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Aug. 8, 2024 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:01:45
Prof. John Mearsheimer on Looming War in the Middle East, U.S. Vows to Intervene for Israel, Ukraine, and More

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Good evening, it's Wednesday, August 7th.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
You would likely not know this from listening to prevailing mainstream media discourse, but the Middle East is on the brink of what is certain to be an extremely dangerous war between Israel, Iran, and its various proxies, including, most dangerously for Israel, Hezbollah, which has tens of thousands of highly effective rockets, at least, Pointed directly at Israeli cities and other sensitive targets.
Unlike in April, when the Iranians retaliated against Israel after their embassy in Damascus was bombed by the Israelis, but did so in a way that was negotiated with the Americans and purposely designed to cause little damage, the Iranians this time, by all accounts, have decided that a far more serious and less restrained have decided that a far more serious and less restrained attack on Israel is compelled after the Israeli assassination on Iranian soil of the Hamas leader, who was leading the negotiations for a ceasefire deal between Israel and Gaza.
If the Iranians do what they are claiming to everyone they intend to do, this would not just be a war between two other foreign countries on the other side of the world.
This would very much be every bit as much of an American war as an Israeli war, given that the Biden White House, whatever that means these days, has vowed to intervene in the war on the side of Israel and has already deployed major American military assets to the region specifically for that purpose.
Now, all of this is happening While the sitting American president is, according to his own party, mentally addled and incapable of processing complex information.
And while the vice president is single mindedly focused on ensuring that she will ascend to power next January.
There also is, just by the way, Another U.S.-funded and armed war still raging, that's the war in Ukraine, and the Russians there have been steadily advancing, consolidating their advantage over Kiev, weakening the Ukrainian front line even further, and virtually ensuring that they will be the winner of that war one way or the other.
All of this, but especially the imminent escalated conflict in the Middle East that will involve, at a minimum, the US, Israel, and Iran deserves far more attention and analysis than it has gotten.
And as a result, we will spend this evening talking to what we believe is one of the best and most insightful foreign policy and an international relations analyst that we know, that is the University of Chicago, Professor John Mearsheimer, who is also the co-author, very relevantly, of the 2007 book entitled The Israel Lobby, about the powerful way that lobby plays, about the powerful role that lobby plays in shaping U.S. policy in the about the powerful role that lobby plays in shaping U.S. policy in
An interview taped earlier today with Professor Mearsheimer, just before the show aired, we spoke to him about all of these crises, the role of the 2024 election, and what effect that could have on them, and what the motives of each state actor are in the Middle East, as well as Russia and Ukraine, Our interviews with Professor Mearsheimer are always among our most watched episodes, and for good reason.
He has proven over and over to be extremely prescient and insightful in his analysis of Ukraine, Russia, Israel, and the broader Middle East, as well as U.S. domestic politics, largely because of his refusal to simply mindlessly accept and then recite establishment dogma and Western propaganda the way the largely because of his refusal to simply mindlessly accept and then recite establishment dogma and Western I am convinced that our discussion with him this evening is among the most illuminating we have done with him, and we are excited to show it to you.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, and especially our interview that we're about to show you that I conducted just a few moments ago with Professor John Mearsheimer.
Professor Mearsheimer, it is great to see you.
Thanks so much for joining the show tonight.
My pleasure, Glenn.
So just as a preface to our conversation, I just wanted to let you know, last night, every twice a week, we have an after show after our live show here on Rumble for our members and subscribers.
And one of them said, why is it that every time you have Professor Mearsheimer on, you don't actually talk about China?
I'm really interested in hearing the two of you talk about China.
And I explained that every time you come on, I always have a long list of things I want to ask you, and China's always on them, but unfortunately there are major national security crises very imminent, either exploding or about to explode, and I feel compelled to talk to you about those, and that seems to be the case right now as well.
So, maybe one day we'll sort of set aside a bunch of time to talk about China, or maybe we can get to it time permitting, but let's begin where we should obviously begin, which is in the Middle East.
