Welcome back to Antiwar Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton.
We're streaming live from ChaosRadioAustin.org and Antiwar.com slash radio.
Our guest today is Philip Giraldi.
He's a former DIA and CIA officer, contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine, weekly columnist, or I guess writes every couple of weeks for Antiwar.com, The Huffington Post and is a member of the American Conservative Defense Alliance.
And he's got this new blog entry up at the American Conservative Magazine.
It's amconmag.com slash blog.
If Iran is attacking, it might really be Israel.
Very interesting stuff and very interesting in context with all the news that's been coming lately out of the war party quarters here in America and Israel in an attempt to get a war with Iran before time runs out on the Bush administration.
So here to give us some context and explain what's going on here with this blog entry is Philip Giraldi.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How are you doing, Scott?
I'm doing good.
How are you, sir?
I'm fine.
Well, this is some pretty alarming stuff and I guess this is the kind of thing that we've all thought of that it's worth it for, I guess, any number of parties that could be named to create circumstances by which Dick Cheney could seize on them and use them as an excuse to start a war.
But you seem to be writing here that your friends who still work for American intelligence agencies are worried that the Israelis might stage an attack against American assets in the region somehow and use that as a pretext to start a war with Iran.
Well, basically, Scott, what I'm doing here is I'm putting two things together.
I mean, the first thing is I think that it's very plausible to make a case right at the moment that many people in Israel are intent on starting a war with Iran, as you put it, before the Bush administration goes out of office.
What particularly alerted me to this was two weeks ago in the New York Times, a piece by Benny Morris, a leading Israeli historian, which really pulled no punches in terms of how intensely he and presumably other conservatives or right-wingers in Israel see the need for Iran to be attacked and for Iran to be attacked right away.
And people in the States like John Bolton and Bill Kristol are basically delivering the same message.
And so taking that and putting it together with, well, how, you know, it's clear that the Bush administration is kind of reluctant to get into this, and the Pentagon is also sending signals that it really doesn't want to do this at the present time.
How would you go about doing this?
Well, as an intelligence officer, the obvious answer that comes up is you arrange an incident.
And the way you arrange an incident and make it look like the other guy did it is called a false flag operation.
You do that kind of thing when you were in the CIA?
No, I personally did not do anything like that.
But there are a lot of historical precedents for it.
You might think back to the start of the Second World War.
The Germans put some of their soldiers into Polish army uniforms and then had them attack their own colleagues to make it look like it was completely staged.
But it made it look like the Poles were attacking the Germans, which of course was ludicrous.
The Israelis basically were doing a false flag when they attacked the USS Liberty in 1967.
They had hoped to sink the ship and kill all the crewmen, and then they were going to allege that the attack had been carried out by the Egyptians.
In order to bring America in on their side?
Well, basically to bring America in on their side, and, you know, there's still some debate as to exactly why they attacked the ship.
The strongest argument appears to be that they were at that time massacring, I believe, 24,000 Egyptian soldiers that they had captured, and they were afraid that the ship was picking up the signals that would reveal that a serious war crime was being committed.
Did you see this headline that, while in Israel, Admiral Mullen had a discussion with the Israeli government about the Liberty attack?
Yeah, that's kind of interesting.
Ray McGovern came up with that one, and he called my attention to it.
And he said, basically, Mullen is sending a signal to the Israelis, or this is how he interprets it, saying, look, we're aware of your capability to try something like this, and we're going to be very much aware that that is a possibility.
That's one interpretation of it.
Another interesting thing is this Navy lawyer, Admiral J. Kristol, is now doing a speaking tour of Israel.
This is the guy that, a few years ago, wrote a book completely exonerating the Israelis for the Liberty.
And interestingly enough, shortly after the book came out, there was a release of National Security Agency tapes which proved that the Israelis had deliberately attacked the ship, the pilots talking to each other and describing it as an American vessel.
