Alright, you all know this guy, it's Philip Giraldi, he's a former CIA counter-terrorism officer, also a DIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, writes for the American Conservative Magazine, he's a member of the American Conservative Defense Alliance, I think that's what it's called, yeah?
Of course he writes for us, a column called Smoke and Mirrors at Antiwar.com.
Lots of stuff to cover going on here, first thing is, I've got to re-subscribe to the American Conservative because I don't get deep background anymore, and I'm missing it, but I saw on the American Conservative website that if I was a paying customer, I would be able to read a bit in there called Games Over for Al-Qaeda, and I did see where you wrote a great article for the Campaign for Liberty, Ron Paul's group there, I'm not exactly sure how to characterize it, about the end of the terror war.
So that's where I want to start, it's a subject you and I have talked about quite a bit, you're a conservative, you're an America-firster, you are a former counter-terrorism officer, you take the problem as seriously as it deserves to be taken, and you know what to do about it better than them, so go ahead.
Well basically the pieces you're talking about, I'm suggesting that the Obama administration might start off on the right foot by rejecting a lot of the false rhetoric that the Bush administration used to justify the infringements that it committed against our civil liberties, and also committed against a lot of people around the world.
How many, I guess, well here's something that Justin touched on in an article that he wrote at Antiwar.com, Justin Armando, where he said, you know, everybody says, I guess, we just sort of accept that Bin Laden and his buddies are hidden in the tribal areas of Pakistan, and so of course this is the excuse for continuing the war on the ground there and that kind of thing.
Do you believe that that's true, or do you know where these guys might have gone?
I guess at least a few dozen of the so-called Arab-Afghan friends of Osama escaped from Tora Bora back in 2001, right?
Yeah, well I think the theory here is that if you keep fighting in Afghanistan, you can keep staging attacks on the tribal areas of Pakistan, Waziristan in particular, which is indeed where Osama Bin Laden is located.
And I think that what the administration is hoping to achieve here is to get lucky, which is basically to identify a group of suspected militants or terrorists and send a drone-firing Hellfire missiles to hit the target, and they're hoping that I think one of these days they're going to be able to take out Bin Laden and the rest of the leadership.
And how is it that you're so certain that that's where they are now?
I've heard from numerous people that the intelligence apparently is improving on locating them.
I'm not sure exactly what that means in terms of capabilities, but they seem to be fairly convinced that the intelligence has been improving, and there's been a couple of attacks that have taken place that apparently were near-misses.
And so that's the theory.
I mean, I think, unfortunately, it's like a crapshoot.
They keep doing it for months and months and years and years to come, and maybe still not get them.
But that's one of the reasons of why I think they want to maintain some kind of presence in Afghanistan.
Where would the party be without Goldstein?
Well, I don't know.
I mean, that's right, exactly.
I think at one point George Bush was admitting that Obama was – why do I keep saying Obama instead of – the names are too similar, it's awful – but was saying at one point that bin Laden was not really important anymore.
In a sense he is, in a sense he isn't.
He would be a significant psychological blow if the United States were able to kill him.
Well, and the thing is, if he's not dead, the empire's never leaving there, right?
I mean, no matter how much they have to tax us, if they're going to destroy every last bit of property in this country in order to finance a war in Central Asia, as long as that guy's on the run, they're going to have the excuse and they're never going to leave.
Well, you know, you've got – basically what you have here, you have a lot of people – one of the things that we should have talked about maybe earlier was the war on terror, which the whole concept – this is a way, basically, of priming the pump and keeping the money flowing and the support going for these policies.
And there are a lot of people in the Pentagon and in the intelligence community and even elsewhere that really want to keep this sort of thing going.
And yeah, you have to have an enemy.
You have to be playing this game.
But I think, quite honestly, that we are leaving Afghanistan one way or another.
There was – I'm sure you've seen – there was press media coverage today that the whole situation in Afghanistan is apparently being reviewed by the new administration, that the British have decided that we've lost this war, the French have decided we've lost this war, and there are other indications that even U.S. intelligence in highly classified reports has come to the conclusion we've lost this war.
Well, and there was a giant attack in the capital city today as well.
Yeah, a huge attack.
