early results in israel's general election show incumbent prime minister benjamin netanyahu leading over his opponent benny gantz exit polls put both candidates in a dead heat with both men claiming victory. president putin dismisses the moeller investigation into the alleged collusion between trump and russia in two thousand and sixteen calling it total nonsense. and the trumpet ministration fires a fresh salvo at its european allies pledging to hit e.u. goods with tariffs worth as much as eleven billion dollars the u.s. says in the movies in retaliation for subsidies given to boeing that rival airbus. be sure to pay a visit to our to dot com to get more on those headlines coming up the cross talk considers whether u.s. foreign policy makers really have america's interest at heart stay with us.

hello and welcome the cross-talk for all things considered i'm peter lewis which drives american foreign policy at its core is it really about furthering national interest is there an ideological foundation that is the driver we're told it's all about democracy or is it really all about power and the purposeful denial of agency of others on the international stage. cross talking american foreign policy i'm joined by my guest max blumenthal. in

washington he's the editor of grey zone dot com as well as author of the new book the management of savagery how america's national security state fueled the rise of al qaeda isis and donald trump also in washington we have james chatteris he is a former u.s. diplomat and former advisor to the u.s. senate republican leadership all right gentlemen crosstalk rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want and i always appreciate where we're getting set up here i notice you have your book can you just lift it up and show our audience here it's fresh off the press. and it must be a book i must admit of savagery i must say it must be a good book because i've already heard that you've been deployed form during talk about your book so it must be good ok so that's that's already. indication to me that my viewers should go out and buy the book here all right let's get serious here max i haven't read your book but i've read a lot of commentary about it and watch some interviews on you tube including the interview you did with another media person it seems to me looking at your title

and following a lot of your writing over the last few years is that really at the core of american foreign policy these days certainly post nine eleven is the belief that you can initiate chaos and control it but you never can and it's tried over and over and over again max go ahead. my book really begins with zbigniew brzezinski the national security advisor to jimmy carter's idea of an arc of crisis throughout the third world that the soviet union was seeking to fail and essentially stabilize and that stability was a real fear of brzezinski and so in afghanistan for instance the cia began to arm figures like globality and hekmatyar who is a warlord and a drug dealer to the tune of over one billion dollars to the largest covert operation in cia history and what resulted all timidly by the time of the removal of the soviet backed government in kabul was the destruction of half of kabul under

the watch of hekmatyar and another cia proxy ahmed shah masood and then the cia and then the u.s. proceeds to support the taliban to replace them to protect the unocal pipeline obviously the this leads straight to the nine eleven attacks the creation of al qaeda. taking the internet you know the the specter of international jihadism to another. level and you even have a actual al qaeda cell operating under the watch of the f.b.i. and cia during the one nine hundred ninety s. in new york city under the watch of the blind shaikh omar abdel-rahman who arrived to new york city on a cia visa as i write citing public sources so clearly there was no real thinking about the disposal problem after the afghan covert operation no thinking about the consequences and once it led to nine eleven well of course there was no thinking

about the day after that for how to exploit the public hysteria and go to iraq you know it's you know it's fascinating because in these aren't publicly known facts here james so they've learned their lesson didn't they after that fiasco or did he just become the playbook because over and over and you've been on this program many many times and you know i should title the program the law of unintended consequences because that's always what happens it's happening now in so many hotspots around the world that the u.s. has an issue a good policy to create instability go ahead james which makes you wonder doesn't it peter whether in fact it is unintentional as we were talking just before the program on the way to the studio this new recognition of the iranian revolutionary guard corps as a terrorist group and mr bolton warming the iranians not to use terrorists as a tool just to craft there's a little pot and kettle problem here as and i don't really think max for coming out