And so he's doing the speaking tour, and he's now accepted the truth, or he's still pushing the propaganda?
He's still pushing the propaganda line that it was just a horrible mistake.
And if you talk about denial, this guy is a federal judge, a former Navy officer, and is now a federal judge, I believe, in Florida.
So it's kind of scary where this guy comes from.
Total denial, in spite of all the evidence that demonstrates very clearly that the Israelis deliberately attacked the ship.
Hey, it's still good timing on bringing the issue up.
I mean, most people don't even know about it at all, so I guess if he's helping keep it in the news, at least over there in Israel, that's something.
Yeah, I guess that's a plus.
I think, obviously, the people that were killed on the Liberty, they still have a very legitimate grievance that's out there, and Congress has done, and the White House have done everything they could to stonewall it.
All right, now, a year ago, Stephen Clemens broke the story at the Washington Note.
It was later verified by Joe Klein at Time Magazine and then by the New York Times that Dick Cheney had sent David Wilmser around, who was, at the time, his Middle East advisor, and was sending him around to the neocon think tank saying that Cheney no longer trusted Bush to make the right decision and start a war, so he was working on the possibility of maybe arranging something with the Israelis to get them to start it and do an end run, an insubordinate end run around the President of the United States and force his hand into the war.
And apparently, you know, obviously, he's been made to back down since then, but it's not over yet.
Is that the kind of thing that you think might happen, where the Vice President could conspire with a foreign government to force the President's hand on something like this?
Well, I think the actual expression that Wilmser used was they wanted to narrow the options.
In other words, they wanted to make it so that the Bush administration was not talking to the Iranians, and that the only options that would emerge over the course of time would be military.
And one of the options they were certainly thinking about was the Israelis staging a pre-emptive attack that would pull the United States into it.
I think this is where Cheney comes into it.
I think Cheney, if you read some of the accounts, particularly in the Israeli media, of Cheney's recent visit to Israel, you'll see that Cheney, I think, was basically giving the Israelis a green light on his own authority to stage an attack.
Now, whether this was cleared with Bush or not, I don't know.
But this is the kind of thing, I think, that you can expect from Cheney, that he'll let other players do the initial steps, knowing very well that the consequence of this would be the United States would be, within a matter of days, fully involved.
Now I'm really interested in the role that Mullen and Gates are playing.
In a sense, you could argue that they are being insubordinate.
I mean, they happen to seem to be on my side in trying to stave off war, rather than do it Cheney style and try to force one.
But they seem to basically be taking on the president in public, although I'm suspicious that perhaps it's simply a matter of good cop, bad cop, when I read things like this in Haaretz, where Robert Gates is saying, writing in parameters, the U.S. war college quarterly, another war in the Middle East is the last thing we need, despite the fact that Iran supports terrorism, is a destabilizing force, and in his judgment is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons.
But all intelligence agencies, including his, which most of the intelligence agencies are controlled by the Secretary of Defense anyway, right?
They all agreed that they're not hell-bent on making nuclear weapons.
So what is this guy doing, Phil?
Well I think this is reflective of the fact that Bush has decided that he's not going to do anything about Iran.
I think that's kind of where he is.
And I think when you hear from Mullen, Mullen's a team player, and so is Gates to a large extent.
These guys are sending the administration signal that we are not welcoming a war right at the present time.
Which is not to say that there aren't very strong currents in the United States government, led by Cheney and others, some even in the Pentagon, like Eric Adelman, that very much would like to see a war with Iran.
So this is the kind of situation that can tip another way.
But I think that Bush has decided that there's just no advantage in doing this now, that it's too late in the administration, and that there are too many downside consequences to it.
Even particularly for John McCain's candidacy, if something were to start and go wrong.
So there are a lot of issues there, but I suspect that Mullen and Gates are actually kind of speaking for the President, believe it or not.
Well, so how great a danger is it, do you really think, that Israel could do something to force America's hand, whether in league with Dick Cheney or just with a wink and a nod from him?
