would be at each other's throats faster than you can imagine.
And, you know, God bless, leave them to it.
But the fact is, here's the good old U.S. providing a common enemy for all of them and giving these people, you know, a viability that they wouldn't have otherwise.
Now, there's a big controversy when McCain accidentally was calling, he was basically confusing his propaganda points.
There's a whole set of propaganda that says, oh, well, Iran is friends with al-Qaeda, and you can read all about it in the Weekly Standard.
And that's actually a pretty narrow audience that buys into that, I think.
And it's a pretty narrow group of people who are pushing that line.
But then there's the much bigger piece of propaganda, which I guess is to a degree true, which is that members of the Mahdi Army are going to Iran and then coming back to Iraq.
And Cheney was confusing his talking points and saying, oh, yeah, al-Qaeda in Iraq is going to Iran for training and then coming back and killing our guys, whatever, and confusing his talking points.
But then the proponents of the former theory came out and said, no, John McCain should not have corrected himself when Joe Lieberman whispered in his ear.
John McCain had it right the first time, even when he misspoke, that in fact Iran is in league with al-Qaeda and is working against us.
What do you say to that, Phil?
You're a former CIA counterterrorism officer.
Well, there's no evidence whatsoever to support that thesis.
This is a typical Weekly Standard thesis.
The Weekly Standard is still claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that al-Qaeda was linked to Saddam Hussein.
So there's no surprise that they would claim that Iran is also linked with al-Qaeda.
And I wouldn't be surprised if they linked him to Saddam Hussein, too, and every other force of evil in the world, maybe the North Koreans.
You know, this is just, you can spin these theories and you can spin these theories, but the fact remains that there is no evidence to suggest that there's any kind of supergroup of terrorists or groups of terrorists working together.
Sure, occasionally terrorists will cooperate when they have common objectives, but these people have very different ideologies in many senses, and they are basically adversaries in many cases, rather more so than allies.
You know, it's interesting, besides the Zawahiri denouncing Iranian conspiracy theories about 9-11, he also, I guess a couple of days before that, they reported that, again, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's number two guy, apparently was complaining about his theory of the American-Iranian alliance, that this Shiite crescent that Seymour Hersh reported that we're redirecting against, that in fact it's all a plan of the Americans to help the Iranians take over southern Iraq, northeastern Saudi Arabia, and somewhere a path of land all the way to southern Lebanon, and that this is the true enemy, is the evil alliance of the Mullahs and the Americans, according to Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Well, Zawahiri, what he's trying to do is he's trying to set up Al-Qaeda as a defender of Sunni Islam, and of course most Sunni Islamic would reject that.
You know, it's a tactical ploy, and as I say, it's just another indication of just how deep the adversarial relationships between these groups is.
Yeah, well, and the idea that the Americans are working deliberately to empower Iran, I don't think really holds water.
We pretty much know they've blundered into handing all the power in the Middle East to Iran over these past few years.
Yeah, it would be hard to find any deliberate American policies over the last seven years, except to alienate everybody.
So I think that's actually our foreign policy, and Condoleezza Rice, of course, is an expert at it.
No, she is.
She's the best.
That's how she got the job.
Let me ask you about the war on terrorism here in America.
The Miami 7, well, the 6 now, because one of them was acquitted the first time, six of them were retried, and again, there was a hung jury, a mistrial, and now the Justice Department has announced that the Miami 6, and their so-called plot to bomb the Sears Tower in Chicago, are going to be put on trial for a third time, so that they might get convictions of these dangerous, homegrown terrorists.
Do you know much about that case, the Miami case, Phil, and what's your assessment of the dangerous nature of these so-called homegrown al-Qaeda guys?
Well, I think, let me just kind of sum it up.
To the best of my knowledge, unless there are some cases I don't know about, with the exception of Richard Reed.
Do you remember him?
He was the shoe bomber.
Right.
There has not been a legitimate terrorist, in the sense of somebody who actually was affiliated with a terrorist group in a serious way, and had an ability to carry out a terrorist act.
There has not been a single terrorist in the United States, that has been arrested, and tried, and sent to prison, or in some cases, obviously, not sent to prison, where the cases fell apart.
These terrorism cases are all bogus, essentially.
