All right y'all, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 in Austin, Texas.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
And our first guest today, I'm pleased to welcome back to the show, Stephen Clemens.
He is the Director of the Strategy Program at the New America Foundation and pens the very influential blog, The Washington Note.
Welcome back to the show, Steve.
Great to be with you, Scott.
Yeah, it's good to have you on again.
And boy, oh boy, do I need some insight on some important issues going on in the world right now.
Let me start with something that you said, I believe it was a debate with Stephen Zunis on Democracy Now!
after Biden was named as Barack Obama's running mate.
You pointed out something that, Steve, I don't know how I didn't really recognize the import of this.
I think I covered this back in 2007, but I never really put this on my list of important things to make sure to go back and, you know, or really even focused on in the first place.
I'll behold you to that.
And that was, yeah, well, that's why I keep people like you around.
But what you pointed out is that, at least in your view, Biden's statement that he would remove George Bush and Dick Cheney from office if they bombed Iran actually did quite a bit to break that deal.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, I don't think that that people recall that, you know, when the Iraq Study Group report came out, where you had Jim Baker and Lee Hamilton and a lot of other folks basically saying we need a very different game of America's approach towards the Middle East.
And there were different dimensions of it.
Bush came out in January of that year in two key speeches.
One was an address to the nation that really dealt with the Iraq Study Group, and the other was a State of the Union address.
And in both of these, he essentially telegraphed, to use John McCain's term, he essentially telegraphed that he would be unleashing covert activity into Iran.
And the next day, both the Wall Street Journal said, you know, applauded George Bush for doing this.
But Joe Biden in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee grilled Condi Rice.
I remember I was there and I remember him just drilling into her and say, you know, the president has no authorization whatsoever to go into Iran.
And it really started a very different dynamic.
I was proud of Biden in that moment.
Well, he did say outright, didn't he, that he would remove them from office or he would do what he could.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I don't know why this didn't stick out to me as as such an important, you know, italicized headline to repeat back every day.
This is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in no uncertain terms Stop the war.
Sounds like.
Well, he at least started, you know, change the pivot of a kind of congressional complicity, in my view, with a lot of what the Bush administration was doing in the Middle East.
And I think Biden, Chuck Hagel and some others that, you know, we're at a point where they said this is this is bordering, you know, criminal criminal action, criminal negligence on Congress's part, the Senate's part.
And as we've learned, you know, there's a great new book out by Barton Gelman, who won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for The Washington Post for these incredible articles on Dick Cheney, his decision making apparatus and how Cheney positioned himself in in the middle of all these thorough thoroughfares of power.
And in in that book, there's a new book out called The Angler, the Cheney vice presidency.
You really get a sense of how far the administration went with very, very little congressional pushback.
And I credit Biden in that 2007 moment and more with really saying enough is enough.
I mean, people properly criticized him before in the Iraq war resolution and others.
But you're right in that in that Steve Zunes exchange that I had on Democracy Now!
It was a nice thing to be able to raise and give people a different dimension of Joe Biden's profile.
Well, and also there's the whole theory of relativity going on here, where you take his vote for the Iraq war and Bosnia and Kosovo and the future war that he wants to spread into North Africa and all these things.
The other competition you pointed out was this guy, Evan Bayh, who I don't know too much about, but you said he's the kind of guy who's got to prove what a tough guy he is all the time, whereas Biden, at least, is more reasonable than that.
Well, I mean, one of the things that I find that was distinctive and Evan Bayh clearly had the momentum for those insiders who knew what was going on with some of the choices that Barack Obama might make as a running mate.
Evan Bayh has many strengths and skills, I don't want to completely knock him, but he's also someone in his profile who tended to tilt towards conflict as a way to define himself.
And I was particularly irritated with a line once where he was sort of lamenting the American public's lack of appetite for any more wars, his remarkable statement after their experiences in Iraq, and that this would send the wrong signal to Iran.
It just seemed to me he wasn't made of the stuff that I hope we see more from Obama down the road, which is trying to leapfrog in a different set of institutional arrangements that aren't always over-militarized and so predisposed towards war.
You know, it's a real tragedy, in a way, because Evan Bayh's father, Birch Bayh, was really one of the greatest senators the Democrats ever had.
You know, he brought Title IX education to women, he passed two constitutional amendments, and I knew he opposed the, I'm on a, involved with him in some things in Maryland.
And Birch Bayh was quite opposed to the Iraq War and a lot of the crusades we've been on, and so had a very different profile than his son has in the Senate.