Apparently coordinated suicide bombers.
It's like, at a certain point, you know, you cut and run.
That's what you do.
I maybe not want to call it that, but that's what we did in Vietnam.
And ultimately, it turned out that, you know, what we had been doing there for years and years and years was counterproductive, and we would have been far better off allowing Vietnamese entrepreneurs to create toys for our children and things like that as a way of bringing them into the world community.
Well, you know, I talked with Alan Bach not too long ago, and he said that he's getting the feeling more and more, and, you know, he's in Orange County, not D.C. or anything, but he's getting the feeling more and more that the professional, snooty foreign policy types are basically more and more coming to the same conclusion as you, and that, although it's funny, because I think of Daniel Ellsberg's memoirs of Vietnam, and I think, well, so what?
That just means they'll be there another 20 years.
That doesn't mean anything, you know?
Just because they all know it's wrong now doesn't mean they're going to change course.
That's right.
There are very powerful interests that are involved in keeping this war economy and this constant sense of siege going, and I think that these people are not to be ruled out in any sense.
They really are still, they still really control the situation and control the way things are viewed in Washington, but, you know, these things have a way of changing when suddenly or at a certain point what you're doing is unsustainable, and it's clearly unsustainable, then there's going to have to be a point when Fisher cut baits, somebody in the administration is going to have to say, do we go Vietnam on this and escalate to hundreds of thousands of soldiers, or do we decide this is just not something we should be doing?
Hey, tell me something.
At the time of the September 11th attacks, how many Al-Qaeda guys were there in Afghanistan?
You know, I don't know what the actual numbers are, but I think we're talking about fairly small numbers, maybe a thousand, maybe less than that, because basically they were training people from other parts of the world to a certain extent, but the actual hardcore cadres were not that big.
I'd hesitate to come up with a number, but I bet you it would be kind of low.
Yeah, you know, they like to say anybody who ever went through a camp in Afghanistan is a sleeper cell waiting to do a suicide bombing somewhere, something like that, but that's not really true, is it?
That's not really true.
Most of them are indeed sleepers.
That they're not people that ultimately became actual terrorists or were motivated to continue down that road.
I mean, these are people in their late teens and their early 20s who were unemployed, had nothing to do in their home countries, were motivated to support the cause of jihad, but most of them did not turn out to be terrorists.
Well, and it was even kind of a rite of passage there for a time in the 1990s after the Soviets finally left and all that and all the civil war was going on.
Yeah, that's right, particularly for young Saudis and Yemenis and people from the Gulf region, sure.
So, I mean, this is the thing is that maybe now that we're in the new administration, everybody basically other than the hardcore 24% or whatever have repudiated Bush.
Maybe now is the time that people can finally get their head around what we're really dealing with and that, you know, after all, September 11th, as horrible as it was, as many people died as it was, as visually overwhelming as it was with the towers falling and all that, still, it was 20 guys that did it and they were working for, you know, like you said, maybe a few hundred something, maybe up to a thousand guys that they were working with back in Afghanistan.
I mean, this is the kind of thing where they should have gone Ron Paul's way at the beginning and gone with a letter of mark and reprisal and sent, you know, I don't know, the DIA or somebody to go and kill these guys, maybe some Marines, but you didn't need to have a war on terror at all.
And I guess my real question for you, since that's so obvious, I think, is, do you think that the guys in the administration, did they really overreact at all or they were basically as realistic about what they were up against as you and me, but they just decided this was the greatest excuse in the world to take care of whatever other agendas they wanted?
Well, I think they did.
They were ignorant to a large extent.
They didn't know what they were confronted with and the intelligence was not that good.
So that was part of the issue.
But I think they basically made some wrong decisions.
They decided that as a tactic, it would be best to go after these terrorists using the military.
And I think that was a big mistake.
Of course, it's come out recently that in the prelude and just before we attacked Afghanistan, that the Taliban was talking seriously about giving bin Laden up.
And they probably would have done that with a little more pressure.
And the fact is, we didn't take that offer.
We went in to, you know, bring about basically a change of regime, which, you know, given the Taliban was not maybe a bad idea.
But the fact is, now we're caught in a in a web that we, as usual, we don't understand and we have no way of getting out of.