I think the last time you were on, It was after Iran.
responded to the Israeli bombing of their embassy in Damascus with a what looked what was designed to look like some sort of major retaliation but was in fact designed by the Iranians to be of great restraint of sort of a type of attack that could easily be intercepted maybe not to the extent that it was but certainly it wasn't their most advanced or sophisticated weaponry that they used.
I think a common theme over the last 10 months since the October 7th attack has been Your view that the reason you may not be as concerned about a kind of regional conflagration is because you always point out neither Iran nor the U.S. wants a major war between Iran and Israel.
This time, though, the Iranians are at least saying that they have to go much further than they went the last time, that it can't be a sort of performative response.
What do you expect the Iranian response to be this time?
Yeah, I agree with you, Glenn.
I think that if you go back and you look at what happened in April, it was not only the Iranians who worked to limit the attack.
The Iranians actually coordinated with the Americans.
Because, as you say, both the Americans and the Iranians wanted to avoid a war that involved the two of them fighting each other.
This is a very different story.
The Iranians have made it clear that this time they're not going to work with the Americans to limit the attack, and they're really going to try to slam Israel.
Exactly what that means is hard to say, but I would imagine that they will launch a much more forceful attack this time than in April, and I wouldn't be surprised if it comes in multiple waves.
And very importantly, the last time we were able to convince the Israelis to limit their retaliation on April 19th, this is after the Iranians struck on April 14th, on April 19th, The Israelis retaliated with a minor strike, and that was in large part because we convinced them to do that.
I don't think that will be the case this time.
So I think what you're talking about here is a situation Where Iran slams Israel, and Israel slams Iran back, and then in all likelihood the Iranians will retaliate, and in all likelihood the Israelis will retaliate.
So you'll go up the escalation ladder.
That's what it looks like at this point in time.
I hope that doesn't prove to be the case.
And with regard to the Americans, I think we're basically caught in the middle because we are committed to helping to defend Israel.
Israel cannot defend itself, as we saw the last time in April.
They need the Americans.
And we have promised that we'll be in the fight with them.
So the Iranians and the Israelis look like they're headed for a major conflict, and we're caught in the middle.
I guess why that jars me a little bit to hear you say is that in the past, whenever I've been very concerned about escalation in the region, you've sort of come on to give some assuring words that it's unlikely, that no one really wants that, certainly the Americans don't, the Iranians don't.
And it appears like this time you're somewhat saying the opposite, that you kind of expect a very dangerous conflagration.
And I'm not saying that that means that you expect it to be some unlimited escalation, although it appears that you're suggesting that that's quite possible.
And as you say, this is not a war between two other countries on the other side of the world.
This is a war that the United States government, whatever that means at this point, has explicitly said it's going to intervene to defend Israel, has already deployed major military assets to the region to do so.
Why?
This seems like that should be the one of the only things people are really talking about.
It seems like it's not really forefront on most people's minds.
Is that your impression as well?
Yeah, I think that that's true.
I think most people are not paying serious attention to this, and they can't imagine what the consequences are going to be.
Just to take this a step further, Glenn, there's the Iranian dimension, which you and I are now talking about.
There's also the Hezbollah dimension.
You want to remember that not only are Hezbollah and Iran Very close allies in this fight, but also there was a double assassination.
There was the assassination in Tehran, which has precipitated the possibility of a major Iranian blow against Israel.
But there was also an assassination against the high-level Hezbollah operative in Beirut, which has given the Hezbollah leaders a very powerful incentive to retaliate against Israel.
So, it is easy to imagine a war breaking out between Hezbollah and Iran on one side, and Israel and the United States on the other side.
And if you just talk about Hezbollah, Hezbollah has somewhere, they now say, between 150,000 and 200,000 rockets and missiles aimed at Israel, many of which are highly accurate.
I mean, the amount of damage that a missile force like that could cause is truly great.
