November 22, 2005
An ~Uncut~Transcript of an hour long Talk Nation Radio Interview with Conn Hallinan, a foreign policy analyst for Foreign PolicyIn Focus and lecturer in journalism at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Foreign policy analyst and scholar Conn Hallinan assesses the world wide impact of Neoconservative leaders and talks about his recent articles.

Click here for Hallinan’s November 5th piece, “War Crimes and Iraq.”

Click here for his November 21st piece, “Dark Armies, Secret Bases, and Rummy, Oh My!”

Is the U.S. unofficially at war with Syria?

Dori Smith: Conn Hallinan, welcome to Talk Nation Radio.
Conn Hallinan: Thank you for inviting me.

Smith: Let’s go over your November 14th piece on Syria. You say that the United States has been unofficially at war with Syria what kinds of military actions has the US taken there?

Hallinan: Well there have been two types. One major fire fight in which US troops saying that they were in hot pursuit crossed the border into Syria and apparently got into a fire fight with Syrian border guards and killed several Syrian border guards. There have also been reports and fairly well established reports that the US is infiltrating Special Forces across the border into Syria. So these really constitute military clashes and at least in the one case the administration is not at all denying the fact that it did get in a fire fight with Syrian guards, it was on the Syrian side, and that Syrian soldiers were killed. It comes pretty close to war.

Smith: What are some of the arguments that the Bush Administration has used for bombing along the Euphrates in Western Iraq and these kinds of cross border tactics?

Hallinan: Well the standard argument here is that the insurgency in Iraq is the result of foreign infiltration, that these are basically the result of jihadists coming from Syria, coming from other countries, etc. Infiltrating into Iraq and that’s the basis of the insurgency. Now, it simply isn’t true and the United States actually knows that it isn’t true. Its own intelligence service has found that 95% of the attacks in Iraq are by native Iraqis, only about 5% are foreign fighters. Most of the suicide bombings are foreign fighters. So what they are saying basically is that Syria is allowing, deliberately as part of a policy to destabilize Iraq, that Syria is allowing these jihadists to infiltrate along the border and that they are the ones that are causing the trouble. Well we know that they are not causing the trouble.

We know that they are not causing the trouble; are the Syrians allowing them to do this? It’s an enormous border. Syrians don’t really have the capacity to seal off that border. But even if they did seal off the border it would have virtually no effect on the insurgency in Iraq according to our own intelligence. So that’s the main kind of issue. Now, there is also a sub issue which has to do with Syrian interference in Lebanese internal affairs.

Smith: And has the United States closed off the border with Syria or worked to close off the border with Iran previously, or has this been left alone?

Hallinan: This was pretty much left alone. We don’t have the troops to do this. If we put all of our troops, I mean there are 153,000 Americans right now in Iraq. If we were to deploy all of those 153,000 troops, which is silly because a lot of them are support troops, along the border of Syria we might seal it off but probably not completely, of course, we wouldn’t have anything for the Iran border.

What we’ve done is that we’ve told the Syrians they are responsible for sealing it off. Now the Syrians opposed the American invasion of Iraq. They are certainly not our allies in the region. The administration has had a steady policy of hostility towards Syria. It’s talking openly of regime change; gave an interview to the financial times in which it was said that they are already discussing who they are going to replace Assad with; that they are favoring a military coup at this time. -So if you are Syria, again, you are not going to spend a huge amount of money trying to seal off a border which you probably couldn’t seal off in any case and which you know is not the source of the insurgency in Iraq. And because everyone in the region knows it’s not the source then the fact that the Americans keep coming back to it makes the Syrians and pretty much everybody else suspicious that this is simply an excuse to go after Syria. And it’s probably a pretty good guess.

Smith: We are talking about some of the same players who brought us to war in Iraq. Let’s go to the discussion that you have entered into about National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, who you say is in charge of the Syria operation.

Hallinan: Correct, well of course as National Security Advisor he would be in charge or any kind of thing like regime change. And you know Hadley is a guy whose fingerprints are all over the run up to the Iraq war. Hadley was the guy that basically put together the evidence for, or the lack of evidence thereof, the main of evidence, that Iraq was buying yellowcake from Niger. And as we know that’s gotten to be quite a scandal and in fact the whole legal fall out with former Ambassador Wilson and the present charges against Libby, Vice President Cheney’s office, etc., all come back to that point. So this is a guy who not only played an important role in the run up to the war but seems to be a tad inefficient at this business and a lot of people are apparently in trouble right now because of him. But he’s central to this whole operation and he’s part of the particular crew of Neoconservatives around Vice President Cheney, that have been the major pushers for not simply the war in Iraq but also destabilizing Syria and beginning to intervene in places like Bolivia, Paraguay, etc. It’s a very aggressive section of the Administration.

I would have to say this; I mean there is a caveat here. I think at this point the administration is split on this question. I know that the Military rolls its eyes and trembles when it thinks of some kind of military operation in a place like Syria. I mean its falling apart in Iraq and I think that the recent uproar around (Representative) Murtha talking about immediate withdrawal from Iraq, what that’s around is that he’s got the pipeline into the commanding officers, not the top officers, but the colonels in Iraq, and what they are telling him is that if we don’t get out of Iraq we are going to lose this army. I mean it’s going to be, we won’t be able to recruit for another generation. It’s just going to be a disaster. –So I think that Hadley represents the Cheney wing which is you know un-intimidated and unimpressed by the disaster in Iraq and is willing to add more fuel to the fire.