Well, you know, I think there's a high probability of that.
This is not a matter of statistics, this is a matter of politics.
And it's a political decision.
Another thing I've been noticing in the Israeli media, which clearly, Scott, you're reading too, is that Olmert is looking for a way out of his political scandals, where his bribery scandals involving American businessmen.
And you know, there are a lot of politicians who realize that a nice little military action is a good way to get out of trouble.
Well, that's true.
It's a time-tested and honored tactic, isn't it?
Yeah, it sure is.
Okay, well, speaking of Israeli media, I have here former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevi, again from Haaretz, report ex-Mossad chief says strike on Iran could affect us for 100 years.
And you know, the current Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, although he's contradicted himself quite a few times, has said at least two or three times publicly that we don't need to have a war now, we can handle this, we have plenty of time, et cetera like that.
Of course, there's other reports that where even the Israeli government is mocking Ahmadi Najad and saying, oh, their nuclear program isn't advanced as they like to pretend.
Yeah, that's interesting.
And not only them, but also the Israeli foreign minister has said a couple times that Iran is really a paper tiger.
And the most recent issue of Time Magazine, which quoted Halevi, also quoted an unnamed senior Israeli intelligence officer saying the same thing, that Iran essentially is a paper tiger.
That is, what is the old English kind of story about the frog who pumps himself up to be as big as a bull?
You know, they said this is what they're saying, that essentially the Iranians are not a serious threat.
A lot of people know that, a lot of people in the U.S. government also know it.
But the fact is, this is a process that's being driven by politics as much as anything.
And that's what the dangerous aspect of it, because Iran is not a threat, at least it's not now.
And lots of people know that.
And yet you keep hearing nothing but war, war, war.
Okay, now, this is more kind of long-term strategic and speculation, prediction type stuff.
But, and it's some reading between the lines, too.
When I see the head of Mossad say, or the former head of Mossad say, this could affect us for a hundred years, of course, in Seymour Hersh's most recent article for The New Yorker, he quotes Gates, our Secretary of Defense, saying that if we do this and start a war with Iran, it will start a generational conflict, our grandchildren will be fighting them generations from now in our streets, etc., like this.
This seems to me a recognition that we do not have a real clash of civilizations, but that if we do attack Iran, we will.
Is that right?
Yeah, I think that's a safe bet.
I think that one of the scary, the truly scary things about talking about war with Iran is that it would unleash other forces.
I think that we've actually seen over the last couple years a decline in kind of the jihadi, you know, clash of civilizations sense coming from the Islamic side.
And I think this has declined for a lot of reasons, which would take us forever to get into.
But I think that that's definitely been taking place.
Muslims are alienated from this kind of rhetoric and this kind of talk, but if you suddenly attack Iran, those who have been saying that, yes, the United States is out to exterminate all Muslims, they suddenly, their voices become very, very credible.
Yeah, this is, and we've known this for years, right, that this is what Osama Bin Laden wants to receive.
And I thought video of Ayman al-Zawahiri saying in an interview that, yeah, listen, if we can figure out a way to create a pretext for America to have a war with Iran, that would be so much the better, to further bleed America dry and destroy those evil dog ayatollah mad mullahs that we hate so much, he said.
That's right.
Yeah.
Because they, you know, there you would have the two great enemies of al-Qaeda fighting each other.
Wow.
It's almost like, you know, it's not the neocons who are pulling Bush's strings.
It's al-Qaeda.
Osama Bin Laden's writing the script.
It almost seems that way, doesn't it?
But unfortunately, I keep hearing the voice of Bill Kristol on Sunday mornings.
And so...
Oh, I don't know how you put yourself through it.
I don't watch.
I just can't.
I turn them off pretty quickly.
I like to see that Cheshire Cat grin that he has as he describes yet another war that we have to fight.
So, you know, the neocons are still very present.