And the Israeli Iron Dome system is not going to be able to deal with many of those incoming missiles or rockets.
And the same, by the way, is true with the ballistic missiles coming in from From Iran.
So I think that Israel is really going to get slammed in the event that you have a war that escalates between both Hezbollah and Iran on one side and Israel on the other side.
And I sometimes say to myself, I wonder what the Israelis are thinking here.
Why are they at all interested in going down this road?
From a strategic point of view, it just makes no sense at all.
And then you say to yourself, well, the Israelis may invade Lebanon.
They can't invade Lebanon.
Their army is worn out from what's happening in Gaza.
There's just all sorts of evidence of that coming from the Israeli side.
They don't have an army that can go into Lebanon and eliminate this threat.
So they're just in really deep trouble.
And what do they do in response to this situation?
They just keep digging deeper.
And it I want to get back to that very, very quickly.
But before we get to the Israeli perspective, I just want to stick a little bit more with the Iranian perspective, because the huge looming reality for Iran is that The country they want to attack or retaliate against has nuclear weapons and Iran does not.
And we interviewed a professor who's a political scientist and historian about the use of nuclear weapons and why there hasn't been a repeat use since 1945.
Yesterday was the 79th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
And she was essentially saying that what is at the core of it is not the use of nuclear weapons, but deterrence, the idea that a country that has nuclear weapons will not be meaningfully attacked because of the fear that nuclear weapons will then be used against the country that attacks them.
What is the calculus of the Iranians here?
Why are they willing to risk that in order to avenge this murder on their soil?
I don't think an Iranian attack would be severe enough that it would justify a nuclear response.
But if there was escalation, if there's escalation that goes up the escalatory ladder, there's a chance of that.
I mean, that's, I think that has to be in the calculus of the Iranian mind.
I think it has to be in the calculus.
The question is, does it loom large or not?
And I would think that they believe it doesn't loom large at all, that the Israelis are not going to use nuclear weapons.
It is such a drastic step.
The truth is that Iran is not threatening the survival of Israel.
If you're threatening the survival of Israel, they will roll out the nukes.
The Israelis will.
But this is going to be an attack in all likelihood that does some damage to Israel, maybe even serious damage, but doesn't threaten the survival.
So I think they're not worried about nuclear weapons being used.
I think if you want to extend this whole situation forward five to ten years, I think that if you do have a war now between Iran and Israel, it will give Iran very powerful incentives to get nuclear weapons.
The Iranians are very close to having nuclear weapons.
They're enriching uranium up to the point where it's just a hop, skip, and a jump, where they have weapons-grade uranium and they can, you know, make a bomb.
They can't do it overnight, but they'll be very close.
And if you posit a situation where these two mortal enemies, who are both basically paranoid, have nuclear weapons and you get into a crisis five or ten years from now, It would be extremely dangerous.
You'd have crisis instability in the extreme.
So what I'm saying to you, Glenn, is I don't think the nuclear problem matters that much here.
But I think moving forward, this is going to become an increasingly dangerous dimension to this conflict.
So you mentioned earlier the vast stock of missiles that Hezbollah possesses.
They've actually already demonstrated the ability to enter Israeli airspace undetected.
They released some drone footage that they obtained just hovering over major Israeli military installations and some of the most sensitive Israeli targets of water and sewage and the sort of thing on which your civilian infrastructure depends.
Just looking at Hezbollah alone, because my understanding is from the Israeli perspective, is they always have taken extremely seriously the damage that could be done.
You're talking about not just hundreds, but probably thousands of Israelis killed if they really were to do a serious retaliation with these missiles of the kinds that you're suggesting they might do.
Not even an all-out retaliation, but just a serious retaliation.
Can you tell me about the level of damage that you envision?
And I know you're not a mind reader or a crystal ball reader, but what kind of retaliation or damage are we talking about that might be done to Israel?
Are we talking about just a few buildings exploded?
Are we talking about the possibility of major civilian casualties?