But Birch Bayh is a real hero, and Evan Bayh, I think, would have been the wrong choice as Obama's VP.
Yeah, well, you know, Biden is, there is cause for concern.
In fact, the thing that really bothers me is, you know, I don't know the entire history of his statements on this issue, but rather than accept responsibility for voting for the Iraq War in his debate with Sarah Palin, he tried to pull a Bob Barr and a Hillary Clinton and pretend that his vote for a war wasn't a vote for a war, it was simply a vote so that Bush would have more credibility in front of the United Nations, or whatever, which was a total lie, and everybody knows it.
He tried to take, well, I held hearings on the Iraq War.
Yeah, he held hearings where he wouldn't let Scott Ritter or any other critic testify at all.
I mean, he was as complicit in this whole thing as Dick Cheney, whether he said some things that were relatively wise compared to the rest of the war party at the time, notwithstanding.
I mean, this is his war, Joe Biden, isn't it?
Well, I'm not going to make, I don't think it's his war, I think it's George Bush's war, but there are a lot of other hands in it.
You may remember Richard Gephardt, whom I had a lot of respect for on some fronts, nonetheless, the guy who really broke the dam when it came to Democratic support for the Iraq War.
So there were a lot of folks that were involved with it.
But if you go back to that time, I don't want to make excuses for Joe Biden and others that supported the Iraq War resolution, but it seems to me that we hadn't really seen this kind of presidency, or this kind of vice presidency, and the manipulation of facts and truth to the same degree.
And I think, to some degree, while I'm not happy with it, there were a lot of folks who just hadn't seen this and couldn't believe that the Bush administration could be as off as they were.
So to some degree, these Democrats who often walk around with feelings of insecurity that they're not trusted by Americans to be able to deploy power when needed, often make the wrong judgment calls when there's a crisis.
Now, I don't think Biden generally is that, and I've been very impressed with Biden's profile and behavior since that time, particularly over the Iranian Revolutionary Guard resolution, which was the sort of next big test in my book.
The IRGC resolution was a huge issue that created another sort of large loophole for war with Iran, and Biden said, no, this is the one Hillary Clinton and Evan Bayh supported.
So I can give a pass on the Iraq War resolution.
I know many others can't, and I respect that.
But when it came to the IRGC resolution, I can't give a pass, because that's sort of, you know, a double hit, if you will, and Biden pivoted away from that direction.
Yeah, well, yeah, at least the whole one spit and twice shy thing going on there.
Well, believe me, there were a lot of other people that supported that IRGC resolution and still gave this, you know, imperial presidency far too much latitude in these issues.
So I admire people like Jim Webb and others that just said this is really bad politics.
Well, and especially, you know, Gareth Porter's analysis of that.
You're talking about the Kyle Lieberman resolution.
Yeah, exactly.
And Gareth Porter just showed how every single assertion of fact in there was absolutely wrong from the get go anyway.
You know, Gareth has just done tremendous reporting, tremendously great reporting on these issues.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, well, let me put off the crisis in Pakistan for a minute and ask you about the Israel-Palestine peace process and what's going on there.
Obviously, well, is it obvious that the Annapolis thing is mostly dead?
And then I guess sort of as a kind of follow up to that or secondary part of that is almost former Prime Minister Olmert's speech about it's time to give up the West Bank and make peace with the Palestinians.
Is that too little, too late?
Is that going to have any kind of effect on the future of the relationship between those people there?
Scott, it's all of the above.
Olmert's statements are important because they were made by a prime minister.
Even going out the door, those statements have some impact.
The Annapolis summit process is on life support, barely ticking.
And there's a lot of frustration with the naivete that Bush and Condi Rice and others showed in trying to assemble us.
Remember, in Annapolis, they brought in all these foreign ministers from all the regional governments and many governments from around the world outside the Middle East and made pretty tremendous promises about what they would be doing.
Condi Rice has been back and forth.
She's about to go back over there to Israel again.
And, you know, the sticking point is really the question of, you know, can you negotiate with the Palestinian government that is divided between Fatah and Hamas, with Hamas controlling Gaza, Fatah controlling the West Bank?
To some degree, this division of the government was created by American obsession with Palestinian elections.
You know, that didn't work out so well.
And you've got a lot of Saudi and Egyptian and Jordanian frustration at American incompetence to make this work, because they know they needed to work in order to, you know, deal with the aspirations and expectations of Arab Muslims in the region who are very frustrated and showing progress is one of the ways in which you can sort of rob Iran of some influence in the region.
So success matters.
And its success matters not just because of Israel and Palestine.
