02/29/12 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Our next guest is Phil Giraldi from the American Conservative Magazine and antiwar.com original.antiwar.com/Giraldi.
He's also the executive director of the Council for the National Interest Foundation.
Welcome back, Phil.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing good.
Thanks for joining us today.
Very important stuff to talk about.
As always, the threat of war with Iran, it never happens.
That's good.
But the threat of it never seems to go away either.
And I guess the biggest news, as far as I know from recently, is that David Sanger was pushed to the side.
And James Risen took the front page of the New York Times on the Iran nuclear beat to say that the CIA says that they're not even making nukes.
And this is something that, of course, we've talked about a hundred times or something on this show, but that is never on the front page of the New York Times.
And so I wondered whether you thought that was some kind of pushback.
And I guess from whom and against whom?
Well, I think what it reflects is the fact that I, like you, I follow the coverage of Iran in the New York Times and Washington Post and in some other places.
And what you notice is that you have these articles implying that Iran is about to get a weapon, that Iran is a threat, that Iran is destabilizing the entire world.
And then you go down and read the comments, and you find that even in places like, for example, Wall Street Journal, you're going to get a flood of comments saying, we don't want another war.
And I think they've finally woken up to the fact that, hey, maybe they have to provide some coverage that's a little more realistic and perhaps a little more moderate.
And I think that's what we're seeing.
So it was really a decision by the Times rather than the CIA came to Risen with anything that he didn't already know, that we didn't all already know from reading Seymour Hirst seven months ago.
Well, I wouldn't be surprised if the government is doing a little pushback.
And Risen, of course, is a very credible figure who's had quite reasonable reporting on most of these issues.
And they might have suggested, hey, maybe it's a good time for an article to diffuse this issue a little bit.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's what's operating too.
Mm hmm.
Well, you know, even for people who aren't so much interested in this issue, but watch the New York Times very closely.
I think it's really interesting to see.
Sanger even had a piece, I think it was the same day, at least on the website the same day.
Maybe they were one day removed in the paper edition or something.
But he had a pretty hawkish article.
But this is exactly his assigned beat, this reporter, David Sanger at the New York Times.
But for this one, it was James Risen and Sanger, sometimes co-author Mark Mazzetti, whoever that is.
Who came out and said really in no uncertain terms that the 2010/11 national intelligence estimate agrees with the one from 07 that says they're not even making nukes.
They haven't even decided to make nukes.
And in other words, everybody to the contrary is just a liar.
They're just lying.
And even Israelis have come and said the same thing.
The Israeli think tank and leaks out of their foreign ministry and defense ministries have both indicated that they do not believe that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon.
So it's pretty much a consensus that this is not taking place.
Yet, if you turn the dial and get Romney, Gingrich or Santorum, you will be hearing something quite different.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, and now the big story yesterday was this Associated Press article that said that the Israelis are saying if they do attack Iran, they won't even warn us.
They'll just go ahead and do it, which sounds pretty much, I guess, at least in the first paragraph, like they're saying they dare us to shoot them down over Iraq or something like that.
But then in the next paragraph, they say, but this is just because we love you and we're giving you plausible deniability so that the Iranians will not hit back at any American targets once we start bombing them.
What's that sound like to you?
Well, it's nonsense, of course.
I mean, the fact is that if Iran retaliates, it's almost inevitable that American targets have to be part of it.
I mean, after all, they're being bombed.
So I would not take that as anything but kind of a face-saving gesture.
I think the really interesting thing on this or how we're going to be going on this will be revealed next week when Netanyahu is here and the AIPAC is having its annual conference.
I think that the markers that they're going to be putting down next week and how far Netanyahu is going to be able to, shall we say, discipline our president will be significant.
Obama, of course, will be speaking at AIPAC also.
So that will be one of these kind of...
You remember in the old days with the Kremlin, Kremlin watchers, and you'd watch every word in a speech or look at every word in a speech and try to determine what exactly the meaning was.
That's, I think, what we'll be doing next week.