I'm sorry, you say there's more coming out about that now?
About which?
About the offer to give up bin Laden?
That has come out in the last few months that the Taliban apparently were negotiating through intermediaries and were giving signs that they were willing to to give him up.
Yeah.
I guess I had read a little bit about that years ago, but I didn't I didn't see the new stuff that had come out about that.
I missed it.
Yeah.
The confirmation came from third country diplomats and other sources that were privy to the discussions that were going on.
And apparently the the Taliban were seeing the writing on the wall and decided that they should be discussing seriously about about giving him up.
But then, of course, we invaded.
This goes kind of back to the subject of whether the interests are going to be able to dictate the obviously wrong policy or not.
And I know that quite a ways in the past, you were a name source in a column by or an article by Gareth Porter.
And I'm pretty sure you follow his work for IPS at Antiwar.com, right?
Yes, I do.
Sure.
And he's been writing about this Petraeus Odierno plot, basically with a bunch of retired generals and seven days may kind of thing to basically, if not outright thwart Obama's plan to withdraw troops from Iraq, to at least set up a situation to spin it where he's a terrible guy for doing so.
And the war was won until he stabbed us in the back and and all that kind of narrative and that they're already going.
And of course, Thomas Rick's book has come out and he's doing interviews, basically telling that story.
And I just wonder what you can tell me about the relationship there between the generals and the president, that they feel big enough that I mean, and here I don't like taking president sides in anything, but sounds like they're worse than him on this issue.
And he's their boss.
You know, what do you think is really going on here?
Well, I think it's it's kind of as you just described it.
What's happening here is that these the generals are working behind the scene to to run a media campaign to put forward their point of view, which is that the two guys in particular Petraeus and Odierno are greater than Alexander the Great, the greatest generals in the history of the world, and basically had this wonderful strategy and worked out that is going to bring us victory over the bad guys everywhere.
And this is being promoted, particularly in in in the media.
There have been a couple of articles in the past couple of days, I'm sure you've read by Rick's on on Odierno and Petraeus.
And this is is crime is kind of to create a public perception that we have to keep doing what we're doing.
And yes, I think that all the evidence is that the new administration is not convinced of this yet and is evaluating what should happen next and intends to go ahead with reducing troop levels in Iraq, for starters, although unfortunately intending also to increase them in Afghanistan.
So, you know, the game is an open game.
And these guys who are civil servants, they're generals that are paid by you and me, are clearly mobilizing their resources to to get their program out into the public.
Now, am I just being alarmist because I kind of think maybe I am in that this is just the way it always is.
You can go back to Douglas MacArthur, he did the same thing, didn't he?
Oh, yeah, he got canned right out of there.
He did, didn't he?
So we always have that option.
When I was doing some research on the background to the Iran issue and how Iran was being vilified and in the media and everything like that, Oderno was behind a lot of this stuff.
So he comes across to me as an idiot, you know, I don't care how they package him and everything like that.
But to me, this guy is a lightweight.
Petraeus is a lot smarter, a lot more cunning, but he's a very political general.
We've seen a lot of these guys come through here.
No, he's not Napoleon or Alexander the Great, not Julius Caesar.
He's he's just another American general who's into the politics of it.
And, you know, these guys, somebody has to we have to get some access to the media to expose them in terms of what they are and what they represent.
And that's kind of hard to do since the mainstream media is lined up pretty much behind them.
Yeah.
Well, and no offense, Philip Giraldi, but that name Petraeus is so Roman general sounding to me.
Yeah, well, I guess it is.
But I don't think he would have made the cut with the Romans.
He'd have been out on the front line somewhere.
That's right.
He's a junior centurion.
All right.
Well, now tell me this, though, because I've thought, well, I'm the worst, right?
I don't I don't believe in anything or anybody at all these days.
And I always figured that, oh, yeah, right.
Obama wants to get the combat forces out and all they're doing is getting busy renaming everybody to force protection and counterterrorism forces and embassy detail and whatever else they can.
So they can still keep tens of thousands at a minimum of troops in the country.
And who knows how many contractors I would think, you know, probably leave those alone.
Nobody's even talking about them.