It matters because it helps Arab states in the region, plus the United States, balance off of some of Iran's activities.
And so there are larger stakes than just Israel in this.
But right now, honestly, it looks like a mess.
And there are a lot of people saying that the window for a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine is really just about shut.
I'm not as negative as others.
I think that this is doable.
I think Olmert's statements going out are useful.
They lay a little bit of railroad track.
And Tzipi Livni wants a deal.
The question is whether, you know, she's got the Labour Party on the left, you know, headed by Ehud Barak, who, despite being in a Labour Party, despite being Mr. sort of, you know, almost peacemaker, is not very friendly towards this deal.
And you've got, of course, the Likud party on the right and Netanyahu, who is also trying to use the politics of this in a way to sort of resurrect Likud in Israeli politics.
And it's like a Rubik's cube.
You're trying to sort of constantly turn it around and get it to come out right.
And it is a mess, but it's a mess where every time we fail, the consequences of failure are more staggering.
Well, I forgot where it was that I only just, I think, yesterday saw a color-coded map of the West Bank and the green dots and, frankly, pretty large splotches all over it were Israeli settlements.
And, you know.
Oh, it's incredible.
What do you mean?
How do you do that?
You've got to force them all out, right?
You can't.
How do you give up the West Bank when there's all these settlers there?
You've got to get them out first, right?
Well, there are ways to do it.
It'd be very costly.
That's why, to some degree, what Olmert's statement was saying was more political than substantive.
It was political and modestly helpful, but it's sending a signal to the settlers who are divided between those settlers that are scattered all over the West Bank, as you saw in that map, and those that are in Mela Adamin and others that are kind of packed around Jerusalem and other sort of large population centers on Israel proper.
People know that those larger settlements, there are about three major ones, probably are not going to be part of the land returned, and that what on a land swap that the Palestinians will be given land that would be equal in value to them that would be cut out from other sections of Israel.
And anybody engaged in this process knows that there's a deal to be done.
What's missing is political will.
It's not the details about Jerusalem, although Barack Obama didn't help all that this year in his speech to AIPAC when he said Jerusalem must remain undivided.
He managed to run right at President Bush and Prime Minister Omar with that statement at AIPAC, which they walked back.
But nonetheless, it was not an accidental line.
It passed an awful lot of veterans before Barack Obama said it.
And of course, John McCain is there, too.
But everybody's afraid of anything that looks pro-Muslim, pro-Arab, or fair and balanced work.
To quote one of my favorites, Chuck Hagel, who says, we can't make false choices between Israeli security and the interests of Arabs in the region.
We need both sides.
I completely agree with Hagel on that.
Well, and the Israelis really are taking over Jerusalem neighborhood by neighborhood just through kind of gentrification and local zoning policies and things like that anyway, where it's almost a fait accompli now, isn't it?
Well, it is and it isn't.
I mean, Jerusalem is interesting because it is one of these places where there are older neighborhoods, Palestinians and Arabs living inside Israel and why they're able to run members for the Knesset.
They can't become leaders of the country as far as prime minister.
They can run for mayor of Jerusalem.
I was with Chaim Ramon, who's the deputy prime minister under Omar right now, a member of the Kadima party.
And Chaim Ramon made this interesting point.
He says, you know, we need this two-state deal because eventually we're going to either be not a democracy or we're going to have apartheid.
Or we're going to end up with situations where in a one-state solution, we're quickly outnumbered and we will see a Palestinian mayor, for instance, of Jerusalem.
So this was said on the record at a huge dinner by Israel's deputy prime minister, who I think was rather thoughtful and realistic about these issues.
And one of the reasons that animates this strong support for a serious two-state deal.
And it's remarkable that even somebody like Chaim Ramon can't deliver it.
I mean, it's one of these questions where you kind of wonder what in the hell could deliver it if you've got the leading people in Israel who can't pull it off.
But, you know, I think that if the window closes on a two-state solution, then you've got a very different kind of civil protest against Israeli control.
And you come back to this nasty question of apartheid-like structures where you've got a huge population dominated by the other, excluded from public works projects, from road access, from thoroughfare, and kind of living under, you know, permanent occupation control.
And Israel will be globally shunned, I think, by that.
I think it's very hard for the United States to support that kind of equation.
Well, you know, right after September 11th, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Colin Powell say, all right, now we have got to get to work on Israeli-Palestinian peace right now.
This is going to be the number one most important thing toward resolving the hatred against the United States of America.
Whatever happened to that?
Well, Colin Powell was right on target.