They're people that, in many cases, are set up by FBI informants, who are inserted in their midst, to encourage them to carry out terrorist acts.
And one of the most egregious of all cases, of course, is the case in Miami.
But I would also call your attention to the Bosnians, who were pizza delivery men at Fort Dixon, New Jersey.
That was another good one.
Yeah, it seems, I don't know, it's kind of frustrating to see them, you know, they're going to put these guys on trial for a third time now.
The one guy who was acquitted, they went ahead and tried him on the same charges, only in immigration court, so they could kick him out of the country.
And, you know, come on, you put these guys on trial three times, is that how we do things in America?
Well, in a lot of these cases, they are plea bargained down to immigration cases, and then they just kick them out.
And that means that, you know, there is no terrorism case.
There are no terrorism cases that are real terrorism cases.
And, you know, my question becomes, why are we spending hundreds of billions of dollars every year defending our country against these terrorists when it turns out that these people are not a real threat?
I think there has to be a reality check, but I don't see any of our current crop of politicians having the courage to even get into that sort of thing.
In your career at the CIA, did you work very much with the FBI on stuff like this?
Is there something about the structure of the FBI or the personalities that run that place where they just are made somehow to care about nothing but themselves?
I mean, it seems to me that sooner or later, a bunch of people are going to die in a massive terrorist attack, and it's going to be because the FBI was, you know, trying to trick some stupid kid into saying something into a tape recorder while there was an actual plot going on all around them.
Well, it's, you know, FBI basically is, because it's a little, I didn't have much contact with FBI because I was working in the CIA in the field.
And, of course, the FBI basically operates in the States, and the CIA operates overseas.
So there really wasn't a whole lot of contact.
But the fact is the FBI is a law enforcement organization and it has a whole different objective, which is to catch people and arrest them and put them in jail.
And that's how they justify their budgets, and that's how they get promoted, and that's how the whole system works.
So, basically, you're asking the guys who essentially are motivated by all the wrong things to do the job of catching terrorists because their objectives are to turn over the numbers and to keep the system kind of moving.
I don't know.
I don't have a good answer for this.
I think we need probably some kind of new organization to focus primarily in the U.S. on terrorism along the lines of maybe the British MI5.
But, you know, there's no simple answer to this because law enforcement is not your...
It's your best mechanism for defeating terrorism in the long run, but it may not be your best mechanism for investigating terrorism and to really find out who the terrorists are.
Well, you know, I remember Peter Lance, who's written a lot of books about the history of the Al Qaeda movement and stuff.
He talked about how he hated the idea of the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, but he supported it anyway because somebody other than the FBI has got to do this.
Yeah, well, that's one way of looking at it, I guess.
But the Department of Homeland Security certainly hasn't done much of a job.
Yeah, well, that's a government improvement there.
They just make it bigger and more centralized and have faith that that will make everything work out better.
It seems like it always goes the other way around.
Wow, so that's a lot of terrorism cases, Phil.
Let's see, Virginia, the paintball guys, the Lackawanna Six, the Detroit Five, the poor kid and his dad out there in Lodi, California, the Miami case, and I guess there's probably hundreds of others, smaller ones that we've never even heard of, and yet none of these guys were actually friends of Osama planning on killing Americans.
I think that's a safe bet from what I've seen about all these cases, about the investigations and the resolution of the cases.
Very often, as we see down in Florida, you get a hung jury.
Very often the case is originally filed as a terrorism case and then winds up in an immigration court.
It's a con job.
I hate to say it, but that's really what it is.
And we have a lot of people in power, both in the Democratic and Republican parties, who just love to play this game.
It keeps the taxpayers nervous, and nobody looks at things too closely, and it keeps the money flowing.
All right, now I want to switch gears back to foreign policy here a little bit and ask you about Somalia.
I just read a report here on the show, 700,000-something refugees, massive humanitarian crisis, and my best understanding of the reason that America got involved and had the Ethiopian army invade back in December 2006 and ever since then was because, according to the Washington Post, there were three Al-Qaeda suspects from the Africa Embassy bombings there.
Is this how to fight a war on terrorism in Africa, Phil?
I think it is, actually.
And let me emphasize one of the words you used.
They were Al-Qaeda suspects.