with this so that the you know with all this talk about the war on terror for the last ten years and of course the war on drugs too it's just amazing how much the u.s. government and especially the cia have used jihadist groups with with with a lot some variation of ideology and of course this is usually in very close connection with the saudis and their money using these jihadist groups as well as criminal organizations involved in drug trafficking as our proxies in this. not only goes back to the afghan war but we saw it again in bosnia in kosovo in libya and syria in chechnya where these groups are used in a foreign legion and of the same time we're wagging our finger and saying oh we're fighting terrorism or fighting terrorism when in fact these terrorists har har our guys in many in many cases you know you can go across the entire map of the middle east since nine eleven where i never was after any u.s. intervention or meddling they are there in every single case so that must be

intentional chaos but can they control it see that's the that's the the sixty four thousand dollars question i mean you could let these people loose but can you control them after the you've left them loose and then they will in the end essentially what they do is blow back and turn against you go ahead max you know this is the disposal problem that i write about consistently and that's a term that i learned from jack bloom who is the investigator on the senate select committee on iran contra and on the outcome of the proxy war in afghanistan and i write about libya which right now we're seeing is still in a state of instability is marching on tripoli more bloodshed is expected this is eight years after nato intervention but the u.k. which was heavily involved in helping to destroy libya experienced the worst terror attack in its history as a direct result of the blowback over libya thanks to a young man named betty who was part of an m i six cell of libyan exiles in

manchester that the m i six essentially used giving them passports ferrying ramadan betty the father of solomon and his son over to libya to fight against gadhafi they were part of the libyan islamic fighting group that the m i six essentially created or helped cultivate to undermine qaddafi after they formed as an ally of al-qaeda so clearly the goal here was just to take down another stable state using any one possible. selman of betty comes back to the u.k. on a royal navy ship and twenty sixteen thousand after training with isis and al qaeda and up and blows up a bunch of teenagers at an ariana grande a concert with a nail bomb and the only leader in the u.k. who actually pointed the finger at the national security state was jeremy corbyn and that's why that's one reason why corbin is under such merciless attack because he told their dirty secret the other leaders either pointed the finger at muslims

in general classic demagogy or they just simply tried to sweep the whole thing under the rug like theresa may but this is happened again and again and it will happen again you know james it's interesting i know this max is i saw you watch on an interview with watching the hawks i mean it really islamophobia his bloomed as a result and of course there are plenty of people that are making lots of money off of this here and there's a lot of other unintended consequences here but this is this one phenomenon fuels the other ok you these wars are very profitable for a small group of people and i want to talk about the media in the second half of the program and then you have these phobias that are created that roots of phobias llama phobia that keeps everybody on guard ok and it's all an artificially created all of it's artificially created james go ahead in washington. well i have again i hope not to offend either one of you but i have a little bit of different take on this of the so-called islamophobia because you

know that every time there is one of these attacks you have all the leaders of all these countries coming out and saying oh islam is a religion of peace and tolerance etc etc almost as though they're covering for these these radicals that they have used as their proxies and they seem actually rather nonchalant about their coming back to our countries and and doing their thing i almost have feel that there's another element to it is that having terrorism inside western countries justifies crap. king down in a further police state scouring the internet to anybody who objects to this you know you can't criticize just because you're racist or islamophobia if you if you criticize this this policy of invade the world invite the world we use these terrorists as our proxies abroad and then when they're there they come back to their countries of origin many cases against our citizens of western countries we say well you know wolf there's really not much we can do about that well there's plenty that can be done about it don't go to those countries and destroy them in

the you won't get blowback i mean that is the most obvious already isn't going to learn all of these things go ahead or for that matter or for that matter peter peter what peter we hear this debate about what about all these people from syria that we were has been supporting these terrorist groups for the last three years to overthrow assad well get a lot of come back to america come back to britain i have an idea they committed their crimes in syria sovereign state why not turn them over to the syrian government that's a good idea max you know your thought before we go to the break here go ahead i mean the largest franchise of al qaeda right now exists under the banner of sham in the province and this was essentially a creation of the u.s. and gulf back proxy war in syria but we have to remember when we talk about islamophobia that the main force that fought this organization and that has died in numbers exceeding one hundred thousand deaths is the mostly sunni syrian arab army which consists mostly of observant muslims we have to remember this we have to