I think he really wanted to move it, and he got undermined and sideswiped by Vice President Cheney and his team, as well as a man named Elliott Abrams, who became the senior director for the Middle East in the National Security Council of Bush's national security team.
You may recall that while President Bush came out and he started out in a good direction, Bush is actually the first guy who said the words Palestine to describe the Palestinian state.
No other U.S. President had done that before.
Right.
And so the President was headed in a certain direction, and then he veered away from it.
So where Powell and one of my colleagues, Flint Leverett, was involved with that, they were going to deliver on this, deliver on the horizon issues in the negotiations treaty.
And so what I've been trying to do in some of my own work is bring us back to that point, because we've had seven years of nothing.
Yeah.
Well, and the Christian right came in and intervened on behalf of AIPAC in that case, too.
I remember, wasn't it in Mearshaw's book?
They talk about Tom DeLay coming up and overruling Bush.
Well, Tom DeLay became very animated with us.
I mean, we had some absurd things.
I don't know if anybody remembers Pat Robertson, but Pat Robertson, one of Jerry Falwell's great buddies and sort of the giant of the evangelical circuit, actually made a statement once that was outrageous.
They were interested in opening up theme parks, Christian theme parks inside Israel, all sorts of land deals.
To my mind, it may have been, I'll just say may, I don't get in trouble here, but seemed slightly on the dollar side of Christian evangelism.
And he made a statement that was outrageous.
He said that the reason that Ariel Sharon had had a stroke was the same reason that Itzhak Rabin was assassinated, that God didn't want his land divided.
And so God took action.
This is what Pat Robertson said about Sharon's stroke after withdrawing from Gaza.
Wow.
Yeah.
And I guess I only know sort of anecdotes, and maybe you have a better, I'm sure you have a better idea of how this really works, living surrounded by all this power up there in Washington, D.C.
But is it the case that the average, say, for example, Republican congressman just absolutely cannot stand up to these people, no matter what?
He's got to go along with the Christian right, or he's doomed?
Well, I don't feel that, but they certainly do.
There are some here who think that the biggest lobbies that they've got to worry about are, you know, depending on what part of the country you're from, are Christian evangelicals, perhaps the power and the money behind AIPAC, and the common convergence of interest between them.
I don't think it's all powerful.
I know some very reasonable people at AIPAC, and I also know some very, you know, reasonable evangelicals, but packaged together, Tom DeLay took this to new levels.
Karl Rove did as well, of creating litmus tests for, you know, the good behavior of these people.
And what you see is you see people going silent, doing nothing, or abstaining from engagement of these issues.
And then what you see on the other side of it, though, for instance, there's been about 27 million of these CDs sent out to people of an anti-Muslim bigoted CD that's being sent out all over the United States to instill and engender real anti-Muslim hate.
And I think it's being done for obvious political purposes to try to undermine Obama.
But it's a CD called Obsession, and there's a sort of shady foundation with very few footprints out there.
I have some ideas where the money's coming from, but it's tied into a kind of joint interest of some of the leading settlement-supporting American Jews in the United States tied together with evangelicals who are more strident.
I don't have any problem with all evangelicals, but some evangelicals look at this as sort of the next, you know, God's crusade kind of thing.
And these folks have joined forces to some degree to help distribute this outrageous CD all over the United States.
I don't know how many you've received in the mail or your Sunday paper, but I've gotten two of them.
It's called Obsession, and it's really quite a disgusting thing.
Now, I haven't gotten one yet, but I've read about it, and it's clear that, you know, they're using Barack Obama's middle name every time they can to make him sound more foreign and dangerous and what have you, too.
Right.
Well, let me ask you about Zippy Livni.
The incoming will be prime minister, I guess, here, what, in a month or so in Israel, right?
Is that right, when she comes to power?
Yeah, I think she comes in in about a month.
I don't have the dates in front of me right now, but it's when she will become head of the party, and then she'll be voted on within the Knesset as head of this sort of sprawling side of things.
While she's going to be heading the party soon, then you have to have the other part of having her voted in as prime minister within the other contending possibilities that no doubt will be Netanyahu and Barack and others.
It's not an automatic process, so she'll come in.
And I've met her people in chief negotiators before in Israel, and, you know, she's not everybody's cup of tea, but I found it interesting or behind the scenes where I thought she had had some rather hardened positions against deal making with Hamas, trying to get a cease fire against dealing with Syria on front.
Next thing we turn around, well, the Turks have been laying the groundwork for, you know, Syrian-Israeli negotiations.