So it's always seemed like just sort of a big pseudo push to get out anyway, to kind of placate the the peaceniks on the liberal side that helped elect him because they need those poll numbers.
But I guess Gareth is telling me Gareth Porter is saying that, no, that's the generals who are doing that, trying to rename everything and undercut everything Obama really does want out.
And then Patrick Coburn is saying on top of that, America has to leave because the Dawa Party and, you know, Iran and for that matter, the people of Iraq have won and they're telling us that we have to go and we don't we're not really in any position to resist that anymore without starting the war all over again.
Yeah, well, I think all of the above is correct.
I think that basically we're seeing the generals manipulate this situation to try to continue to have leverage over it.
And I think at the same time that Coburn is absolutely right that the game has changed, that suddenly we have the Iraqis with a voice, with credibility, telling us that we have to go.
There was some there was some statements today by the Iraqi leadership that I think were reported on anti-war.
Again, reiterating that message here, because Maliki was disputing what Biden was saying.
Basically, Biden was kind of implying that we would decide what to do and so on and so forth.
But no, this is not what what's happening anymore.
We will decide what to do.
Yeah.
The headline is on anti-war.com right now, Maliki era of U.S. dominance over.
And now I guess the fact that the Dawa Party did so much better in the recent elections, the provincial elections than the Supreme Islamic Council doesn't really change the degree to which they're tied to Iran, does it?
Or maybe I'm trying to remember back, was it Maliki and Jafari were on separate sides of a Dawa Party split over whether they were more pro-Iran or more nationalist Iraqis?
Yeah, your recollection is correct.
The party, the Dawa Party basically split because the from the the rest of the religious group, because it was convinced that the rest of them were too religious in a sense and too close to Iran.
But Dawa is close to Iran, too.
I was reading the media coverage of all this and was astonished by some of it, because Dawa is fairly close on every level and the leadership of Dawa has been close to the Iranians all along.
Maliki is personally very close to the Iranians.
So this perception that suddenly we've taken a flying leap away from the Iranians is not accurate.
Yeah.
That's the victory that Obama was, I guess, bragging about the orderly elections and how great they are.
Yeah.
We'll be hearing about the Purple Thumbs again and and we'll all be doing a victory lap as we're going out the door and that huge embassy, they'll probably turn it into what did the Iranians turn our embassy into into Tehran, the the Museum of Atrocities or something like that.
Right.
Yeah.
We'll be seeing that on the Tigris and Euphrates.
Yeah.
Right.
And the rule is going to be, oh, don't use the water.
It's electrified.
You can't touch a damn thing in that embassy.
It'll kill you.
Well, Halliburton is to blame for that one.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
That's really the great one.
Right.
Electrified water coming out of the faucets.
Yeah.
The toilets, too, I think.
Oh, good.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's wonderful.
Well, so.
Well.
All right.
Let me ask you this one.
The Weekly Standard.
I know you love where this is going, right?
The Weekly Standard, quoting a Saudi newspaper, says, see, we told you Al-Qaeda is in Iran.
They're in bed with Iran.
They always have been.
And everybody who ever said otherwise has just got their head in the sand.
Well.
Yeah.
I saw all those reports.
They've been coming out now for about a month.
And as far as I can tell, there's no substance to any of them.
A lot of this was based on when the director of the Director of National Intelligence.
What was his name?
Thomas Fingar.
No.
The one who just left.
The one who was just replaced.
Oh.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I'm thinking the head of the National Intelligence Council.
No.
Director of National Intelligence.
McConnell.
Yes.
McConnell had his farewell press conference.
And at the press conference, he mentioned the tale of Osama Bin Laden's son being in Iran and then being allowed to leave Iran.
And now, apparently, he's back in Pakistan.
And anyway, this was taken by people at the Weekly Standard and other places and conflated into a whole story of Iranian involvement with Al-Qaeda.
And as far as I tried to track down the stories, and all that I could determine was that most of this had been made up.
So I don't see the evidence for any relationship between Al-Qaeda and the Iranian government except occasionally at a tactical level where our enemy's enemy type policies maybe play out when local Iranian Revolutionary Guardsmen encounter Al-Qaeda in a situation.