All you have to do is literally is turn on the television.
And these people do want war, and they think war is the solution.
Even the John Bolton lady, for God's sakes, it's unbelievable that, you know, he's saying from his whatever bully pulpit he still has, that Israel should attack the United States with the full support of the United States.
And, you know, this is insanity.
Yeah, it is insanity.
Well, you mean attack Iran.
Iran.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But same difference.
I mean, because we are talking about something that would be very, I guess, self-sacrificial, at least if you count the entire American people rather than the war party that will benefit their own way.
Yeah.
Well, there is absolutely no plus side on this for the American people.
You know, oil prices would skyrocket.
That's just for starters.
You'd have a completion of the process where the United States would be really turning into a military economy where the only part of the economy that functions is the military.
And that's scary.
And, you know, if you if you project back and you think of what the founding fathers, if they could be here now and see this, what they would think.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
I saw a political cartoon that was a new energy resource.
We just hook up the the wire set up to the founding fathers so that they can spin in their graves and generate electricity to run our cities.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, you know, there's a certain group of Salafist Wahhabist Sunni jihadist types called Jandala, who seem to be doing very well these days from all the headlines I'm reading, Phil, in terms of what?
In terms of the.
Well, they just murdered two more of the cops that they had kidnapped in Iran.
Oh, I see.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, obviously, this is one of the groups that if you read between the lines in Seymour Hirsch's account of what's going on, you would this is one of the groups that's being supported.
And there's also an interesting story, which which I think was an antiwar from Israeli sources about an explosion of a munitions caravan in Tehran, which is is extremely mysterious.
And there is some suspicion that it might have been carried out by the United States or Britain or by the Israelis, who the players are, as nobody's quite clear.
But if this is true, this is a serious escalation of this kind of support of guerrilla warfare or as the agency would call it, covert action inside Iran, because these are really acts of war.
Well, you know, when I talked to Hirsch and I only had just a few minutes with him, but he seemed to kind of back away from the assertion that American money was actually paying for terrorist groups to commit violent acts, although that sure seemed to be at least my interpretation of Andrew Coburn's coverage of the same presidential finding.
They're authorizing some sort of covert activity in Iran.
What's your take on it?
Well, my take would be, you know, I've been on the inside of this kind of stuff and, you know, you support groups that have weapons and they go in and they do things, then where do you draw the line in terms of, you know, are you really supporting them or really not supporting them?
Of course you're supporting.
Yeah.
Well, so there is no other purpose for that, is there, other than to get the Iranians to finally do something stupid or what?
Well, you know, I wish it were that simple.
The thing is, certainly if this if this nonsense continues, either the United States or the Iranians or the Israelis are going to, somebody's going to do something really stupid.
And that's the danger here.
I mean, you're you're basically you're meddling in in situations where you don't have to meddle, where they're particularly in terms of the so-called threat posed by Iran.
There are lots and lots of ways to deal with that, starting with diplomacy and and working with other incentives.
And the fact that we are are constantly going for this quick kill kind of option, supporting groups that are there to overthrow the regime or to destabilize and so on and so forth.
I mean, this kind of stuff is playing with fire.
Well, and see, that's really the thing, like Justin Armando has been writing for years, that we're simply a border incident away, Gulf of Tonkin incident away, explosion inside Iran away from some sort of pretext that will be good enough.
Yeah, that's that's exactly right.
You know, if you want a war, there are 100 ways to start it.
And unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there who want a war on on both sides.
And this is this is the situation we've gotten ourselves into.
It's reassuring when you hear Mullen and you hear Gates saying, look, we want to negotiate a solution.
We don't want to know a military option.
It's not in our interest to do this right at the present time.
But until the president says that, it's not policy.
And I'm waiting to hear it from George Bush.
Of course, the grammar would be awful and probably the syntax.
But I still would like to hear him say it in his own words, that that this is off the table and that we really want to talk to these people to resolve our problems.