She was dealing with the Qataris and Egyptians behind the scenes to sort of look at questions of how they might achieve a cease fire with Hamas.
So she's got a pragmatic edge to her, and I frankly think that's what Israel really needs.
Israel needs a strong leader with a pragmatic edge who can deliver votes and support to get these deals done.
Well, you know, she was quoted, I guess, in an off-the-record meeting, but Haaretz reported it.
I don't know what all their sourcing was or what have you, but apparently she said, listen, the Iranians are years and years away from a nuclear bomb, and even if they did have one, that's not necessarily a threat to us.
Come on, let's get real.
Now, and I know that's not the way these people talk in public, but, you know, politicians, I mean, but that's pretty good.
Do you think she, like, would act as though she really believes that?
I hope so.
I think that those kinds of comments, I hadn't seen them, are probably the audience designed for them are more her interlocutors who are trying to ratchet down the tensions in the region.
Others in the Labor Party, whom I know quite well, General Ephraim Schnee, Ehud Barak and others have a more strident tone when it comes to the fear and the sense of existential threat that Israel faces from Iran.
My colleague Daniel Levy, who heads our Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation, and I talk a lot about this, and it's very, very easy for Israel and leading Israelis to get whipped up in concern about, you know, Iran's nuclear program for obvious reasons.
But then there are others who say, one, it's far off.
Two, they see other options.
Three, diplomacy has not been fully tried or deployed.
And then we've got people like Flint Leverett, who used to work in Bush's National Security Council staff, who talk to the Israeli security establishment a lot, and they have a sort of realist, pragmatic edge that's pretty close to what Tzipi Livni communicated.
So, you know, you can call it both ways.
We've got, you know, hyperventilators, and you've got engagers, and you've got some people that are completely unrealistic, I think, in the dovishness of it, which I think we also have to be clear.
You know, Yossi Bailin, another former, he's leaving the Knesset, but a guy I really admire on the real left is ready to go deals with everyone.
I don't think that brand of thinking is going to get very far in the current Israeli situation.
So Livni's probably as good as it's going to get, and every time she makes a sensible statement like that, I think we ought to applaud.
We shouldn't overreact when she isn't in that same spot, because she's trying to satisfy a number of constituencies and hold them together to get some real, tangible results.
We're at a point where we can't really continue to fail.
We can't be in the Middle East peace business for the rest of our lives.
We've got to put those people that are in this game out of business, I think, and otherwise the window closes, and Israel has to begin really considering a very different kind of alternative state structure with its domestic Palestinian residents.
As in a one-state solution?
Absolutely.
Well, see, this has always been my thing, and you know me, I'm a libertarian.
I figure that if the Knesset barely had any power except to protect people's individual rights, then it wouldn't matter if it was run by Palestinians or Israeli Jews or whoever.
It wouldn't matter, because it would be a limited government, and everybody would be free, and it would be great, and everybody would get rich, and it would be wonderful.
What's the problem?
Yeah, unfortunately, that's not the game.
Unfortunately, you've got, you know, I have to tell you, I went over through what was considered the VIP crossing into Ramallah with Daniel Levy and another guy, and we had a permission slip essentially signed off on by Ehud Barak, who was Minister of Defense.
We still were held there for 45 minutes with the sort of little lords of the Israeli Defense Forces deciding whether they wanted to let us through or not, and while we weren't subjected to the humiliating and degrading treatment that many Palestinians are subjected to every day, we were allowed to walk around and not forced to sit down, and we finally just said, okay, you guys shoot us if you want, we're walking through, and we walked ahead without, I mean, we just walked in, and we came out, we were held up again, but you go through, no matter who you are pretty much, incredibly inconsistent treatment across these border crossings, and in that environment, you know, the libertarian that you are would be very frustrated, because you see constant abuses of authority that people in that system are able to exert upon others.
It's not to say that there aren't very good people in the command structure of the IDF, there are.
What's interesting is how the generals, some of the generals I know are very progressive, for instance, in their view and commitment to human rights, civil liberties, and all that, but it's not communicated through the ranks in the way in which they devolve decision-making to others in the IDF over there, so it's a huge problem, Scott, and if we could have the world that you just outlined, it would be terrific, but they're nowhere near that world.
Yeah, well, and you know, just take a look at one snapshot of the separation wall, and boy, does that thing just smack of tyranny.
That doesn't look like security to me, just at a glance, you know, that is to take...
Did you read Obama's speech on tear down, you know, tear down the world's walls?
No!