So there are possible scenarios where there have been connections, but there's certainly no government policy for this.
Well, we know that to whatever degree there is an Al-Qaeda, their friends in the Jandala group are working with America against Iran.
That's right.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, somehow that went unmentioned in the Weekly Standard piece I read.
Yeah.
Well, the Weekly Standard, all the news that's fit to print, right?
Yeah, I thought so.
Yeah.
But, you know, obviously, this is very selective reading of the news and very selective use of information that's out there.
And there are loyalties and connections that go all across the place from Afghanistan over to the Mediterranean and in Lebanon.
And these relationships are very complex.
And what the Weekly Standard and other people try to do is to simplify these things in terms so as to demonize all these people and all these relationships and to make sure that we have a lot of hot enemies out there all the time.
Yeah.
Well, and I guess as long as there are people with funny sounding names who wear funny looking hats, they're never going to run out of people to point their fingers at and wage war against.
That's right.
Exactly.
And there's an endless supply as far as they're concerned.
Oh, man.
It's like I think Bill Hicks said that somebody told him, if you want to complain about America so much, why don't you just leave?
And he said, yeah, right.
And get killed as a victim of our foreign policy.
That's right.
There's nowhere safe to go.
You got to be in the eye of the storm or you're going to be the victim of it.
That's exactly true.
Geez.
All right.
Well, and and I don't know, maybe the we're getting to the stormy part of the storm here in the eye as well now with the financial crisis and all the rest of it.
But let me ask you, you mentioned the Mediterranean region there.
Let's head on over to Turkey and Israel.
First of all, you have a blog entry at the American Conservative Magazine about General Zinni.
Now, he was the former head of CENTCOM, Petraeus' job.
That was his job under Bill Clinton, at least for a time.
Right.
And he was the guy that came out opposed to the Iraq war before it started, which you would think that people would take note of that.
The last head of CENTCOM was against it.
And now there was a whole rigmarole and a scandal about the incompetence of the Obama administration offering this guy a job, I guess, as I'm not sure what, overseer of Iraq or ambassador to Iraq or exactly what the viceroy.
And then they took it away from him.
And you have an explanation for the scandal, what's going on in the background behind the scandal and why General Zinni was denied this job.
Yeah.
Well, Zinni, Zinni is a very experienced operator in the in the Middle East and Central Asian regions.
He's also designated by Clinton as a special envoy to the region.
So he's a very he has all the experience that that's needed for any position in that area.
What happened was that during the last week in January, he was approached by Hillary Clinton and was brought to Washington for a series of interviews with Clinton and with her deputy Jim Steinberg.
And he basically was interviewed for the position of ambassador to Iraq.
OK.
And apparently the interview went so well that he was offered the position.
It wasn't just a screening type thing.
He was offered the job.
And the next day he was called by the vice president, Joe Biden, and congratulated on receiving the position of ambassador, U.S. ambassador to Iraq.
Mysteriously, in the next few days, this whole thing unraveled.
Zinni apparently was was wrapping up his own affairs to take the position and do what he had to do in terms of divesting himself from directorships he has and things like that.
And he was calling daily to say, you know, is is what date do you want me to be in Washington for my briefings and for my approval before the Senate?
And he kept getting stonewalled.
And finally, after a few days, he was told that the position had gone to someone else to a career diplomat, Christopher Hill.
My sources are saying that it was our usual friends in the in the Israel lobby that basically just derailed it.
That major Democratic Party donors and supporters from New York state contacted Hillary Clinton directly and told her that the Zinni appointment to Iraq would not be desirable, that Zinni had taken too many positions that were adversarial towards Israel in his previous jobs and that he would not be a good candidate.
I also heard from some intelligence sources that what is behind this is that Israel regards Iraq, of course, as a frontline state in its confrontation with Iran and would have to get oversight overflight authority over Iraq if it were able to stage an attack against the Iranian nuclear facilities.
And they did not feel that Zinni would be someone who would go along with this.
So that's the argument behind the argument.
And that's what I'm hearing for what it's worth.
I don't know if this is all true or completely correct or not, but it certainly is a plausible explanation for why someone now this was not a screening.
This was guy was offered the position of ambassador.
He was fully qualified for it, qualified for it, highly qualified.