Well, do you think that if, you know, diplomatically and politically speaking and all that, that if Bush decided to, hey, you know what, I think I'll take you up on that great offer of 2003 to negotiate everything, do you think they'd go along with that or they wouldn't at this point?
I don't know.
You know, I don't really know enough about what's going on inside Iran.
You really have to talk to somebody like Juan Cole or a genuine expert in terms of of how Iranian politics are playing out.
I would think if the Iranians right now basically see themselves as in a very strong position and that might disincline them to to want to engage in serious negotiations.
And also, from what I understand about Iran, obviously, the government there has moved to the right as a result of the events of the past five years and that it is more conservative now and may be less interested in cutting a deal.
But, you know, you don't know until you try.
I mean, quite honestly, the negotiations up till now have not gone anywhere because the United States has not been a serious player.
Well, the place in the region where they've been strengthened the most is in southern Iraq.
And of course, America has supported the Supreme Islamic Council and the Dawa Party, above all others in that country, to the benefit of Iran.
But lately, Maliki of the Dawa Party, the quizzling prime minister, has said, OK, America, we don't need you anymore.
You can go ahead and go.
Do you think that he really means that or that's just political cover for him at home?
Is he really in a position where he only needs the backing of the Iranians and no longer of the Americans, too?
Well, I think there are a couple of ways to look at this.
I think that mostly what he's saying is for domestic politics.
They have local elections coming up at the end of the year.
And there was a strong indication that the Mahdi, the group around Muqtada al-Sadr, was going to stage a major victory.
So he wanted to forestall that.
And indeed, the Mahdi has been apparently losing some of its political support.
So there's a domestic agenda there.
And I think that to a certain extent, he does feel that as the security situation improves, the United States becomes a more marginal player.
And I think what he'll try to do is play the United States to get the support that he really feels he needs and basically exclude the U.S. from any of the political process.
How successful he'll be, who knows?
And indeed, the security situation seems to have gone south again.
Today, there was a bombing that killed over 50 people or a series of suicide bombings that killed over 50 people in Baghdad.
So that's kind of breaking up, too.
Yeah, 70 killed, 300 wounded.
I only just hit refresh on antiwar.com.
It's all red.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Everything's blown up all over the world, it looks like here.
Also, the security situation is maybe not as stable as it, to a certain extent, seems.
A lot of the security situation depends on other political factors as to who's doing what to whom and how they think they're going to come out of a situation and whether they're lying low for the moment.
You know, there are a lot of things that make it very complicated.
Well, you know, we have this whole Sunni awakening with the concerned local citizens, the sons of Iraq, who are basically the Sunni insurgency who resisted the occupation for years but then basically have decided to go on the dole.
Do you have any indications, and I mean, I guess it's possible as far as I know, but do you have any indications that they are actually willing to join the Maliki government as a minority player or that the Maliki government would be willing to have them?
Well, you know, I think the answer to that has to be what kind of incentives are offered to them.
The big problem for the Sunnis, of course, is money.
They don't have access to the oil revenue and the Maliki government has been very resistant on implementing any kind of, well, should we say constitutional changes that would share revenue and that sort of thing.
Yeah, I guess if you gave the Sunnis enough of an incentive, they might be interested in participating in the government, but I don't know how far you can go with that one.
I mean, it's just basically they have a local interest that's distinct from that of the central government, like the Kurds.
The Kurds are, I'm sure you've been reading, are expanding their zone of authority up in the north of Iraq.
I mean, everybody has all kinds of horses in this race, and to look at it in simplistic terms like, you know, Democrats and Republicans, we have a political system and authority is passed from one party to the other, I mean, it doesn't work that way.
So in other words, what you're trying to say is the search worked.
You know, I don't know.
The surge or the enhancement or whatever the technical term was for it certainly has created better security in some areas, but there are a lot of people like Juan Cole who are saying that security in a lot of other areas has gotten worse and that there are political explanations for why some areas are more stable at the moment that are probably not permanent.