Right, because the American people are now, and maybe they were then too, but we are certainly now as removed from the power at that AIPAC conference as we were from the Kremlin back then.
Yeah, I think more so.
You're right.
I think the fact is this is all playing out in kind of like an abstraction.
I mean, it's not the input of the American people who really don't want a war.
And in fact, the White House doesn't really want a war.
It seems to be that these aren't even relevant factors, that what's going to happen is being determined by a lobbying group and certain key congressmen who are pushing this issue and the media.
Well, now, I don't want to give Netanyahu too much credit or anything, but he's got to kind of have some kind of imagination for what the Middle East would look like, what position Israel would be in after a war, and maybe he could turn the whole Middle East upside down and maybe that's what he wants.
But I mean, is that really in the Likud imagination?
That's what's the best long-term interest for Israel is just chaos all around them, because I guess all that chaos will be weakness and they'll be the strongest power.
It seems to me like that's not a very good long-term fix for the Israeli problem there.
Yeah, well, I would have to agree with you, but I think there is an Israeli point of view.
If you go back to the Clean Break document, which was altered by Richard Perle and others, essentially it calls for encouraging the Arab states to break up into their constituent parts, so they'll be weak.
So there is that kind of mindset in Israel, but I think I absolutely agree with you that Netanyahu would be crazy to attack Iran at the present time, because the consequences will be totally unpredictable.
But that doesn't mean he won't do it.
Certainly the signals they're sending are insistent.
There's almost something every day urging a military option to take care of Iran, and at a certain point, just the fact that you keep saying this builds a certain momentum.
Right.
Well, I think maybe there's a little bit of momentum behind, wow, all that hype isn't true about their nuclear program.
I mean, I don't know.
Certainly we've been trying on this show for a long time to make that point, and I don't know whether it's ever really gotten through to anybody, but occasionally you can read it in the Christian Science Monitor, or even the New York Times now, that this nuclear weapons program that we have to bomb so bad isn't actually real.
It's more like a Saturday morning cartoon of what's going on.
But that's pretty much the same thing with all kinds of political subjects.
You know what I mean?
It's really not different than the whole Obama's a secret Muslim, rather than Obama's a secret tool of Wall Street.
And the military-industrial complex, you know?
I think, again, to evaluate what's going on, when you read these articles, go to the comments section and see what people are saying.
I think you'll find that lots of people are waking up to the fact that this is another war for no reason.
That doesn't mean that we, the people, can stop it.
But nevertheless, I think that there are a lot of people who are quite aware of the issues.
Well, and now back on the Israeli government's point of view on this, you look at expediting the chaotic collapse as the plan, or whatever, like they say, David Wilmeser and Richard Perle, in those 1996 articles, or studies, so-called, that they did for Netanyahu, the Clean Break documents.
But already even Hillary Clinton is saying, actually, maybe we don't want to arm those that Ayman al-Zawahiri is encouraging to go to Syria to fight against Assad.
And I don't know if she is just talking out loud.
I really don't understand the context.
Maybe you've got a good idea of what she was, if she was just kind of going off and not really thinking about the microphone and the quotable there.
But she is really striking down her own policy bad.
Do we really want to help al-Qaeda in Syria, she said, Phil?
That's right.
It's that we don't know who the players are, and al-Qaeda is certainly one of them.
All right.
Yeah.
Well, you're going to have to address that angle of this same issue, really, after this with Phil Giraldi.
All right.
So welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Phil Giraldi, former CIA and DIA officer, writer for the American Conservative Magazine and Antiwar.com, executive director of the Council for the National Interest Foundation, we're talking about possible wars of regime change.
Now, I can't figure out, seriously, and we've been talking about this for years, too, who in the world would think that the stable Baathist dictatorship in Syria is worse for Israel than whatever chaos is going to replace it?
Because haven't even the neocons been able to learn that when, say, for example, in Iraq, you break it, you're not necessarily always able to put it back together the way you want it.