Smith: You know everything that you are saying is so concise and you are going over all of my questions in advance here, but that’s ok. We will have to eliminate some of my questions.

Hallinan: (Laughter.) Well ask them anyhow and who knows if we’ll get another angle on it.

Smith: OK. You write too that the strategy reminds you of Cambodia policy. Talk about that aspect of your piece and do so in terms of the possible grotesque failures that could occur if the US Military does continue toward regime change.

Hallinan: You know again to remind people, I keep forgetting that you know I’m 63 and so to me the details of the Vietnam War are what I grew up with and was in the middle of. For most of my students I might as well be talking about the battle of Antietam or Gettysburg. I mean these were things that are just enormously far into the past. So just a quick reminder: In 1970, in April of 1970, the Nixon Administration was arguing that the war in Vietnam in the South was being fueled by troops from the North. Now, in fact, there were North Vietnamese in South Vietnam, this was a civil war, but that all of the insurgency was the result of infiltration and infiltration from Cambodia.

There was a particular area called the Parrot’s Beak that sort of jutted out into near the Mekong Delta in South Vietnam. So the United States and the South Vietnamese Army crossed the border in April 1970, preceded by a massive B52 bombing, the invasion was a failure I mean because the war in Vietnam was not fueled simply by North Vietnamese infiltration. It was unsuccessful in terms of seizing the North Vietnamese headquarters. But what it did was it destabilized the Cambodian Government and it led to a coup in Cambodia. Sihanook was thrown out. A military government came in. And the Khmer Rouge organized against the military government. When the Khmer Rouge got in, I mean we know about the killing fields. So you know the connection between one and the other is an absolute direct connection.

Now in terms of Iraq a lot of us argued; if you invade Iraq you are going to open the lamp, you have three communities which live an intense relationship with one another, the possibilities of civil war are present and not only would a civil war destabilize Iraq but because Iraq is a very central country and a very developed industrial country for the Middle East; that it’s going to have impacts all over the place. The Turks are going to get involved because of the Kurds. The Iranians are going to get involved because of the Shiites. The Sunnis are going to get involved because Sunnis are a minority in Iraq and Sunnis are a majority in the Middle East. I mean, just domino after domino was going to go. Well they went and of course all of the dominos are falling. And its not that there is danger of civil war in Iraq, there is a civil war in Iraq. In fact the best way to end that civil war is for the United States to get out.

So the reason I use Cambodia is that you take an action and you don’t bother to study history or you don’t care about it, and then you are surprised by the results. I think the results of invading Syria would be to destabilize, not only of course Syria, but it would certainly cause the Kurds in the Northern part of Syria to ally themselves with the Kurds in Iraq.

This would freak out the Turks because they do not want Kurdistan established in their Southern border. It would certainly destabilize Lebanon. The view of Lebanon that we have now is that everybody is anti-Syria. In fact, Lebanon has been split right down the middle. People seem to forget that it was Syrians that went in and ended the civil war in Lebanon. And the struggle in Lebanon is certainly, you know, it’s a long running one and it has to do with Christians versus non Christians. Christians have always dominated the politics of Lebanon. They are the most powerful and most wealthy sections of the society. I mean these are complex things. In comes the United States with F16s and M1 Abrams Tanks and thinks they are going to make things better. Well they always succeed in making things a lot worse. Cambodia was a disaster. 2 million people dead and the killing fields, you know we are still picking up the pieces from that in Southeast Asia.

My feeling is that this talk of going in and resolving things by military force which is what people like Dick Cheney and Bush and this particular section of the Republican Party, want to do, has proved disastrous in every case, and I would say that the same thing on Afghanistan. I think we talk about the fact that Afghanistan is now an elected government and everything, but you know it’s an incredibly dangerous place. The Taliban are making a come back. You know you can’t solve things with guns. Let me just say one other thing too, and it’s the continuation of the big lie and I don’t know how else to put it.

Two days ago Vice President Cheney in his speech at the American Enterprise Institute, said that if the United States withdrew from Iraq what it would mean would be that Al Queda and Zarqawi and these jihadists would now have a state that they were in control of. Literally not a single person, not only in the Middle East, but even in Iraq thinks that’s the case. How could 5% of the insurgency seize control of the other 95% given that the other 95% is far better armed and far better organized?

It’s this continuation of the lie and its getting a stunning number of people killed. I think one of the things that people don’t think about here is that they talk about the American casualties, and these are awful, they’re terrible, I don’t know 15 or 16 thousand wounded now and certainly more than 2000 dead, but nobody talks about the Iraqis and there is no agreement on how many Iraqis have been killed. The Lancet, a British medical magazine said that the figure is 100,000. Other casualty organizations have been tracking it say that it is somewhere between 35 and 39 thousand, it’s hard to say. That’s why when I see these people talk about Cambodia and I see someone like Representative Murtha talk about Vietnam; these people know what they are talking about. Murtha fought in Vietnam. He saw what we did and he saw the consequences of what we did. And you know he’s pulling on those consequences.