It all depends how far up the escalation ladder you go.
And, you know, the question I always ask myself is, once they start up the escalation ladder, what are going to be the incentives on both sides to stop and to not go further up the ladder?
And I think one could argue that you may have one or two exchanges involving Hezbollah in Israel or Iran in Israel, and both sides quickly come to the conclusion that it's not in their interest to go up, let's say, to the third rung of the ladder.
And I think the Americans will be deeply committed from the get-go to preventing both sides, whether you're talking Hezbollah versus Israel or Iran versus Israel, to keep it limited, to put an end to it as quickly as possible.
We don't want to see a major escalation.
We don't even want to see the war start.
So we'll do everything we can to cap the volcano.
And if that happens, the damage will not be that great.
But if you Get to a situation where Hezbollah launches, let's say, 100,000 rockets and missiles on Israel.
The damage would be enormous.
Israel is not a big country.
It doesn't have that many major cities.
And they would, you know, target some of the most important installations in Israel, both political, military, and economic.
They would end up killing lots of people for sure.
And then the Israelis would surely retaliate by going after Beirut.
And God knows how many people in Beirut would be killed, which would just enrage Hezbollah and give them an incentive to try to kill even more Israelis.
So if we don't cap that volcano, and I'm talking about the Americans, this could result, this conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, just that dimension of the conflict alone could result in huge numbers of civilian casualties in both Lebanon and Israel, and enormous damage done to the infrastructure that would have long-term consequences for both countries.
And again, this is why I said to you before, Glenn, I do not understand for the life of me why the Israelis are going down this road, and why they're not working with us to try and just cool everybody's jets and shut this one down, because it's not in their interest to see a war happen.
Well I want to propose some hypotheses about why the Israelis might be willing to go down that path even though, as you say, it bears incredibly high risk for not just Israeli land but for the Israeli citizens.
But before we get to Israel and its perspective and motives, I just want to stick a little bit more with Iran and ask You know, what we saw with the bombing of their embassy in Damascus was, as we talked about at the start, a very restrained response that was obviously intended to kind of show their citizens and the region that they would not allow their embassy to be bombed with no response, but at the same time it was a response
Basically to ensure that it would be over very quickly, to avoid that escalatory risk.
Why is this assassination of this Hamas leader on Iranian soil different in terms of what the Iranians feel compelled to do?
Is it just that it's one too many, or is there something different in nature about it?
Well, it is a case of one too many.
The first time the Israelis did it, I'm sure that we told them that We understood their position.
Let's work out some sort of arrangement where your attack on Israel is limited, and we'll do what we can to make sure Israel's counterattack on Iran is limited, and that will put this behind us.
And I think we thought, and the Iranians thought, that that would put an end to provocative Israeli strikes against Iran.
But that's not what happened.
And from an Iranian point of view, they say to themselves, if we don't make it clear to the Israelis that they're going to pay a really serious price, they're going to continue to do this.
The Iranians are interested in deterring the Israelis, just like the Israelis are interested in deterring the Iranians.
And I'm sure the Iranians feel the best way to deter Israel is to really slam it and make it clear that in the future, if Israel does anything provocative like this, the costs will be very great.
So you can see the Iranians have a deep-seated interest in making the Israelis pay a high cost.
But as I said before, the Israelis will then have a deep-seated interest in making the Iranians pay a high cost, and there you go up the escalation ladder.
So typically I think what is foundational to your analysis of foreign policy and international relations is that you have an understanding or you try to develop an understanding about the rational, strategic interests and motives that particular leaders have and how they respond to threats to their country or perceived threats and sort of the dynamic of power that forms it.
And what I understand you to be saying here is that although you are able to ascertain with some degree of clarity what the motive of Iranian leaders are,
You're not able to understand the motives of Israeli leaders in terms of why they were willing to embark on a path of this sort, which for all the talk about Iran and the West and this propagandistic framework being some insane, irrational, religiously fanatical country, the reality is that everyone in that region knows the various rules and the frameworks and they've been around each other for a long time.