I mean, when David Williams and Richard Perle wrote, let's expedite the chaotic collapse in Syria, it was so that we're in charge of how it's going to look on the other side.
But they don't even believe that anymore.
They can't.
There's no way.
So what do they think they're going to get after they get rid of the Baathists in Syria, unless it's going to just be, you know, jihad war from now on over there?
Well, obviously, they are not interested in looking very far ahead.
And we're clearly seeing already in Libya, which is recently liberated, according to this kind of formula, that the results don't turn out very well.
There's a state of anarchy in a good part of Libya at the moment, and nobody seems to be in charge.
The same thing could very well happen in Syria.
Now, in the short term, you might say that benefits Israel because you have a greatly weakened Syria.
But at the same time, you're going to have a long-term result.
Eventually, somebody's going to come out on top, and there's going to be probably a Sunni-dominated government, which in all likelihood will have strong religious overtones and not be friendly in any way to or accommodating in any way to Israel.
There was another front-page article in the New York Times today about how Shias, a minority in Syria, are being systematically killed by Sunnis.
So we're seeing all this kind of craziness erupt, and we don't really understand who the players are.
It could very well be that the government propaganda is somewhat true, and the propaganda we're hearing from the rebels is somewhat false.
In fact, I would assume that to be the case.
And it's not something we should be getting involved in.
Well, you know, you look at Libya.
There's one that was on Ariel Sharon's list.
Yeah, let's get a regime change.
Everybody hates Gaddafi from way back and whatever, and he's not buying near enough weapons from Joe Lieberman and all that.
So let's go ahead and get rid of him.
But you got a very weakened Libyan state, as it's still just a bunch of militias shooting at each other.
But the problem of the era, I thought, was these stateless groups of killers.
And, you know, that's the problem for the states.
Anyway, it's not really each other in real life.
That's just when they're pretending.
The real problem is loose kooks with loose stinger missiles on their shoulders.
And that's where, you know, what happened to all of Libya's arsenal?
Same thing with Iraq, where anyone was allowed to just come and seize artillery shells to make homemade landmines out of them.
And these kind of weapons, and especially when they're talking about the shoulder fire missiles, this is absolutely a nightmare for North Africa, the Middle East, Southern Europe, at least.
Yeah, that's true.
I mean, the problem is, you know, it's like Pandora's box.
You open it up and you don't know what's going to come out.
And unfortunately, our policymakers don't seem to know either.
I would assume that their sources of information are better than your and my sources of information, but maybe not.
They seem to make blunder after blunder after blunder.
Look at the look at the chaos in Afghanistan, where we've thrown away a trillion dollars, killed 2000 American soldiers and probably something like 100,000 Afghans.
What kind of result is this?
These people are I don't know what drives them.
I don't know how they can be so stupid.
Our foreign policy is so stupid.
It's hard to imagine that anyone with half a brain is actually trying to run it.
Yeah, well, and here we are.
We got Hillary Clinton in charge of the thing.
That's what makes it fun is how unbelievable it all is that Hillary Clinton's the secretary of state right now.
Anyways, I wanted to make sure and get this footnote in.
It's coping with crumbling states, a Western and Israeli balance of power strategy for the Levant.
This is the kind of partner article or whatever to a clean break, a new strategy for securing the realm.
It's at IASPS.org coping with crumbling states.
And it's by also David Wilms or Richard Pearl.
I think certainly Wilms.
And I think I have this right, Phil, that I just read a couple of weeks ago that this guy, Sheldon Adelson, who's bankrolling Newt Gingrich, that he's the money behind this think tank where clean break and coping with crumbling states was written.
He's the guy that paid Wilms and Pearl to write this thing.
Yeah, I believe that's correct.
And he's also funding a couple of other think tanks right at the present time that were reported in the paper.
I think one is in Israel and one's in Florida or somewhere like that.
But it's clearly a sustained propaganda campaign to bring about regime change in virtually every Arab country, certainly, if not every Muslim country.