Smith: Now, Conn Hallinan we are really concerned about what is going on in terms of all of the casualties in Iraq but about Representative Murtha and his argument that the US Military presence in Iraq is making things worse. I want to call your attention to an interview that Amy Goodman did on Democracy Now with Colonel Wilkerson. He worked in the Secretary of State’s Office under Colin Powell and it just so happens that she showed the video of the speech you are referring to with the Vice President’s comments to Colonel Wilkerson who then commented on them. I want to say that this is someone who has become extremely controversial in his remarks about this White House. He’s saying that there is a cabal running the government at the top level. And what he said though I thought was interesting because he said that the tactics that the United States Military has used including torture have really caused a problem in terms of how the United States is perceived in the Middle East now and in terms of any possible competition we might be in where winning hearts and minds away from extremists might be concerned. So he’s saying we are losing the war of ideas. Just comment on that part of what he said and talk about that split again that you have mentioned in the government.

Hallinan: I think in terms of losing, I think we have already lost. One of the things that was interesting is when they found, I think it was last week, when they uncovered this prison that was being run by the Internal Affairs Administration of the present Iraqi Government; signs of torture and all of that kind of stuff. And the Americans made a big thing of it, if you take a look at the editorials in the Arab world, and not just in the Arab world, in Europe as well, you know people just laughed, just rolled their eyes and said ‘what are the Americans complaining about -you guys gave them the idea.’

We don’t have any moral support, not simply in the Middle East. Look at the last vote on Cuba. A resolution came up in the United Nations against the embargo and we had four votes, one of them was Israel, the others are Palau and the Marshall Islands. Total population 97,000. That’s how isolated we have become. And it’s spread beyond the Middle East, a perfect example again, the Organization of American States, when the subject came up of the embargo against Cuba the OAS not only voted against the embargo but they changed the term from “embargo” to “blockade” to stop the “blockade”. Now some people may say well that’s just a piece of vocabulary. It’s not just the vocabulary. An “embargo” is the policy of a country. A “blockade” is a violation of international law. But here’s the OAS, what we normally think of as our back yard, basically accusing the United States of violating international law. That would not have happened without the war in Iraq. That would not have happened without Abu Ghriab. It would not have happened without this cabal of people who have seized control of the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and the leading executive positions in the country.

I mean you know the whole thing about Judith Miller that got sort of missed here was that what you were really seeing was that you were seeing the leading newspaper in the country, one of the leading reporters for the leading newspaper in the country, basically acting as a conduit, a stove pipe as it were, for this phonied up intelligence to the American people. And since the Neocons have such a big impact on other newspapers and radio stations, television stations, etc. You know it’s really our only national newspaper. -It has an impact far beyond its circulation and there’s no question since Judith Miller was in there meeting with these people and having meetings with them in the midst of them she knew what was going on. It’s very scary. And the thing that makes me worried about it is that under normal circumstances you would say, the United States invades Syria? Give me a break. You know they are falling apart in Iraq how are they going to pick up something else. -These people don’t worry about that. I mean this doesn’t enter their minds. You listen to Dick Cheney now. They are just as tough and as aggressive and unilateralist as they were.

Right now John Bolton two days ago made a proposal for reforming the United Nations which basically concentrates all power in the hands of the General Secretary and the Security Council and completely, I mean, the General Assembly basically becomes a debating society. This is what the Administration has done to internal politics in the United States.

When Condoleezza Rice was asked whether or not the Bush Administration would come back to Congress to ask them if there was a possibility for military actions against Syria and Iran she said that wasn’t necessary. Congress had already given the President the right to do anything he wanted in the war on terrorism.

You know the right of Congress to declare war is simply gone and these are the people that are right in the center of it and I find them a very scary group. And you know again not to go too much farther a field Donald Rumsfeld and the leading people in the State Department at the Latin American Desk say that the present crisis going on in Bolivia, demonstrations every night there, is being organized by the Cubans and the Venezuelans.

Well, you want to put that argument together with the pre-Iraq arguments that the Administration was coming up with and these statements about Syria and Iran being these centers of terrorist operation …yeah I think this is all very scary. It doesn’t make any sense but it’s all very scary.

Smith: I do want to ask you about the changes that we have seen in Iraq in the last day or so with recent announcements being made ironically really that there may be some agreement being reached between Shiite, Kurdish, leaders and Sunni leaders, pertaining to a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.

Hallinan: Absolutely, and you know this is a story that has legs all over the world and none in the United States. And that is that the Arab league called this conference. Brought together all of the parties just like they did in 1989 in Lebanon. And the Syrians were asked to go in by the United States and by the Arab League and they ended the civil war. This is a very important development. Now, the United States has done its level best to downplay this conference going into it. I mean they didn’t have very much choice afterwards when this resolution came out.

If you look at yesterdays New York Times there’s a story which buries the conference in the 11th paragraph on the inside page and gives it two paragraphs. All over the world people have been looking at the Arab League conference as a way out, this is a way out; this is a way that could end the situation going on in Iraq right now.