I mean, it was actually a great speech that he delivered in Berlin, and my friendly critique of it is great speech, I actually liked his trip to Europe, but I said, you know, he just was in Israel, why didn't he give this in Tel Aviv or in Ramallah?
Yeah, well, did he mention Israel's walls while he was there?
Did he mention Israel's walls in Germany, specifically?
No, no, he talked about walls, the walls were the theme of his speech, but he did not talk about that, and I said, what a missed opportunity, it would have had far more impact in a place where it mattered, you can't just be about great ideas and platitudes in the areas where there are no costs or consequences to what you say, the question is, can you go in somewhere where it does matter, to some degree like Reagan did when he told Gorbachev to tear down these walls, or Kennedy did before, but, you know, in Tel Aviv, in Jerusalem, in, you know, Ramallah, give the kind of speeches there that would take one of the world's major fault lines, and help to say something that would resolve it, and that speech, had it been given there, would have been much more impactful, and my own respect for Barack Obama would be a lot greater than it is, even though I admire him, but I think it was a missed opportunity.
It doesn't seem very brave to denounce walls in Berlin, where the wall's gone, or I guess it wasn't in Berlin, I forget which, but the wall's been gone since I was a kid.
I'm glad that wasn't lost on you.
Yeah, well, I got a lot of problems with the things that this guy says, but anyway, let's not get too bogged down in that.
I just, well, wasn't there, the head of Mossad, or something, said we gotta tear down these walls not long ago, right?
Absolutely.
The former head of Shin Bet, you know, essentially the FBI of the Israeli security forces, Shin Bet, had a guy named Ami Ayalon, who was a contender for the head of the Labor Party.
I really like this guy.
I mean, he's sort of the Chuck Hagel of the Israeli political establishment, and I'm gonna be doing a lot more with Ami Ayalon, I think, but he lost the battle to Barack, but he's a guy who was the former head of the domestic surveillance, intelligence, and sort of police force, the Shin Bet, and he believes that we should do a deal, we should tear down those walls, we should engage and change the dynamic of relations between Palestine and Israelis.
All right, now we're almost out of time, but here I wanna broach a whole new giant subject.
Can I keep you over, or do you need to go?
No, go ahead.
Okay, great.
Let's talk about Pakistan.
Well, first of all, I wanna complain about the candidates, since there's an election coming up here.
In both debates so far, and I'm sure in the one coming up next week, these people will continue to talk about whether it's okay to say in advance that you will bomb Pakistan before you bomb Pakistan or something, and yet no one will even mention the fact that George Bush has been bombing Pakistan, announced or not, for the last month or so at least, and depending on who you read, it seems to be perceived more and more in Pakistan like a war against the state of Pakistan and the people of Pakistan, not just these few radicals who happen to be holed up within the imaginary line and so forth, and there are some people who are saying, well, you know, I mean, it's pretty obvious.
This new guy, Benazir Bhutto's widower, Mr. 10%, just barely got elected with a plurality in the parliament.
He's got this brand new, shaky government, and we're sitting here bombing this country that's armed with nuclear weapons.
Talk about playing with fire on the eve of an election.
Tell me what the hell's going on there.
I mean, that's basically all I know, Steve.
Well, I mean, you pretty much frame it as I would frame it.
President Zardari is in an unstable situation, and he has to demonstrate he's got some strength in his position that he'll defend Pakistan's sovereignty and that he will diverge from the United States on occasion, because among Pakistanis, Zardari is looked at as our puppet, so he can't look too close to the United States.
So the things that he said about Pakistan soldiers firing on US troops, to me, wasn't surprising.
When that really starts happening and moves from rhetoric to reality, of course, there are enormous problems.
And you're absolutely right.
We've been penetrating Pakistan's borders constantly, and our drones have killed many, many innocents over there.
It's the death of innocent people, children, women, people caught in the crossfire that should never have been subjected to this, that's created enormous blowback within Pakistani politics.
And we have, you know, Bob Gates and Mike Mullen and others going over constantly to apologize for the errors.
And their standard line is the United States has done more than any other nation in the world to try and prevent, you know, civilian casualties and accidental casualties.
But yet we have these incidents that have created this.
So it's not just going after the bad guys.
It's killing the good guys that has caused enormous concern.
And the bombing is going on as we speak, and neither Obama nor John McCain have been talking about the costs, the consequences, or the opportunities of that policy, I guess, which I don't see much from.
But you don't get a sense of a larger strategic picture of what they would do.
We get set up for hypotheticals of, oh, would you go invade and crash through the sovereign territory of another nation if you could get at one of these people?