This kind of stuff is just insane.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, when Hillary Clinton is saying that, geez, maybe we shouldn't do what Ayman al-Zawahiri wants this time, which, you know, it's a bit refreshing.
The only problem is I don't trust her or whatever.
And I was under the impression, especially since you reported that there are new findings along these lines.
And, you know, the other bits and pieces we've had, that there really already is a United States, ahem, NATO, Saudi, Qatari effort to do just that in Syria.
Yeah, there's no question but that this has become official U.S. policy to regime change in Syria.
The White House has said so.
Hillary has said so.
Biden has said so.
I don't think there should be any question about it and that the intelligence agencies and organizations like NED are already in this up to their ears.
So that's clearly what's taking place.
And again, the issue becomes, who are you helping and what kind of endgame do we get out of this?
And they don't have the answers to this.
They willy-nilly are supporting these free, you know, free Syrian army, which they have no idea whether it's 30 people or 10,000 people.
And these governments in exile operate out of Germany and out of Washington or out of Beirut.
And the fact is that, you know, you don't really know what kind of bill of goods is being sold and what your end product is going to be.
And this is why, per Ron Paul, I mean, the best thing to do in these situations is just stay out of it.
You don't really know what you're doing.
Well, you know, in Libya, you really did kind of have this East-West thing where these used to be two separate states until World War II was when Libya was created.
And even though you just had very small numbers of fighters on the rebel side, they were led by European special forces and CIA and the Air Force and all of that, you know, NATO planes, you know, taking care of all their air cover.
And there really was, well, not really was, but there sort of, kind of, at least was a battle line that was slowly moving westward until finally they got to Tripoli, took Tripoli, found Qaddafi, shot him in the side of the head, that kind of thing.
We don't have anything like that neat of a narrative in Syria, do we?
I mean, this is going to be a real problem, even getting rid of the guy in the first place, never mind the horrible consequences of getting rid of him.
As far as I can tell, he still has the support of the majority of the population.
So, you know, the whole thing is one of these nightmares where you have, obviously, local issues to a certain extent that are driving this process, and we don't really understand what they are.
And the same thing was pretty much true in Libya, although, as you point out, there was a clear demarcation in that the Italian rule had two provinces, and they had very distinct characters, and I believe, to a certain extent, tribally, and otherwise they're different.
So there was a division there.
But yeah, in Syria, there's no division.
Everybody is kind of mixed up.
Alawites, Christians, Sunnis, and Shiites, and now, of course, Al-Qaeda and other groups getting involved.
So you don't know what's going to come out of this, Stu.
I mean, it's just something where we should be holding our noses and walking the other way.
Yeah.
Well, and it's funny, because it's so easy for Americans to ignore foreign policy.
If only we could just keep our government out and make them ignore foreign policy, too, then it'd be okay, you know?
That's right.
Just pretend Syria doesn't even exist.
Who cares what happens there?
Well, you know, in a certain sense, it doesn't.
I mean, you know, if you talk about U.S. vital interests, Syria is not a U.S. vital interest, except if we get involved.
And then suddenly it becomes a vital interest, at least in terms of we're screwing up the situation and getting engaged in it, and then we have to try to figure out how to disengage.
You know, why was Iraq a vital interest, except for the fact that they produce oil?
But the fact is that they produce oil means they have to sell it somewhere.
So, you know, all of these things are just crazy.
Yeah.
Well, and you look at it, we're no worse off for the fact that everybody but us got the Iraqi oil.
It doesn't matter that we lost our own victory over there and made sure that China and Russia and European countries were the ones that get to develop Iraq's oil resources.
Who cares?
It's a liquid, for crying out loud.
Well, it was a war that paid for itself, wasn't it?
Oh, yeah, definitely.
In a very short amount of time, too.
That's right.
Three trillion dollars.
All right.
Thanks very much, Phil.
Appreciate it.
Okay, Scott.
Take care.
All right, everybody.
That's Phil Giraldi, former CIA and DIA and American Conservative Magazine, antiwar.com.