Now, let's see, I've got so many different things here I wanted to ask you about.
I've got to try to keep them in order here.
Well, first of all, what years were you in the CIA?
I was in from 75 through 92, and then for a year again around about 9-11.
Oh, wow.
Okay, so then you do know the answer to this question, I think.
There's an article today on the front of AntiWar.com, Iran's Islamic Revolution had Western blessing.
I don't know if you read this thing, it's an interview that says that basically the Americans gave a wink and a nod to the Ayatollah Khomeini and said, well, look, this is basically inevitable.
The Shah was dying or whatever, they got him out of the country.
Go ahead and recognize the government and everything was fine until the revolution kind of got out of control and they seized the hostages at the embassy and it was downhill from there.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's basically true.
There were a number of divergent views on what was going on in Iran at that time.
The intelligence services, which of course where I was, basically were saying that the Shah would be able to stabilize the situation and he still should be the horse that would be backed.
However, there were strong divergencies within the Carter White House, within the National Security Council there, and also at the State Department.
So there were people saying all kinds of different things and there were certainly were, there was no lack of people who were supportive of Khomeini and what Khomeini represented before Khomeini began to demonstrate traits that Washington found very much undesirable.
Well, and you know, there's all kinds of scandals.
I remember Robert Perry, the great investigative reporter, told me that when he investigated Iran-Contra, he noticed that as he peeled the layers of the onion, it just kept going further and further back.
Of course, there's the stories, I don't know how exactly confirmed they are, that the Republicans made a deal with the Iranian revolutionaries to go ahead and keep the hostages longer in order to benefit the Republicans back then.
Do you know about that?
Well, that story's been out there for quite a while, but I don't know if it's true.
I never saw any actual evidence, but of course at that time I was in Rome, Italy, so I would not have necessarily been in the loop in terms of what was going on there.
I see.
But does that seem plausible to you, or are you kind of suspicious of that, or I don't know, does it matter?
I'm kind of suspicious of that.
Deep down I feel that most conspiracies tend to come out with time, and the fact that there really hasn't been any corroboration of that story would suggest to me that it's just a story.
Yeah.
Well, we'll have to look further into that one, I guess.
Alright, so now I want to ask you about your last article that you wrote for AntiWar.com, conservative confusion on Iran.
And you're a member of the American Conservative Defense Alliance, you write for the American Conservative Magazine, and you're not some hippie, dippy, liberal peacenik, you're an America first kind of guy, and that's got to, at some level in there, got to conflict with be loyal to your country, be loyal to your president, go along and respect authority and all those other conservative traits that most American conservatives apparently are overwhelmed by.
How do you address them?
Well, basically I go back to basics.
I say that, you know, conservatives basically, their first loyalty should be to the Constitution, not to the president, not to a political party, and that the Constitution is everything.
And we've seen our Constitution weakened by what's been going on over the last five or six years, and also the basic constitutional principle that you don't go to war without declaring war and with full consent of Congress has been trampled on.
So that's a basic conservative principle.
And I would point out to conservatives essentially that, you know, the world is turned upside down in that if you're supporting George Bush, you're supporting big government, you're supporting budget deficits, you're supporting a stripping of constitutional rights, you're creating an environment in which the United States is going to war without having any vital interests at stake.
It used to be conservatives stood for the opposite on all these things.
And so what I'm saying is conservatives should go back to their conservative roots.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Makes perfect sense to me.
I'm trying to play devil's advocate or something, but I can't think of the argument that goes against that.
Just be loyal to your president.
But that's just such a simple slogan.
It doesn't really mean anything.
That's right.
And it doesn't make any sense when your president's wrong about everything.
That's the point.
Yeah.
The president is just an executive.
The president is not is not the Constitution of the United States, and he's not the guarantor or he's supposed to be the guarantor of our of our liberties and rights.