When Chalabi came to the United States last week he gave a speech to the American Enterprise Institute the whole focus of the speech was to try and undermine the Arab League’s efforts because it’s not in the interest of Iran, it’s not in the interest of the Shiites to have this kind of agreement. Chalabi represents that section of the Neocons. He represents Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Hadley and Feith, and all of those people, John Bolton, etc.

So the Administration has done its best to undermine this. I think this is extremely hopeful. I think that the Arab League meeting is a breakthrough. You know I’m sure, I think the President of the Arab League said that they had only accomplished 70% of what they wanted to accomplish but you know 70% is a whole lot better than nothing.

And I think this begins to also bring in outside pressure; to step away from unilateralism. For instance one of the things that this resolution is going to do, it’s going to put tremendous pressure on the British. Tony Blair is already fighting a rear guard action against opposition to the deployment of the troops. It’s going to be very difficult for the British to resist giving a time table for the withdrawal of their troops at this point. I think it’s a very very important development.

Smith: The last time we were reading about Iran we were learning what the IAEA was doing and an evaluation of the possibility that Iran had violated the non-proliferation treaty was going to be put off until I believe it was November 25th.

Hallinan: Right.

Smith: And so where we left off was this sort of higher level debate. However, you have written in your recent piece, November 14th that’s published in Counterpunch, about MEK, an organization of Mujahedeen-e-Khalq.

Hallinan: It means “red flag” you know, Mujahedeen of the flag.

Smith: And so this is an extremely nationalistic organization I would assume?

Hallinan: It’s a very odd organization, a really odd organization. It has characteristics of being very left. It’s pretty secular. A little cult-y, their main base is in Europe, it would be kind of hard to describe them and I guess if you had to describe them you would say well they are kind of cult-y left is the way I would describe them. They did, they carried out a number of bombings in Iran after the take over of Koumani. Some of the information that they have given has been accurate. Some of it has been you know sort of tarted up. It’s hard to tell what it is. But they are officially a terrorist organization that is they are on the State Department list as a terrorist organization, and we are basically protecting them in Northern Iraq. So there are some contradictions here that are pretty impressive.

Now one thing you did say was what about referring Iran to the Security Council for violations, or suggested violations of the non-proliferation agreement, that has been put on the back burner. That apparently has been now put on the back burner. I suggested this in a column earlier, I wrote a column about the vote for India to the possibility of referring Iran to the Security Council, but the U.S. has now backed away from that because they can’t get support from anybody in the Security Council. The Chinese, the Russians and the Indians have told them that they have no intention of referring Iran at this point to the Security Council. The question is -are the Iranians building nuclear weapons? Well that’s a different interview; it’s a long and complex one.

Smith: OK, without then getting into that aspect of things, let’s talk though about the presence of this Mujahedeen faction near the Iranian border itself because what I’m wondering is, we are now looking at a completely different world with events in the United States splitting the U.S. government really wide open for us to look at from a different direction. But who would be supporting this kind of development? Maybe it is a covert operation in part, maybe not?

Hallinan: It’s a little of both. The Mujahedeen, that particular group, has gotten very strong support from the Neocons. I mean it’s a very uncomfortable support because the Mujahedeen kind of consider themselves sort of quasi Marxist. So here are these quasi Marxist types hanging out with Dick Cheney and Hadley and Wolfowitz and these people. And so I would imagine small talk at cocktail parties must be short. However, the Mujahedeen, their tie I mean their support comes from the Department of Defense. And in fact the U.S. State Department has always been rather nervous about them but the Department of Defense, which is Rumsfeld, they are very supportive of them because they see them as a potential kind of fifth column in the case of any sort of military action against Iran and I will also add that the Iranians have been routinely shooting down, well I don’t know some of them probably crash on their own, but a number of American drones. Predator aircraft, another one, there’s a kind of a long range propeller craft; the Americans have purchased some Israeli short range surveillance aircraft called the Hermes. And they have been routinely knocked down or crashing in Iran. Now, if you are the Iranians you have to take a look at the situation. You have this group of people who are well armed. They have tanks and all, these are not you know a bunch of guerillas with Kalishnikovs. These are people with tanks and armored cars and artillery etc. on your border being protected by the Americans and you are getting this flood of surveillance drones which are crossing your border and photographing what? Are they looking for nuclear things? Are they mapping radar networks, which is what I think they are doing? In other words they go into an airspace and someone turns on the radar to see what they are and you’ve got a map right there of the radar system and so if you are ever contemplating an attack then you have someone’s radar system down and you know how to knock out that radar system so that you can launch air attacks etc.

I mean if you are the Iranians you’ve got to think that you’ve just discovered somebody at your door trying to jimmy your locks. It’s one thing if you have someone sitting across the street looking at you through a spyglass. It’s quite another when you find them, you know, with a lock pick trying to get in the door. So does this all translate into the fact that the United States is going to launch a military attack on Iran. I mean, the rational logical side of me says “no” it’s just impossible, this is a huge big country. You know the Mullahs are not terribly popular but it’s a very nationalist country, I mean it would pull the entire country together to resist us, much too big a country for the United States to defeat militarily. I just can’t imagine that we would do something like that but would that stop Dick Cheney and Hadley and Bolton and all of these people? Absolutely not. They haven’t shown the slightest bit of common sense in anything that they do.