remember that people in libya did not want isis to take over syria but this is our creation and then of course it blows back to us in the west and when i say us i mean our elite foreign policy makers it blows back to us in the form of refugee crises and then that fuels islamophobia further and you have an actual islamophobia industry that cashes in on it with books with fake think tanks speaking tours and training with organizations like the f.b.i. just a quick question. but the the the people that make these decisions for these foreign interventions are never held responsible are they. they very seldom are and then we see them consistently kicked up stairs and maintain our influence in both parties figures like robert kagan who initiated the project for a new american century henry kissinger who advised both hillary clinton and nikki haley these figures are still revered in washington and zbigniew brzezinski elliott abrams. down and we have this very top we have john bolton all right gentlemen

we're going to go to a short break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion of american foreign policy stay with r.p. . we came here where you were before you came here when you live well. in many u.s. states capital punishment is still practiced convicted prisoners can spend years waiting for execution but most of the time the victims' families they are very much in favor of the death penalty there are some people because of what they do have given up their rights as live among us some even proven innocent years on death row and how many more races is it going to take before we as a society realize that this is not working and we actually do something about.

i think the number. they've matter to us is over one trillion dollars. more than ten white collar crime. eighty five percent of the global you long for the old rich eight percent world market thirty percent some with one hundred to five hundred three per second per second and we rose to twenty thousand. china's building two point one billion dollars. but don't let the numbers will be. the only number you need to remember one one you know bored one and only whom. i mean more to gain is an outstanding person because he took on the most powerful agency in this county or you'll be to stay if you look at it from the book on that

one to. mark was the day that when he was five. going to has been the most contentious critics say he is the first time i noticed something wasn't in fleece work pretty much when i first started the corruption in palm beach county it's not something that you can smell like bad it's. a wing it wasn't what i wanted to do. we've had more shootings in this county then some states have had collectively drug and went to his website began featuring comments about the family the sheriff's wife and squash you like a boy you know we should stop then you should say and i'm left with stuff i believe what i'm doing ok you know it's your funeral. critic house. i snuck out of the united states. into russia

political. men they know bad wolf. you don't need interest rates above zero you don't need capital you don't need savings you don't need. you don't need inflation. so people like united states are saying like well why can't we just be like you. welcome back to cross talk we're all things are considered on peter to mind you were discussing american foreign policy. ok i want to go back to max in washington you said you started your book basically

with the mujahideen ok that's a good starting point you chronicle the involvement in the culpability of the media in all of this nonsense that we're experiencing because it is it's truly nonsensical what's going on right now ok how is the media changed and i want to talk about how the neo cons against all odds i suppose have been able to conquer both parties and the media also all three go ahead max. well that's a that's a that's a tough question i mean the book you know does begin in afghanistan and i i write about how dan rather became gunga dan as the washington post critic tom shales called him he went and embedded with the mujahideen heap war you know indigenous clothing and everybody were able to go on c.b.s. with debt with dan rather and complain that they only had a few bullets and a few old enfield rifles and they needed more weapons they needed the stingers which reminds me of how the media behaved at the beginning of the syrian proxy war

when they embedded with the cia back free syrian army dan rather appears again a week after nine eleven on the david letterman show and he starts preparing the public for a long war in which many men and women will have to die a permanent war against terror and dan rather warns them that arab americans were celebrating the nine eleven attacks from across the river from across the hudson river with absolutely no evidence and either donald trump repeated in two thousand and fifteen so. it's not just the neo cons but it's the most trusted figures in news who have been spinning out these lies that have been driving us into permanent war and you know dan rather has been replaced by a new generation of figures who helped sell the russia gate hoax and the russia gate hoax has basically been used to domesticate donald trump and create space for the neo cons to move back into his administration now why of the neo cons never gone away it's because they're so similar to the foreign policy elite on the