But of course, when he's not doing that, he has to be held accountable.
Yeah.
Well, and speaking of that, there's a new article in salon dot com by Tim Shorrock exposing Bush's historic abuse of power about the possibility of some new real in-depth church committee type hearings and getting to the extent of the Bush administration's data mining and databasing of Americans activities.
And I believe you were quoted by name in Christopher Ketchum's article about the main core database and the enemies list, I guess, that the state is keeping of people here in America.
Can you comment on this?
I don't have any inside or authoritative information on that sort of thing, but certainly I keep hearing from people that are, you know, from the intelligence background, like myself, who have perhaps more familiarity with it, have been saying for quite some time that the United States government is compiling enormous databases, comprehensive databases on all citizens, and that many citizens are as a result of this process being identified as as people who are dangerous or subversive.
And what was the what was the what were the numbers that came out last week?
A million entries on the no fly list, which constitute four hundred thousand people.
And I mean, really, are there that many terrorists in the United States?
If there were, I would be we'd be fighting in the streets, wouldn't we?
Yeah, it seems like we'd all be dead already.
Exactly.
Yeah, so I guess what really is going on here is not only do we have the technological capability to turn the entire Cold War intelligence apparatus toward the American people, but we have the secrecy and the entire complete lack of accountability to go along with that.
Yeah, that's the problem.
I think all of this comes down to the big word accountability.
And we've lost sight of the fact that government officials should be accountable.
I know, Scott, you're somewhat familiar with how the British parliamentary system works when when a British cabinet member is involved in something that's that's illegal or the judge to be wrong or something like that.
They resign immediately.
There's accountability in the process.
We don't have that anymore.
We have clowns like the current Attorney General Mukasey, you know, who's who's justifying the same things that Alberto Gonzalez was justifying in terms of torture and secrecy and executive privilege and that kind of thing.
And, you know, these things are violations of our Constitution.
Yeah.
And, you know, that's the real problem, too, is this isn't just well, you know, this policy is wrong and this policy is wrong.
This is sort of a wholesale assault.
It's they keep drawing a line and then crossing it and then drawing the line and crossing it again just to see how far they can get.
And apparently they can go as far as they want.
There they've had their accountability moment and there is none.
Well, that's clear.
I mean, we there was an election in 2006 in which it seemed there was an accountability moment, at least in terms of the Iraq war.
And but there hasn't been.
We're still there.
We're still spending twelve billion dollars a month.
Americans are still being killed there and there's no end in sight.
And so, you know, you blame it on the Democrats, but the Democrats are just like the Republicans.
They're basically people who are interested in getting into power and staying in the power.
And they don't really care about the ethics of how they do that or what they do once they're in power.
I mean, there are certainly exceptions to that.
What I'm saying, like people like Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, but they're few and far between.
Yeah, it's amazing to hear the discussion about outright admitted violations of the FISA statute of the torture statutes and to hear the Democrats saying Cass Sunstein, an Obama adviser, saying, you know, we don't want to criminalize politics and criminalize policy differences.
I don't think any of us can use that in court if we're accused of a crime, can we?
But your honor, we just, you know, completely twist and ignore this law and it doesn't even mean what it says anymore.
How can you convict me?
That doesn't work for us.
Yeah, well, the impeachment was inserted in the Constitution because there was a concern by the founding fathers that you would get executives who would not basically enforce the law.
And that's essentially why it's there.
And, you know, we have egregious cases of failure to to enforce the law on the part of administrations now going back quite a ways and also and most particularly with this current administration.
And because in politics, all these people, you know, one hand washes the other Democrats and Republicans alike, and they're not willing to rock the boat to do what's right.
And that really is unfortunate.
Yeah, it's funny because they're completely willing to rock the boat to do what's wrong.
They're willing to shake the whole world up like dice at a craps table and, you know, see what happens.
Here we have John McCain, bad mouth and Putin and Russia again.