And and basically it was pulled out from under his feet.
Yeah, it certainly sounds plausible that some heavy pressure was applied by somebody.
And now, of course, this guy has a history is he publicly complained that, hey, don't you guys realize there's this concerted effort by a group of guys called the neoconservatives to get us into this war?
And it's basically on behalf of Israel or their view of Israel's interests.
And it's a bad idea.
And they smeared him as an anti-Semite and all those kinds of things before the war.
Right.
That's right.
And also, he's been critical of settlement policy by Israel.
He's been critical of a number of their foreign policy steps.
I believe he was even critical of of their their invasion of Lebanon back in seventy six.
Sorry.
In 2006.
And so he he's been up front as a as a an independent voice, shall we say, on the Middle East.
And I suspect in this case he's paid the price.
It's so puzzling to me.
Well, I guess the answer is pretty easy.
But, you know, there's an article by David Sanger of whatever the Bush government says is true fame in The New York Times.
It's hard to quantify exactly, you know, who's the worst at The Times.
But anyway, he's in the running, David Sanger.
Anyway, he has an article today that's about how are this overture by Iran that, hey, let's start up this dialogue you were talking about is very problematic, because if we actually want to deal with the Iranians, we'd probably have to accept that they have some sort of civilian nuclear program of some kind, which the Israelis insist must not exist in any form whatsoever.
And so, geez, what are we going to do when, you know, obviously this isn't going to happen if if our obvious and direct interests conflict with theirs at all?
Well, that completely throws into question whether we're going to be able to work out a deal with the Iranians or not.
Yeah, I mean, it's pretty incredible that people like Sanger don't see the contradiction in what they're saying, which is essentially that foreign policy by the United States should be, should that Israel should have a veto over it.
And but that is essentially what he's saying.
And it's unfortunately been the way that things have operated with the Bush administration and with the Clinton administration before that.
So, you know, hopefully we're going to see a break in that.
I think that one of the one of the only good things to come out of this economic meltdown is that suddenly the United States is not numero uno anymore in terms of being able to throw its weight around and in terms of being able to unilaterally call shots in the international stage.
And I think what we're going to see is that Obama and his his people are going to be looking at a lot of these issues and saying, what's in it for us?
What do we get out of this?
And, you know, it could be that we will see some shifts on on relationships, even including Israel.
Back when you were in the CIA, I know you were stationed in Turkey.
Were you that you were the station chief there?
Is that right?
No, I was.
I was the chief in Istanbul.
Oh, I see.
Not for the whole country.
But no, no, no.
They did.
The chief for the whole country would have been an anchor in the capital.
I see.
And so for how long did that go on that you spent time working there?
I was there for three years during the 80s.
For three years.
And did you already have expertise in Turkey before that at all or?
Well, you know, it was the kind of thing when you're out and around overseas, you make friends and somehow I always had a lot of Turkish friends.
And in fact, when my wife and I were married in Rome, our best man was a Turk, Turkish diplomat.
And so we've always known Turks.
And I still go back to Turkey at regular intervals.
And I admire Turks very much.
Well, and it's such an important country and it's something that I certainly know very little about.
And I'm sure most Americans know very little about.
But this is really the bridge between the east and the west right there.
This is the place where the Muslim world has a much more Europeanized culture.
And, you know, there's always the dispute back and forth about whether they'll they are to be allowed in the European Union or not.
And then, of course, there's all the scandals about all the drug running and nuclear secret smuggling through there and and the the forgot what they call the deep state kind of secret government that runs everything and and all that corruption.
And then, of course, there's the all important relationship with Israel in the region.
And and of course, I guess I neglected to mention there that Turkey's been an ally in NATO since the end of World War Two.
Right.
And it's had a democracy, more or less, since the 1930s.
Right.
So it's a it's an unusual place.
It is, as you say, a bridge between cultures and has a lot of problems, no question about it and a lot of issues.
But at the same time, it's it's been a up until the probably the attack on Iraq, the most recent attack on Iraq by us in 2003.
It's been a staunch ally.
Yeah, they did let us use bases in their country to invade in the Operation Desert Storm back in 1991.
That's right.