And the answer to that question, you know, I guess, is, of course, they would on a non-routine basis and expecting huge political fallout.
But God, to talk about it in anything more than a momentary hypothetical, it's a bizarre obsession that the media and that others have had over this question.
And I think it's really scaring much of the world about it.
I'll tell you one good thing, Scott, beyond all these.
You know, these wars abroad are going to end.
I mean, this is one of the good downsides or upsides of the economic downsides we're having, that we're not going to be spending $300 billion on a war of choice abroad.
We're not going to continue to be able to justify even the massive rearming that we have while you see unemployment rising in America, infrastructure going untended.
And to a certain degree, it's interesting about these huge economic shocks we've had is that it's going to force the winnowing down of other kinds of ruptures that we've had in our system.
And I think that's possibly good.
But, you know, the way you framed it about Pakistan, I couldn't agree with you more.
Well, now, David Petraeus, who is right about everything, period, and damn you or anyone else who would disagree with him about anything, he says it's time to deal with the Taliban.
So it must be right.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, I actually think that one of the biggest things that we could do is begin looking at the political objectives of the people we call terrorists and find out where are they going?
What are they doing?
And if we're going to oppose them, there are different layers of opposition.
I mean, I'm not, to tell you the truth, a great fan of the Taliban, particularly when it comes to the issues you and I care about, which is freedom, you know, society, you know, liberty, rights of women, et cetera.
But our opposition to that doesn't necessarily change, you know, translate right into a very effective strategy for doing away with them or undermining that.
We've shown ourselves to be quite incompetent at undermining that ethic, if you will, out there.
And so, yeah, Petraeus has made this comment about dealing with the Taliban.
So have other sort of realists.
And I think it's interesting, and to some degree, look, I think Petraeus is an interesting guy, and I think we're going to be seeing a lot more of him in future years.
I think he's eventually going to be the Republican Wes Clark, who eventually runs for president and the Republican ticket.
He's said as much already.
What's that?
He's said as much already.
Yeah, and the Washington Note was one of the first to be out to blog that a couple years ago.
But, you know, the thing is, while he's in uniform and while he does have a band of, you know, media managers and people who help prune and sculpt this mega soldier profile, at the same time, Petraeus isn't going to be crazy or say things that he's not going to be able to stand by for a long time.
And so his comment about the Taliban was sort of brave.
And I think he's calling as it is.
And, you know, he ultimately right now has to report up to the chain of command to Bob Gates, who I think Bob Gates probably at one level offhand probably agrees with Petraeus.
Well, you know, obviously, I've never been there.
I don't know too much about this stuff, really.
All my best information comes from a pretty limited number of sources.
I mean, the regular news I try to keep up with and then real experts like Eric Margulies and and Patrick Coburn, although I don't even think Patrick Coburn has been there in a few years, but he can certainly speak to the area.
But I believe, you know, Eric Margulies, his word can basically be taken when he says, as he told me on this show.
The Pashtuns tribal ethnic group there, they don't have any political representation or political body at all except the Taliban.
That's it.
That's what they mean when they say Taliban types.
They mean the Pashtuns.
They have no one else representing them but the Taliban.
So what we're basically doing is we're fighting a civil war on the side of the Uzbeks and the Tajiks against the Pashtuns and calling it a war on terrorism.
Well, you might follow that more closely.
And the question of political vehicles to carry one's interest, I think, sounds very legitimate.
I think there are greater complexities there than just that issue.
And I think it's certainly true that there are deals.
Even Karzai has begun to reach out to the Pashtun, to the Taliban, through interlocutors, the Iranians involved.
And frankly, Pakistanis are encouraging this.
There's a lot of dealmaking or subtle dealmaking.
It may all come to nothing going on.
And what's interesting is the United States is not engaged in much of it.
But it's very clear that no matter how you look at it, that the Taliban are on the rise.
My colleague, Peter Bergen, Steve Cole, and others I work with have been to Afghanistan and Pakistan fairly frequently over this last year.
And Peter, of course, is CNN's terrorism analyst, was there with Anderson Cooper and others about a year ago and began really documenting the incredible rise and return of the Taliban to some degree.
And I think now we've got to kind of walk this along and see where it goes, because we've got to generate some stability.
It's one of the places that is most combustible.
And we seem unable to obliterate the players in this game.
So then the question is, what are the other strategies?
And you've got a lot of other smart people on the show that can sort of talk that through.
But I think the idea that we can just bomb them all out is not working and is creating its own repercussions that can destabilize and turn Pakistan against us, undermine Zardari, undermine Karzai, and create a very, very different environment over there that we have right now, where you really do have a nuclear state that is at odds with responsible stewardship in the global order.