And, you know, let's put aside McCain for just a moment here.
There's got to be some sort of so-called pseudo intellectual background to this idea that we need to have a provocative policy toward Russia.
What the hell is going on?
I thought we were friends with the Russians now, Phil.
Well, I think this is another neocon policy.
The neocons, they're most focused on the Middle East, but they they basically see adversaries everywhere.
And they believe that the United States should be asserting itself militarily against everybody just about that.
They also have problems with China.
I'm sure you've seen.
And but Russia seems to be the bad law at the moment.
And as you say, it's unfortunate that we have no particular reason to be meddling in Russia's internal politics.
Putin had an approval rating, I believe, of 92 percent when he when he stepped down as president.
And, you know, it's up to the Russians to run their country the way they want to.
And yet, you know, we have McCain constantly making comments about this.
And, you know, there's nobody in as far as I can tell the Democratic Party who's speaking up and saying that this kind of stuff is is idiotic.
Well, now there's got to be some kind of what they call geopolitical interest and so forth here.
This isn't just ideological craziness, is it?
Well, I I don't know.
I don't see anything logical in it.
Why are we pushing NATO up to the very borders of Russia?
Why are we putting in this missile defense system in Poland and Czech Republic, which has no real function whatsoever?
Why are we doing these things?
I don't understand it, to be honest.
And if there's a geopolitical reason there, I don't see it, particularly now that Russia is asserting itself again.
And Russia is a major oil producer, and there are a lot of good reasons to try to be friendly with Russia.
Well, I don't know.
I know there's probably a lot of bad blood from some of the shock therapy, so-called policies of the 1990s and so forth.
But I mean, from what you know of Vladimir Putin, if we had a policy of genuine friendship toward Russia, would it be reciprocated?
Is there a war party in Russia that wants to pick a fight with us?
There is.
I mean, there are definitely nationalists in Russia that are just as extreme and just as crazed as nationalists in the United States or anywhere else.
But at the same time, I think it was very clear during the first couple of years of the Bush administration that Putin was quite friendly and Putin was willing to work in a partnership with the United States on most issues.
The Russians, even an issue like terrorism.
The Russians, of course, with the Chechens and others, have their own terrorism problem.
And there is every indication that the Russians are willing to cooperate right across the board on many of these issues.
And I don't really understand what is driving this policy of almost deliberate alienation of the Russians.
Pat Buchanan speaks out on it quite often or writes about it quite often.
This is just a totally insane policy.
Well, and I think it's really important to hear a guy like you, who is a covert CIA operative in Cold War days, somebody like Pat Buchanan, who we all know was a speechwriter for Nixon and still to this day an ardent defender of the Cold War and America's Cold War policies.
And to hear people like you say that it's America who's got it all wrong in our policy toward Russia instead of the other way around, I think is a real indicator.
We all know Pat Buchanan is not soft on the Russkies.
He's got to have something legitimate he's complaining about here.
Yeah, I mean, you know, there's a real danger.
I think it was either John Adams or it was Madison who said that the United States should not be going around looking for dragons to slay.
And that's what we're seeing today.
And a lot of this comes out of the hate to keep banging on the neocons.
But I mean, it's the neocon mindset.
It's the neocon way of looking at the world, which is, I guess, in a way, curiously enough, Darwinian.
You know, you're in constant conflict.
You're constantly seeking to become biologically superior or something.
There's something very strange about it.
And one would have hoped that in this decade, certainly with the United States facing no real competitor in the world, militarily or economically, we could have gotten away from that kind of nonsense.
But it seems to be pervasive.
All right.
Well, I really appreciate your insight on the show today.
I know the audience does as well.
It's Philip Giraldi, former DIA and CIA officer, contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine, writes a biweekly column at antiwar.com, also blogs at the Huffington Post and is a member of the American Conservative Defense Alliance.
Thanks very much for your time today, Phil.
Thank you, Scott.