They weren't Al-Qaeda persons or actual Al-Qaeda terrorists.
These were people that were suspected of possibly being involved with terrorist actions.
And for the sake of these three people, we got involved in the region and are continuing to be involved in the region.
And they tried to kill one of them, as I'm sure you're aware, with a cruise missile strike from a nuclear submarine back about a month ago.
Do you remember that?
Oh, yeah, killed three women and three children.
And also a donkey and a cow, I believe.
And they missed the guy, of course, who was the target.
And it turned out he wasn't even a confirmed Al-Qaeda.
He was just a guy that the FBI wanted for questioning in connection with a terrorist attempt against Israelis in Kenya.
So it didn't even involve the United States.
Oh, it wasn't even the Africa Embassy attack?
No, it was the Mombasa attack against an Israeli tourist jetliner and a hotel that was being used by Israeli tourists.
Oh, man.
Well, you know, it was, let's see if I remember right, it was in the summer of 2006 that Osama bin Laden put out a message that said, Hey, everybody, heads up, the Americans are coming to Somalia and they're coming to Sudan, so get ready for them.
You know, is this guy writing Dick Cheney's playbook or what?
What's going on here?
Well, I think if Osama didn't have Dick Cheney, he would be in trouble.
Yeah.
We often talk about it the other way around, right, as Osama bin Laden as the perfect Goldstein boogeyman to point at, but George Bush and Dick Cheney serve that exact same purpose for him, don't they?
Yeah, I know you've spoken to Michael Schur, and this is one of his principal points, that we are the ultimate enablers of international terrorism.
Yeah, we are Osama bin Laden's indispensable ally is the way he puts it.
Yes, that's exactly right, yeah.
That sounds about right.
All right, well, so Iraq looks like it's falling apart now with the Mahdi Army versus the Badr Corps, a.k.a. the Iraqi Army.
Patrick Coburn had an article the other day about the concern local citizens are all killing each other now, bombings going off in the Sunni provinces and so forth.
Are the Americans going to have to flee Iraq, or is there a way that we could actually have some sort of orderly withdrawal before this whole place catches on fire over there?
Well, you remember those images of the U.S. evacuation of Saigon where the helicopters were landing on the roof of the embassy and then getting dumped into the sea because there wasn't even time to refuel them and turn them around?
I don't know.
I mean, to me this is...
People ask me all the time, you know, what should we do?
And I think my answer is I can see no good coming out of the United States staying in Iraq even one day longer, and I would leave tomorrow.
I would leave today.
Basically, I do not see any argument that tells me that there is anything that's positive that's going to come out of this.
And, you know, I can see that we've left a mess there, and the Iraqis are going to pay the price, but I don't see that our staying there makes it any better.
Yeah, you know, I saw Christopher Hitchens making the case that, well, you have Wahhabi Saudi Arabia and fundamentalist Shia Iran there, and Iraq is the keystone.
Iraq is what decides the fate of the region, and so we just can't leave.
But I guess your argument is that the damage is done.
It's too late.
You shouldn't have invaded then.
That's right.
The damage was done the minute we stepped in there.
And I don't know where Christopher Hitchens gets his stuff.
I think he makes it up.
But, you know, I mean, this stuff is astounding.
The neocons always see these complicated interrelationships and everything that justify the United States playing some kind of spoiler role in the region.
Anybody who has half a brain would realize that the United States has totally screwed up the entire region by its interventions.
And, you know, that's one more argument to say, you know, intervention has never worked.
It's time to stop this kind of policy, stop this kind of thinking.
All right.
I've got one more line of questioning for you here, and this is about John McCain, his staff, and policy toward Russia.
Now, I'm against this war on terrorism thing.
I think we're agreed that we'd like to see as a very focused, low-level kind of law enforcement intelligence type operation against the actual individuals who are our enemies, and I think, as you said, ramp the rest of this thing down.
But when I look into the future and imagine some sort of new Cold War or worse with Russia, I can't help but wonder just what flavor of insanity has taken over up there in Washington, D.C., where John McCain, actually, I guess this is, he's decided from focus groups and what have you that this must be a positive talking point for his campaign for the presidency, that we're not going to take any S from Russia.
We're going to get in their face.