But they refused to let us use the overland route to to insert the 4th Infantry Division into northern Iraq.
And although they did let us use interlaken and other air bases.
Oh, I see air bases, but not ground troops.
Right.
The border.
Well, that's a pretty hard border to roll over anyway.
And I think it is.
Yeah.
And more recently, they've played a role in being kind of the hosts, I guess, for negotiations between Israel and Syria, which I guess took place over Dick Cheney's dead body or I don't know what's going on there.
Well, Dick Cheney was did his best to stop the negotiations, but the Israelis decided they were in their own best interest.
The Syrians, of course, were eager to engage and the Turks provided the venue.
You're right.
And Dick Cheney a couple of times tried to derail it, but didn't succeed.
Well, and now, how badly do you think those efforts toward peace have been hurt by the recent.
Well, it's hard to call it a war is, again, Bill Hicks said a war is when two armies are fighting the recent attack on Gaza.
How much has that set back what was going on there, do you think?
I don't think it set it back much at all.
I think because now I think there's a separate issue and I think this is an issue that many people want to see resolved because it is something that is doable.
And so I think that the negotiations had reached it.
I've been told the negotiations had reached the stage where they've been discussing very specific issues like water rights and actual borders and access and things like that.
And I think there's been a lot of inertia on this that could easily continue.
Of course, a lot depends on who winds up as the Israeli prime minister tomorrow, I guess.
So the Gaza issue has had another effect, I think, which is basically to make the relationship between Turkey and Israel somewhat more strained.
But I think the momentum for the Syrian rapprochement continues.
Well, and what's left to I mean, I know we're talking about the Sheba Farms and the Golan Heights or what's really in question, but that includes rivers and very important resources.
Yeah, right.
That's the critical issue in a lot of these areas that water resources are absolutely critical.
And that's why a lot of the negotiations come down to really talking about water.
Well, now in this this battle between is it going to be the Kadima party or the Likud party that comes out on top in these elections?
Do you have how much difference do you think there are really between, I guess, the kind of official narrative is that Livni would close down the settlements and use the army to force the Jewish settlers out of the West Bank, whereas Netanyahu has vowed never to do that.
Do you think that that really represents much of a difference in opinion?
I think the short answer is no.
I think that there are a couple of myths that are being propagated, which is that anybody could actually go in and shut down the settlements and hand them back to the Palestinians.
No Israeli politician could do that under current circumstances, even if that is in the long term interest of Israel, which it is.
So I don't think that's going to happen for either one of them.
And then there's the myth going around that Netanyahu is a better choice because Netanyahu represents hardliner.
It's like Nixon going to China.
He would make peace with the Palestinians, whereas someone who were less a hardliner would not be able to do it.
I don't see that.
Netanyahu has been totally consistent throughout his entire career.
He is an ultra hawk, hardliner, racist.
He's supported by the neocons in the United States to do anything and everything he can to to marginalize the the Palestinians.
I just don't see it now.
It's supposed to, I guess, inspire the rest of the world to say, that's it.
We've had enough.
We can't rely on the Israelis to make peace.
We have to make it for them and force them to accept a deal under, you know, I don't know who our is supposed to really be.
But under our guidelines, give up the West Bank and Gaza because we said so.
But really, who's in any kind of position to give an ultimatum like that?
Right, exactly.
The we are the only ones, the United States are the only ones who are even in a position to think in that way.
But if if any American president tried to do anything like that, the media would be on him immediately in a murderous way.
And Congress would also be on it.
So it's not that this is just not viable.
I hope Obama will have the good sense to at least get some things going with George Mitchell incrementally to help the Palestinians and to move towards some kinds of kind of lessening of tensions.
But I don't see anything beyond that as being viable.
Can you tell me about this guy, Jim Jones?
He's the national security adviser.
And according to The Washington Post, he's going to have a greatly expanded position.
And in fact, I guess in the article they talked about, you know, what a disaster Rice was.
They didn't really talk much about Hadley, but they talked about Rice's inability to coordinate the agencies.
You know, we really do need a unitary executive on foreign policy and the chain of command ought to be Obama, Jones, everybody else, and it ought to be a very tough chain of command that way.
You got any opinion you'd like to share about that?
