welcome to cross talk we're all things considered peter lloyd well what 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's 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 i must admit of savagery i must say it must be a good book because i've already heard that you've been deeply formed during the talk about your book so it must be good ok so that's already. indication to me that my viewer 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 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. you know 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 fill in a centrally 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 through the largest covert operation in cia history and what resulted ultimately 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 sheikh 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. it's 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 hot spots 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 are 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 especially in a foreign legion at the same time we're wagging our finger and saying oh we're fighting terrorism or fighting terrorism when in fact these terrorists are are our guys in many many cases you know max this 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 can let these people loose but can you control them after they have left them loose and then they will and essentially what they do is blow back and turn against you go ahead max. this is the disposal problem that i write about consistently in it 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 bedi 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 khadafi 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 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 corben is under such merciless attack because he told their dirty secret the other leaders either pointed the finger at muslims in general or classic demagogy or they just simply tried to sweep the whole thing under the rug like to recently but this is happened again and again and it will happen again you know james it's interesting i know this max was i 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 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 knows 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 et cetera et cetera almost as though they're covering for these 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 cracking down further police state scouring the internet to anybody who objects to this you know you can't criticize us because you're a 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 they come back to their countries of origin many cases against our citizens of western countries we say well you know what 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 all right we're 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 eight years to overthrow assad well we get a lot of come back to america come back to britain i have an idea. 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 yeah i mean the largest franchise of al qaeda right now exists under the banner of sham in the province and this was essential in the 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

trading with organizations like the f.b.i. just a quick question here but but the people that make these decisions for these foreign interventions are never held responsible are they. they very seldom are and then we see him consistently kicked up stairs and maintain 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 elite a . man and we have a date at 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. .

it has nothing to do with the propaganda that the daily mail pushing but when you have a population that might be susceptible the propaganda they can easily be manipulated into thinking that fracking is something other than what it is it's not economically viable it costs more to frack then then then you make a profit it's cash flow negative it's also environmentally negative you destroy the environment incredibly. during the grid to pretty. old enough to remember that it was most of the family were employed. there wasn't it was bit much worse objectively today but there was an expectation that things were going to get better. there was a real sense of hope. there isn't today today's america was shaped by the turn principles of concentration of wealth and power. reduced democracy

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with the mujahideen ok that's a good starting point here 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 ok 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. dan as the washington post critic tom shales called him he went and embedded with the mujahideen he wore you know indigenous clothing and everybody were able to go on c.b.s. with that 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 this. stingers which reminds me of how the media behaved at the beginning of the syrian proxy war

when they embedded with the cia backed 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 by the 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's 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 you know on one side of their mouth they talk about democracy promotion but it's really. what i scott what i call it it's a path ology of power and he did not and 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 they call but neverland global hegemony world domination is what it boils down to 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 in 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 trotskyites 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 interventionists 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 christendom 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. well you know it's going to matter i saw her interviewed jim comi and

she was outraged that freedom of speech one 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 book goes all the way up to donald trump fit donald trump in your book max i mean we just saw for reid's akari a 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 russia gate 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 u.s. 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 a vote and 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 their self proclaimed socialist you know james that

you weren't you but you were on the program many times during the campaign 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 it's 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 anywhere go ahead james. my

signature hash tag on twitter now is not what i voted for look. it's somewhat of a mystery to me as well that 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 would 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 you know 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 trends 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.

they can come and blow our brains out at any given time and we can't really do anything actually america is the only country in the world where you can kill people outside war and legally get away with. the whole of the fire crawls still brilliant all the trouble here's briefly all the points it's hollow playing to k.k.k. exists because america wants it to exist the other the biggest terrorist group to ever operate in this country and they're dead to media worse all than the people who destroyed the world trade centers of the scroll why.

it has nothing to do with the propaganda that the daily mail is pushing but when you have a population that might be susceptible to propaganda they can easily be manipulated into thinking that fracking is something other than what it is it's not economically viable it costs more to frack then then then you make an profit it's cashflow negative it's also environmentally negative you destroy the environment incredible out of. business if there was a period of sort of the old i suppose it's just bush but if. you do what we do you will be well to the minute that it was and i go to the. moon is its ability. to get enough of him you know that all you want the solicitor going to bring in the

man i'm interested in said liberal still is that mean that you all know paul. enough well it was pretty good way to listen to. what you stated to which i'm going . with them. here do you really mean it was your money you know did you insert storm in the lead here so my look from moods are doing the curator cofer smirk. i i. i. i i.

i. i. president putin and the trumpet discuss it beyond rust in venezuela and a potential nuclear deal for north korea and an hour long phone call. u.s. congresswoman says washington is partly to blame for the turmoil in venezuela the secretary of state brands her comments ignorant and disgusting. the french interior minister is accused of lying after claiming it made a protesters attack staff at a paris hospital. and facebook is accused of censorship after banning some prominent right wing commentators for alleged hate speach.