Smith: I just want to read one of the paragraphs in your piece. You say, “Most of the information on Iran’s nuclear weapons programs comes from the MEK, which has an uneven track record for accuracy. In any case, there is a disturbing parallel between the role the MEK is playing in developing information on Iran’s weapons of mass destruction and the prewar intelligence on Baghdad’s WMD programs cooked up by Ahmed Chalabi-” (”and the group of Iraqi expatriates gathered around the Pentagon.)” Now Ahmed Chalabi right now a very controversial figure, and what we are looking at is sort of a strange process where he is dealing with Iran and the United States. Just develop your ideas a bit.

Hallinan: I must admit I have a sneaking admiration for Chalabi. He’s really the cat man. No matter where you throw him up he comes down on his feet. I mean here is a guy who flees Iraq. He goes to Jordan. He starts up the Petra Bank. He has to flee Jordan because he’s embezzled $39 million dollars from the Petra Bank. He has a sentence of something like 31 years hanging over his head in Jordan. -Comes to the United States, tarts up all of this phony evidence for the invasion of Iraq, goes to Iraq, is at one point arrested by the United States, and now there is at least an outside chance that the guy could become Prime Minister. I mean in a horrible kind of scary way I find that there’s part of me that sort of admires this guy.

The thing about the stuff on Iran is that you know it’s very hard to figure out what Iran is up to. Have they concealed things? Yes. They have absolutely concealed things. They admitted that they concealed things. Do they have a nuclear weapon program? Oh I don’t know, there’s no evidence that there is but of course Rumsfeld at one point says the fact that there is no evidence doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist, which is true. You know it’s one of these things that you are just not particularly certain about. Nobody thinks it’s going to happen very quickly. I mean the thought is that it would take them anywhere from ten to fifteen years to do so.

You know in a certain sense if I were Iran, and this is a dangerous thing to say and I know people yell at me when I say this, but you know if I were an Iranian and I were thinking just in terms of my national interest and I hear all of these people talking about you know they are going to have regime change in Tehran; you know, Richard Perle is saying that Tehran is a ripe fruit waiting to drop in our lap. These are people that basically got the war in Iraq going. So you hear all of this kind of talk. Your major competitor in the Middle East is Israel which is a nuclear armed nation, somewhat in excess of 200 nuclear weapons. Why wouldn’t you build a nuclear weapon? I mean you would look at, you’re part of the “axis of evil,” the three parts that were part of the axis of evil were Iran, North Korea, and Iraq.

Well, Iraq didn’t have nuclear weapons and they got invaded. North Korea does have nuclear weapons. Maybe, and they didn’t get invaded. If you are an Iranian what conclusion do you draw from that? I mean this is one of those cases where this rhetoric of the Neocons has produced exactly what they say that they don’t want. In terms of the possibility that the Iranians are working on nuclear weapons, it’s very much up in the air. I think one of the problems, and it’s one that nobody is facing up to including the United Nations, which I’m very supportive of in these things, but the fact is that the nuclear non-proliferation treaty is based on the fact that the nuclear powers agree to get rid of nuclear weapons. That’s the whole theory behind the non-proliferation agreement. Other countries will agree not to develop nuclear weapons because the five major nuclear powers would agree to get rid of them. Well, the five great nuclear powers haven’t done anything to get rid of them at all; in fact, they’ve made them more sophisticated since the treaty has been signed.

More than that the United States violated the agreement when they threatened Iran and Syria with nuclear weapons, one of the parts of the non-proliferation agreement is that you cannot threaten a non-nuclear country with nuclear weapons. Again, that’s obviously a key core of the non-proliferation agreement. You kind of ask people don’t build nuclear weapons and so therefore we won’t blackmail you and we will get rid of arms. So there is a quid pro quo. Well the problem is there has never been any quid pro quo.

So if you are the Iranians or the North Koreans or the Japanese or the Taiwanese, you know a lot of countries that could develop nuclear weapons, the Brazilians could develop nuclear weapons, so could the Argentineans. As long as the great powers do not take that treaty seriously except to keep nuclear weapons out of other people’s hands then we have the ongoing problem that countries that are threatened are going to say well we need to develop nuclear weapons.

And I find that in some ways one of the scariest aspects of this whole thing and nobody is raising this, again, not even the United Nations. You know I just wait for someone to say how come we are not following the treaty ourselves and are there consequences for us taking a cavalier attitude towards how the treaty applies to us as opposed to how it applies to everybody else. I think this is one of the consequences.

Smith: The United States put permanent bases in Iraq. I understand it was 14 of them. How does the presence now of those bases impact what you are talking about in terms of the strategies that these countries must develop in order to feel safe?