Well, Obama clearly has seen how bad it was under Rice when she was national security counselor, and he's basically decided to learn from that example.
She was replaced, of course, by Hadley, who was also kind of he had to follow in the tradition the way she did it.
And it was it was kind of a weak read, too.
So anyway, this is going to become, as you say, a unitary executive of of a sort in the National Security Council.
Jones is is a pretty good choice.
He's got a lot of experience.
He's a lot of hands on experience.
He has, as usual, a lot of enemies in the usual place in that he at one time thought we should consider putting a NATO force or some kind of U.S. assisted force onto the West Bank.
That idea was dismissed by a lot of people.
But I think it actually has some merit.
So anyway, he's you know, he's kind of a creative thinker.
Marines tend to be thinkers outside the box.
So I think it could be a lot worse.
I think he's he's he's one of the more positive choices coming out of this administration.
Yeah, I don't know.
It just kind of I guess it is childish of me, but to have an overextended military empire run by a guy named Jim Jones just makes me think of murder, suicide.
Yeah, well, he can't help his name.
Well, you can say call me James.
All right.
Yeah, that's right.
All right.
Here's one that I thought of a little while ago while you were talking and I forgot to get to Iran and their nuclear program.
As everybody in the whole world, except everyone with power in Washington, D.C., knows there's no nuclear weapons program in Iran.
All of America's intelligence agencies agreed about that in November of 2007 in the NIE, which had been suppressed for a year, as you had reported back in 2006.
But so now it's hey, honestly, it's February 2009.
Things change.
You're a former intelligence officer, presumably.
Well, obviously, from your writing, still somewhat plugged in to people with power in Washington, D.C., intelligence agency types.
Do you know of any new evidence or intelligence or whatever they call it that would indicate that the Iranians actually do have a nuclear weapons program?
No, I do not.
That's why the debate has shifted to Iran's having the capability to enrich uranium at all.
And that's because they the the neocons and their friends have realized that they can't in a serious way make the case that Iran has a weapons program.
So they're trying to say that, well, we shouldn't allow them to have any capability to enrich uranium, because if you can enrich uranium, eventually you can arrive at a bomb.
So that's that's how the kind of thinking has shifted tactically, because they don't want Iran to have any capability to do anything.
And of course, Iran has a perfect right to enrich uranium for electricity generation, just like every other country in the world.
So, you know, that's that's kind of where we're at.
But no, I don't know of any evidence, solid evidence that Iran has any kind of weapons program, although I would add as an intelligence officer, to be absolutely fair, if I were Iran, I would have one.
And I suspect that they do have kind of something squirreled away somewhere.
But this is not in the nature of a major program.
This is maybe some kind of research facility that, you know, does various things and maybe at one of the universities or something like that, hidden under some Department of Agriculture designation, something like that.
But I would suspect that there might well be something like that.
Well, and see, that's what's dangerous, though, is when we're dealing with the American empire, the imaginary standard of evidence is quite often enough.
Like, well, I could see why, you know, if it was me, I would have.
In fact, my good friend, Shauna Kay from Chaos Radio, we had basically agreed that they must Saddam Hussein must have, you know, at least one storehouse full of mustard gas somewhere.
Just, you know, because I would.
Right.
I mean, he's a tough guy.
He wants to have guns hanging on his wall and all that kind of thing.
Why not keep some chemical weapons?
It sounded plausible that he would have a little bit.
Not that we agreed that that would be a reason to invade his country or anything.
Yeah, well, that's that's the key point, isn't it?
I mean, you know, you can suspect all you want about all kinds of things about many countries in the world, but that doesn't give you the right to invade them.
And I think that's where we have to draw the line.
I mean, the only justification for the United States militarily getting engaged with anyone is that that that country or that person or that that ruling party poses an imminent and serious threat to the United States.
And that's the only justification.
All right, everybody, that's Philip Giraldi, former DIA and CIA counterterrorism officer.
He is a member of the American Conservative Defense Alliance.
He's contributing editor at the American Conservative magazine.
He writes articles as well as the deep background sidebar there.
And of course, he writes for antiwar dot com.
The column is called Smoke and Mirrors.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Phil.
Thank you, Scott.