democratic side even though they primarily work with republicans in fact they came out of the office of scoop jackson in the one nine hundred seventy s. who was a democrat richard perle and doug feith these pro israel ideologues were in jackson's office and they espouse the same ideology of spreading democracy and spreading human rights to countries where we topple their governments and of course what fills the void is anything but democratic it's been the taliban it's been the chaos in libya it's been controlled it live province and yet they are never safin sufficiently interrogated and held accountable as i attempt to do on the pages of my book the management of savagery and so they never die they're just this is the force in washington well james you were you were working within the beast ok i mean did you how did you see that i mean because you have these really intensely ideological people that you know on one side of their mouth they talk about democracy promotion but it's really what i scuttle what i call it it's

a path ology of power the making sure that there is no one is can deny the extension application of american power it is that it doesn't have an ideology it has a medical condition go ahead james. if you want a blueprint for everything we've seen in the last two or three decades take a look at in one thousand nine hundred six article called toward a neo reaganite foreign policy by bill kristol and robert kagan it basically lays out a program for what the. well but neverland global hegemony world domination is what it boils down to it is just amazing to me that you as you say it's a contradiction. and well maybe it's a contradiction in terms but that's what they want to do and as you mentioned i did work in the belly of the beast for a long time and as you know we have two parties the evil party and the stupid party i work for the stupid party and i don't think a lot of republicans realize that these people who just sound like you know but they were very good anti-communist and they were simply this this trotskyite sex

that came out of social democrats usa into the republican party and essentially run its foreign policy and there isn't a dime's worth of difference between republican neil codd's like the people the next mention or our democratic liberal interventionist like the samantha power and susan rice and battling albright and people like this that they share the same vision where they can use this humanitarian justification to go off and do terrible things you know some people refer to the c.n.n. effect that somehow it's the news coverage that drives the policy i don't think so i think the media are handmaids to their government sources and badoo to flee spin out the stories almost on demand it seems all those beautiful men in some crazy thing that always the there was reasonable missile well as extraordinary christiane amanpour at c.n.n. and the balkans and also syria she's all over the place demanding war war war for humanitarian reasons you know it's going to max her i saw her interview with jim

comi and she was outraged that freedom of speech what's an curbs during the two thousand and sixteen election so she's she's pro-war internationally and she's against the constitution at home i mean that's where american journalism stands now your poco is all the way up to donald trump fit donald trump in your book max i mean we just saw fareed zakaria declare that donald trump's failure to yeah bomb the crap out of venezuela shows that he's still in the pocket of putin so you know this rushing. a narrative won't die you know i talk about russia gate i write about russia gate in the afterword of my book and talk about how it's essentially used as leverage against trump who ran this sort of nine interventionist presidential campaign really demonstrated the power of non or anti interventionism not just across the us but within the his rustbelt base in the republican party and this frightened a lot of the managers of savagery in washington this campaign of you're painting

trump as putin's puppet was very effective at her personally but also it exposed the fact that he had very few allies in washington besides steve bannon who himself was an unknown figure here and he wound up with his national security director adviser h.r. mcmaster a deeply rusa phobic figure very close to the neoconservatives who by the end of his tenure was leaking on donald trump that he had handed him index cards urging him not to congratulate putin on his election something that every previous president had done he was fired the next day and then who could trump turn to john bolton someone who he just knew from fox news because trump's always taking executive time and doesn't know who else to turn to and bolton proceeds to wreck the korea peace summit and drive the venezuela regime change operation so this is the natural result of the russia gate narrative and how it's been deployed and i don't think we've seen the end of it it could be used very easily against bernie sanders. proclaimed socialist you know james that you it you but you were on the