All right, well, I'm president, you're secretary of state.
Your orders are to go over there, make a deal with the Pashtuns, where they hand over the Arabs that they're keeping, and we'll rendition them back to whatever their evil countries are, where they came from, or whatever.
And then we will make peace with the Taliban, some kind of arrangement with them.
What we want, because this is the bottom line, right?
As long as there are, you know, basically any Arab Afghan that's there is considered part of Osama's army by the American War Party and, I guess, by the American people.
As long as Osama and Zawahiri are podcasting from the Hindu Kush mountains, then the war against the Taliban and everybody else around there has got to continue.
But it was just in the news, right, that Mullah Omar sent an intermediary and dealing with the Saudis, trying to work out a deal where they said apparently they would be willing.
Apparently, Mullah Omar doesn't like Osama anymore, and he's willing to work to kick the Arabs out of Waziristan.
Is that right?
We ought to be jumping all over that, just to test it, make sure it's true.
But we ought to be jumping all over that.
I mean, yeah, because see, here's the problem, though.
Well, this is my speculation, anyway.
Tell me what you think of this.
They don't want this.
They don't want Osama.
They want Goldstein out there.
They want the excuse, great, you know, he got away to the hardest place in the whole world to get him.
If there was a place where you just can't get him, it's in those mountains.
So, wonderful.
We can just leave our boogeyman there, and he can be the excuse for wars in Somalia and everywhere else if we want.
And so, why make a deal and get him?
I mean, is that too cynical of me?
I know I'm an evil bastard, but still.
Well, you know, a lot of the common sense stuff you're laying out, Scott, ought to be pursued and thought about.
And right now, what we're doing is we're in a slow bleed, threatening to send in more troops, setting in, trying to get more Europeans to send in troops without what I see as a public game plan that makes sense strategically.
And without more knowledge of what's going on the inside, it's very hard for me to support the direction of things right now.
Yeah, well, we're just going to surge, and it's going to work.
Because surges work, and the surge worked, and this surge is going to work, too.
And it'll be a surge, and it'll be great.
All right, now, last thing, and I'll let you go real quick here.
You mentioned Flint Leverett.
And it was he and his now-wife, Hillary Mann Leverett, who told the story of the Great Peace offer by Iran.
And this is where it all ties back together, this recent news article about Flint Leverett saying, am I right, over 3,000 Arabs were renditioned by Iran, with and without the cooperation of the United States, back to their home Arab countries after September 11th, but before being thrown in with the Axis of Evil?
Yeah, this is a remarkable bit of news that was covered by Barry Schweib of AP.
He did an event.
I was the chair of the event with Hillary and Mann Leverett and Flint Leverett earlier this week, in which they outlined a number of the cases in which Iran cooperated with the United States before and after 9-11, interestingly, primarily dealing with Afghanistan and the movement of Arabs within this region.
And Hillary gave a really riveting account of some of the things that the Iranians had done with regards to withholding passports, detaining, and shipping back various Arabs to their countries after that, because we had begun a massive bombing campaign of terrorist training camps, and these camps were fairly large camps with families, you know, wives, kids, etc., and after we basically unleashed our bombing campaigns against them, while we didn't have many people on the ground, we secured Iran's cooperation and the cooperation of other countries, even Syria, in helping to redirect and stop the movement and to document who many of these Arab participants and jihadists and whatnot were at the time.
So, yeah, it's very, very interesting.
There's always more news and history that we're learning as we talk about this stuff.
Well, you know, it seems like so much of our bad policy is grounded in bad rhetoric.
We got Islamic extremism out there, which is such a catch-all, that we lump all our enemies together, probably helping heal differences between them and making enemies out of people who aren't our enemies.
I mean, here, Iran wants nothing but to help us fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and yet we would rather pick a fight with them, like Zawahiri wants us to do.
Absolutely.
They know how to push our buttons.
Yeah, and we just, we're like a robot.
We just do exactly what they want, it seems like.
Crazy.
Pretty much agree.
All right.
Well, good talking with you, Scott.
It's amazing.
It's amazing that you have such a clear view that close to the center of power there.
I really appreciate it.
Well, you're kind to say it.
I think there are a lot of people who think I have blurry eyes, just like a lot of other folks.
No, no, you do great.
And everybody, that's Stephen Clemens from the Washington Note.
He's the director of the strategy program at the New America Foundation and always an excellent source of information and insight.
Thank you very much, Steve.
Thank you, Scott.