Hallinan: Well if you recall the invasion of Iraq came from neighboring countries. There was a big fight with the Turks because the Turks wouldn’t allow us to send a division in from Turkey. We actually already had the division on the way to Turkey and the Turkish legislature said ‘no you can’t do that’. But the rest came in from countries that surround Iraq. So if you have these American bases, and you have them in the Middle East, and they are permanent bases, and you are a country that might consider something like nationalizing oil or might take a position on international questions that are not in line with the United States; you have to look at those bases and say are those bases, could they be used as a spring board to attack our countries?

Imagine in 1980 or 1965, you know a major Soviet base in Canada and Mexico? You know we wouldn’t have allowed it. It wouldn’t have been permitted. We certainly would not have allowed it.

So I think what happens is that not only do those bases make those countries nervous but given that those countries do not have the resources to ever match the United States in terms of military power, at least not in the foreseeable future, what’s the logical answer? The logical answer is well let’s develop nuclear weapons. Then at least we’ve got an ace in the hole. -I think those permanent bases end up as an enormous destabilizing force and I think Americans are going to have to begin to look at this enormous ring of bases. Thousands and thousands of bases, more than eight thousand bases all over the world, and try to understand the way that other people view those bases.

They view them as projections of American foreign policy. And particularly with the group of people that are in power right now who are unilateralists, they see them as direct threats to their sovereignty. And Americans are just going to have to bite the bullet and realize that they can no longer build bases everywhere simply because of the fact that they have the power to do so.

One other thing on those bases, you know the suspicion, certainly in the Middle East, and in much of the rest of the world, is that this is about oil. Now, I don’t think the war in Iraq is only about oil but of course, it’s about oil. In May of 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney’s national energy policy development group made a recommendation to President Bush that quote, “make energy security a priority for our trade and foreign policy.” -Iraq has the second largest reserves. Maybe the second largest reserves, maybe the third largest reserves, hard to say, but certainly some of the largest reserves in the world, and our energy policy is fundamental to everything that we do. The suspicion is that those bases are going to stay there to insure the fact that the United States is going to continue to have access to Middle Eastern oil.

You know even if that were not the case, and I happen to think that it’s a big part of the argument, even if it were not the case however there is no way that you can convince anybody in the Middle East that that isn’t why they were there. And again, the U.S. is going to have to realize that it can no longer control resources that are essential to its economy and international security, they can no longer control them through military force. They are going to have to have access to them through diplomacy, which is not really a problem. I mean people are going to sell oil according to what the price is. Nobody is going to refuse to sell oil to the United States, and the United States has too many sources of oil. At this point Venezuela is sort of a thorn in our side, you know, Hugo Chavez, well Venezuela hasn’t stopped selling oil to the United States. It’s still the fifth largest supplier of oil to the United States and even larger than that for the East Coast. These bases create their own problems, and there’s going to have to be a change in policy.

Smith: Let’s turn then to your study of other bases. I know you’ve written about an increase in troops at a U.S. base in Japan, and you have now been discussing the problems that we may face with regards to saber rattling toward Bolivia

Hallinan: Well I’m very concerned. You know you have got to track where people take airplane trips to and this August, Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, flew to Paraguay. Now this is not normally a place that you would think of the Secretary of Defense going and so when he had made this trip to Paraguay my ears sort of perked up and I said gee I wonder why Donald Rumsfeld is going to Paraguay?

I had written a fair amount about Latin America, I don’t claim to be an expert but I had written a fair amount about the Southern cone, particularly the area of Brazil and Argentina and Uruguay and Paraguay; Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, etc. and so then I started to research it.

Well it turns out that the reason he went is because the U.S. Special Forces, 500 of them, are being deployed at an air base in Paraguay. Now this is not a small air base. At one point somebody said you know it’s just dirt, well actually it’s larger than the international airport in the capital of the city, Asuncion. It was built in 1982. It’s an enormous place. It can handle B52 bombers and Gallaxy C-5 cargo planes, which by the way the Paraguayans did not own any of.

It can house up to 16 thousand troops etc, so you say well, come one this is just paranoia. Well even paranoid people have enemies and the problem with it is its right near the Bolivian border. Bolivia is going through an enormous amount of upheaval now. It has had three Presidents since 2000. The major fight is over renationalizing the oil and gas reserves in Bolivia. Bolivia has the second largest natural gas reserves in Latin America.

In 1996, the U.S. and the International Monetary Fund, IMF, put the squeeze on Bolivia to sell of the reserves and sell off access to the reserves and they did so for a pittance, I mean $286 million dollars or something like that was what they sold them off for and they are worth about $250 billion dollars.

So it started with this sort of privatization that the U.S. has been pushing and there were first demonstrations around the privatization of water and then gas and oil, anyhow, there has been a lot of upheaval. It’s a reflection of what the situation in Bolivia is. Six out of ten people in Bolivia live under the poverty line. In rural areas it is nine out of ten. And the majority of the population is native Bolivians and they have been frozen out of the political process all of their lives, in fact, they didn’t even become citizens of Bolivia until 1952. So, you know, this is about poverty. It’s about poverty and access to power.
But when Donald Rumsfeld made his speech in Paraguay he said that all of the demonstrations were being organized by Cubans and Venezuelans and that all of this upheaval was outside agitation, etc.