We're going to pick a fight with them over former Soviet Georgia.
We're going to put so-called defensive missiles in Eastern Europe, and this guy Putin is a thug.
Is this really where we're headed now?
We're going to have to have a confrontation with Russia again?
Yeah, I find it astonishing, too.
I mean, it's like they're trying to restart the Cold War.
Putin is a dictator, and Russia is kind of a difficult place in terms of its transition into any kind of pluralistic democracy.
It's not happening.
But the country is basically a free market economy in a lot of ways.
It's made a lot of progress compared to what it was like in Soviet times, and it's armed with a lot of nuclear weapons.
We don't really need a conflict with Russia.
I don't understand where McCain is coming from, except that it could be that because so much of his money comes from defense contractors and also the money that goes to the neocons comes from the defense contractors, they want to make sure we have a big adversary out there that can be pointed to to justify continuing in these defense expenditures.
But the McCain line is insane.
He wants to kick Russia out of the G8.
He wants to confront Russia on a number of issues.
And don't forget China.
China has also kind of been in the crosshairs.
Again, this is not to defend China or its policies, but we don't need international conflict where there are better ways to resolve these issues.
And Putin has shown himself to be amenable to discussion, to negotiation.
He is susceptible to pressure in various ways.
And McCain, again, is looking for the military solution, and this is scary.
Well, in what way does Russia even stand in the way of American interests in the world as broadly as even a McCain might define them?
Well, McCain defines them pretty broadly.
That's, I think, the point.
Russia, of course, has commercial deals with Iran.
It basically is involved in the Middle East as kind of a fifth party in terms of its support for countries like Syria.
So it is perceived negatively in terms of the McCain worldview.
Russia has its own sphere of interest, which we're the ones that are pushing on it.
You know, the situation in Georgia, which I'm sure you understand, there are two sides to this argument.
And also the situation in the Ukraine, the whole issue of Ukraine joining NATO when it appears that more than half of the Ukrainian people are opposed to it.
So there's some crazy stuff going on here.
And I think McCain probably spent too much time ejecting from his airplanes and things like that and hit his head a few times.
His brain is scrambled.
And he comes across very often now like a doddery old man who doesn't know exactly what he's saying or why he's saying it.
Right, yeah, I've noticed that too, especially during this campaign.
I'm sure he's very busy.
But I've noticed that his depth of understanding seems to just about stop at the level of his talking points.
He really is not very well informed about any of these.
Yeah, that's the scary thing.
He's not outing his foreign policy credentials, and he doesn't seem to know very much.
Now, in terms of picking a fight with China, I guess I've got to wonder about the splits in the GOP between the Wall Street crew and just the Navy faction or whatever of the Republican Party.
It's got to be that the guys on Wall Street want no problems with China whatsoever.
Everybody's making money.
We're doing business.
Maybe Lockheed could make a killing off having some sort of conflict or Cold War or anything like that with China.
But there's a lot of other American businesses that stand to lose a lot for a policy like that.
Where the hell are they?
Yeah, well, that's it.
I wonder who's kind of speaking for the American people on any of these issues.
The United States is in a terrible economic situation, and we have lost all of our political capital over the past seven years.
This is not a good time for our country, and what we're heading into is going to be even worse.
And yet we don't have any of the three major politicians that are running for the presidency even talking about it.
Yeah, it looks like we're just stuck on the very same course.
When I saw Barack Obama, just for example, he seems to be the least warlike of all these people, and yet he hesitated not one moment to throw Jimmy Carter under the bus for going to meet with Hamas and has really made a lot of statements that would make me think that he's not very much better than Hillary or John McCain.
Yeah, I agree with you.
I think that the only good thing to say about Obama is the fact that he maybe would do some things differently than Hillary and McCain.
And I think a lot of people are going to vote for him in hopes that he will possibly do something.
But I wouldn't count on it.
And certainly his statements would not give you much ammunition for being optimistic.
Got that right.
All right, everybody, that's Philip Giraldi.
He's a former CIA and DIA officer.
He's a regular columnist at AntiWar.com and a contributing editor to the American Conservative Magazine.
You can also find what he writes at the Huffington Post.
Thanks very much for your time today, Phil.
Thanks, Scott.