program many times during the campaign and and i got a lot of flak from people i'm sure you did too is that the i never said i was for or against donald trump but i like some of the things he had to say because i was always say never hillary i could always could not even stomach that idea but i did said look not interventionism that's that's music to my ears i'm going to give you a listen and then i i think it was in the national interest somebody penned. for him his vision of his kind of pragmatic foreign policy which is kind of a weird article is kind of contradictory but it was kind of moving in the right direction what has happened to him i mean bolton said of the national security council i mean has he just surrendered as he does want doesn't want to be distracted because pompei always making a complete fool out of himself around the globe he's some kind of evangelical walking it's bizarre messaging is weird ok bolton admits it's about oil in

venezuela i mean where is trump in all of this if any where go ahead james. i'm up my signature hash tag on twitter now is not what i voted for look. it's somewhat of a mystery to me as well it was he lying the whole time was he it was easy just surrounded as he is he just getting bad advice i don't think that's as important to answer that question is just a note that whatever it was he promised really isn't going to happen i think sometimes you get these glimpses that there's a tiny little two thousand and sixteen candidate trump inside president trump fighting to get out but it's not going to happen i recently published a piece saying war with russia is not inevitable just keep repeating that unfortunately that even with the the whiff of the moeller report about so-called collusion there will be no opening to moscow there will be no change in the direction of american policy i'm sorry to say maybe he would like to do that but i had terms of that as you mentioned the team has put together the people who are surrounding him maybe the constraints he has that we don't even know about he's

just following the neo-cons script we don't have an america first foreign policy we have an israel saudi arabia first foreign policy and we see the possible regime change in venezuela or iran and some very bad things could happen peter you know maxine. i'm very very fundamentally pessimistic right now because of so many things that are going on do you think his administration is planning a war against iran it certainly looks like it there are absolutely elements in the trump administration especially john bolton who don't like war but we have to consider the elements outside the trump administration that are even more ideologically invested in some kind of war against iran specifically sheldon adelson and where was donald trump's last public event it was at the republican jewish coalition in las vegas in sheldon adelson of the nation casino where he actually speaking to an audience of american jews referred to israel as their

country bizarrely and that's actually just the way sheldon adelson thinks sheldon adelson. a few years ago actually called for the u.s. to drop a nuclear bomb on iran this is someone who is a doe tard in the lexicon of north korea's kim who is out of his mind and donald trump is heavily invested in sheldon adelson adelson bernard marcus and paul singer three pro israel billionaires contributed over forty million dollars to donald trump's election and i think this is the real danger this likud wing of the israel lobby at the same time the u.s. military the pentagon brass they understand the consequences of a war with iran would be absolutely catastrophic and it would create an existential domestic crisis in this country as well as for the e.u. which is dead set against it i think what we're going to see is continued economic warfare yet max but let me get is this a form of kind of virtuous signaling i mean trump is showing that he's going through the motions made it at the end of the did the pentagon is going to say you

know the collateral damage of this would be so devastating that it's a no go but for the election for the campaign it's virtues signaling is that a fair assessment max yeah there is a way to look at it that's comforting which is that trump is simply appealing to domestic constituency in order to win and for trump winning is everything it's the same with venezuela if you look at trump's speech in miami before the you know right wing miami cuban in venezuela to lobby trump was simply demonizing the venezuelan government in order to leverage the hatred of socialism against a potential bernie sanders is yet to see so all of this relates to domestic politics for trump he could care less about what actually happens to iran or venezuela and they're just going to simply use every method of financial terrorism against these countries in the meanwhile we're going to be watching them i want to thank you both here many thanks to my guests in washington and thanks to our viewers for watching us here in r.t.c. you next time and remember crosstalk rules.

after the previous stage of my career was over everyone wondered what i was going to do next the ball different clubs on one hand it is logical to sit in the home field where everything is familiar on the other i wanted a new challenge and the fresh perspective i'm used to surprising people and i saw one on t.v. . i'm going to talk about football not the or else you think i was going to go. by the way ways of that slide here.

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