This has made the local countries, particularly Argentina and Brazil very nervous. If you recall in 1964 the United States was instrumental in helping the Brazilian Military overthrow the civilian government in Brazil and establish a military dictatorship that went on until 1985 and did awful things for 21 years.

The same thing in Argentina, a military dictatorship received widespread support from the United States. Everybody knows about Chile, we helped organize the coup. So suddenly you get people in the Southern cone, they see enormous build up in this American base, and it makes them very nervous, and again, there’s a reason why they should be nervous. The United States built up a large base in Ecuador at a place called Manta and for a long time the United States denied that it was anything other than a weather surveillance airport. But local journalists got on the story and it turned out that it was a great big huge operation. I mean it reminds me most of a place like Long Chen which was the center for CIA operations in Laos and the bombing of Cambodian the bombing of Laos, and it’s a sort of secret base in the Laotian hills.

So this particular base at Manta has some hundreds and hundreds of U.S. troops. It has thousands and thousands of mercenaries because the United States has largely privatized the war in Columbia against the guerillas in Columbia, has largely run it through these private corporations which of course Congress cannot look at because they are private corporations and they can’t be subpoenaed and nobody can look at their records, etc.

So here is this giant base that’s going on here, that base moved in and the situation in Columbia heated up, the guerilla war got worse, you had a coup in Venezuela, and it turns out that several leading members of the Haitian group who organized the coup against President Aristide were holed up there for a little over a year at this base.

Now, maybe it’s coincidence. But you see a coup in Venezuela. You see a coup in Haiti. You see the war in Columbia heating up. You see this big air base being built up and all of these American mercenaries and military pouring into this area. If you are Brazil and Argentina, and Uruguay, and Bolivia, you are looking at this base here in Paraguay and you are saying uh oh, this seems to have a familiar pattern.

Now again, it may not, nothing may come of it, but I don’t think anybody knows about it and I have no doubts that when it comes to people like Rumsfeld that they are certainly thinking in terms of intervening in Bolivia. And the minute you say that it is all about Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro well suddenly you are talking in terms of the Cold War and you know our friends are whoever they are as long as they are the enemies of people we don’t like. That’s very scary.

Smith: In your piece November 14th published in Counterpunch, Provoking Syria, Cambodia all over again, I want to turn to the point you are making about Israel. You mention AIPAC, Richard Perle, the Likud.

I want to turn your attention to recent stories, developments about Hollinger International, because at this point Richard Perle is actually facing civil lawsuits over his role in the illegal siphoning of $100 million dollars from investors at Hollinger International, and in addition, ex-Hollinger Chief Conrad Black, the media mogul in Canada is also being indicted, that’s in America. So there has been a big shake up too in Israel’s politics with Sharon leaving the Likud Party. Amir Peretz now leading Labor. Just talk about the incredible day to day news events that we are seeing and the degree to which your view on what is going on is changing perhaps.

Hallinger: Boy, it’s hard to keep up with it. I would point out that Conrad Black has investments in newspapers in Israel, and they are the most right wing of the newspapers in Israel, specifically the Jerusalem Post.

What’s happened in Israel right now is a bit of an earthquake. I think the biggest earthquake, everyone says well it’s Sharon leaving Likud. I don’t think that’s the big earthquake. I think the earthquake is that the Labor Party got retaken over by Labor again and that you have the candidate for the Labor Party now who is talking about poverty as the central issue and in fact who defines the occupation of the West Bank as a moral question, not simply a practical question, but a moral question.

What’s interesting is that for the first time, the first time that I ever recall, a week ago Sharon made a statement about the fact that we have to be concerned about poverty in Israel. In fact, one of the affects of this kind of neo-liberal Likud politics, particularly Netanyahu when he was at the economic ministry was privatization and the whole bit and what you had was this enormous growing gap between rich and poor in Israel.

The poverty index has gone up sharply. And all of a sudden you have a candidate, a major candidate of the Labor Party, who is talking about the fact that we have to address that. And now suddenly what it means is that traditionally Sephardics who were cut out of the political process by the Ashkinazi European Jews who dominated the Labor Party and you suddenly have a Sephardic labor leader who is talking directly to Sephardic Jews. –Now the Sephardic Jews who were always the poorest but who lined up with Likud because they were so angry at being cut out of the whole political process by the Ashkinaz, you are suddenly going to find the Sephardic population split. That has already split the Russian population. Nobody ever thought that the Russians who go toward Labor. Now polls show that there is a growing favorable part of the Russian population, Russian immigrant population that’s for Labor. So, boy this is just, this is an upheaval.

Now does this change sort of my view of what’s going to happen? Well I think it does to a certain extent. One thing you have to remember I think is that sometimes we tend to think about Israelis as if they are one block of people. In fact, Israeli society is deeply split and I think that while one part of them sees themselves as –not proxies for the Americans, I mean the Israelis have always been very careful to do what is in their interests, and I think one of the things that I also get disturbed about is sometimes people point to people like Richard Perle or (Paul) Wolfowitz and they say well you know look these people are Jewish and so they are doing what they are doing to support Israel and Israeli politics and I don’t agree with that. –I think that it is in the interests of American foreign policy to keep the Middle East in turmoil. To have a powerful military force in the Middle East which is an ally and that’s Israel. But the first time the Israelis do something that the Americans really don’t like they will find out quickly that they can get dropped. So I’m always very careful to make it clear that this is not about being Jewish and its not about being non-Jewish or Arab or anything. It’s about policy, it’s about basic policy.

I think that the effect of this upheaval right now will be, in the short run, I don’t think there is going to be much progress at all made on the Palestinian side. But you suddenly have Labor going back to its roots and instead of acting like Neoconservatives themselves and totally concentrating on the question of something like Gaza which is in some ways a diversion, but is now talking about poverty, wealth, democracy, access to resources, and moral questions about occupation, that’s going to move the entire debate in Israel in a very different direction. And even if Labor doesn’t win this election you know there is going to be an elephant in the room, and there has not been an elephant in the room for many years in Israel and it is there now.

I would say one caveat here. Sharon is brilliant at the business of disruption. At doing something which diverts everybody from what is going on. I mean he was a general, and he was a pretty good general, and one thing he knows is that diversion is a very good tactic on the battle field. Could you have a situation where something could happen, bad, with Syria and the effect is that it would drive the Israeli population toward a united front against Syria, to basically back the person who they have trust with for security in times of War, Sharon; could something like that happen?

Well I know it sounds paranoid but it’s possible and that’s a little bit of my fear here but I think what’s happening in Israel right now is just so exciting and so interesting and I think in the long run it’s going to have major effects on American policy in the region as well. The Israelis are going to have to decide whether they are part of the Middle East or not and a significant portion, certainly the Sharon people, you know are building a wall and they are not building the wall to keep out the Palestinians. They are building a wall to keep Israel separate from the rest of the Middle East. I think if that triumphs that is a long run danger to the existence of the State of Israel. I think that there are now people in Israel who are beginning to say this is a bad idea, it’s impossible, we can’t keep up the burden, we are in fact part of the Middle East. That seems to me to be the only long run, long term solution to not simply to the Israeli/Palestinian situation but to the Arab/Israeli situation.

Smith: Will you comment finally in a similar way about the shakeup in U.S. politics in the wake of the prosecution being waged by Patrick Fitzgerald?

Hallinan: (Chuckles) Oh the wheels of God grind slowly but they grind exceedingly fine don’t they? You know it’s just so interesting to look at this. You know there’s that old line, whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad. I think that it’s wrong. I think it’s whom the Gods would destroy they first put in power without restraint. And these guys, you know Libby and Cheney; the whole lot of them. They’ve had both houses of Congress. They’ve got most of the courts. They’ve run the Executive. And they basically felt they could do anything they wanted to do, and they were not subtle about it, you know they were just open, blatant; you know invasion of Iraq, we’re gonna kick your butts, we’re going to take Baghdad in two weeks. Well they did take Baghdad in two weeks and they still don’t own Baghdad.

So I think that one of the effects on this is will it begin to remove this section, will it put this section of the Republican Party into eclipse? Well it may be a little early to say that but I would say that is the direction that it is going and I think the sign of that was the recent vote on the budget. What’s happened is the Republicans are going home to their districts and they are finding that their constituents are really unhappy. And they are unhappy about what happened with Katrina. They are unhappy about the fact that they suddenly have woken up into a country which can no longer even handle a bad storm.

I mean, you have had starting with Reagan, you have had almost 30 years, at least a quarter of a century, of consistently hollowing out every single social service, every single ability to respond, and we’ve been running on luck. Well we just ran out of luck and suddenly people see what that means when you run out of luck and you do not have a system which is capable of responding to anything but military things, and they can’t even respond there.

So I think the effect of the prosecution will be that it will really deeply damage these people. I have a caveat here. And that is it also depends on what the opposition does and I will have to say, proof in advertising, I’m a registered Democrat, and Barbara Lee is my representative and so she’s very easy to vote for and she was the only vote against the war in the House; I don’t have any problems with her and I certainly don’t have any problems with Democrats, but what I’ve seen of the Democratic leadership is a timidity that may end up getting it into major trouble.

When Murtha made his comments about withdrawing the Democrats were very careful to say well that’s not our position. I don’t know why it isn’t their position? I mean I don’t understand what they are saying. They’re saying we should stay in there longer, for what? You know, well, there will be a civil war. Number one, we don’t have any right to intervene in anybody’s civil war. You will recall the British almost intervened in our civil war. We would have been very unhappy about that if they had done so. But two, I think we have essentially fueled a civil war; we are the source of the civil war, so why are Democrats being timid on this question? If there is going to be a change, and finally run these thieves and crazy people out of decision making positions in the United States there is going to have to be an opposition which articulates a clear policy to the contrary. I have not seen it yet. I hope very much that it will be done but I haven’t seen it yet.

Smith: Conn Hallinan thanks so much for joining us on Talk Nation Radio.
Hallinan: My pleasure.

This Talk Nation Radio interview was produced in the studios of WHUS Storrs, Radio for the People at the University of Hartford. Talk Nation Radio can be heard on Wed. at 5 PM at WHUS Storrs Click here to listen to this broadcast or download it as an air quality MP3 file.