Everybody understands that what the response has to be.
The Israelis, I assume, understood what they were doing when they carried out this assassination.
So before I offer some hypotheses, including based on my interview earlier today with Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem, who said some pretty dark things and disturbing things about the tenor of Israeli discourse right now.
What are the possible theories for what is motivating Israeli officials and leaders to embark on this course?
Well, Glenn, it's a tricky issue here because, you know, we refer to Israeli officials But if you look at what's happening inside of Israel, it's quite clear that there's a huge battle taking place between the Israeli military and intelligence establishment on one side and Prime Minister Netanyahu on the other side.
There are a good number of people who think that Netanyahu's policy in Gaza, for example, is misguided and that the Israelis should agree to a ceasefire right now.
We're not talking about a bunch of pussycats here.
We're talking about people at the highest levels of the Israeli military, the IDF, and the Israeli intelligence community.
But Netanyahu himself and a number of the ministers to his right are not in favor of doing that.
They do not want a ceasefire.
They want to continue the war in Gaza.
And I think the same thing is true with regard to picking a fight with Iran.
I think there are a good number of officials in Israel who think this makes no sense at all.
But Netanyahu does not believe that, as best I can tell.
His basic view is, you know, when Israel's in trouble, the best solution is to use the gun, to escalate militarily.
Historically, the Israelis could get away with this.
I mean, we can talk about how the world has changed in a way that's to the detriment of Israel in this regard.
But in the old days, the Israelis relied very heavily on their military.
And that military was capable of winning quick and decisive victories, whether it's 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, right?
In those days, the Israelis had a military that was capable of solving problems quite quickly and quite effectively.
But that world has gone away, and as you and I discussed in the first part of the show, it's hard to tell a story where the Israelis used military force against Hezbollah and against Iran and come out with a victory.
And if anything, it looks like they're going to pay an awful price.
Before we get to a little bit more on the Israeli motive.
What about the fact that they are already caught up in a major, you know, urban warfare battle for the last 10 months, by all accounts?
Israeli reservists and people in the military are sort of exhausted.
I mean, they've been fighting a major war for 10 months now and counting.
There's battles between Orthodox Jews and civil society about whether they should have to enlist in the military.
How does that affect the ability of the Israelis to fight on a completely different front or multiple fronts regarding Hezbollah and Iran?
Well, there's no question that the ultra-Orthodox basically refuse to serve in the military.
And given that they are now 13% of the population, and they are growing in numbers, I read somewhere the other day that by the year 2050, 48% of the population that is eligible for military service will be ultra orthodox.
Just think about that.
48% of your population is ultra-Orthodox, and the ultra-Orthodox basically don't serve in the military.
You can get away with that, Glenn, if you fight short wars.
And as I said to you a minute ago, in the old days, the Israelis fought short wars.
Think about the Six-Day War, right?
But this is not a short war.
And if you think about what we're saying here, we don't see any end in sight to these conflicts, right?
And if you have a military that's heavily dependent on reservists, you're going to wear those reservists out.
And at the same time, you're not going to be able to call on a reasonably large slice of your population, it's now 13%, but the number will increase over time, to serve in the military, to help out those existing reservists.
So the Israelis have a real manpower problem inside their military that looks like it only gets worse with the passage of time.
And this creates huge problems for the IDF.
But the other dimension to this, which has nothing to do with manpower, which is of tremendous importance, is the coming of missiles.
In the old days, missiles just didn't matter very much.
They were not irrelevant, but they didn't matter all that much.
Now you have a situation where Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, the Houthis all have missiles and rockets and they are aimed at Israel.
And this is a huge problem for Israel because there's no easy way to deal with this missile threat.
As we're seeing today, and if anything, the missile threat is going to get worse with the passage of time, because missiles are proliferating, their accuracy is improving, the yield of the warhead is improving, and the end result is you have an Israel that is surrounded Right?
It's ultra-orthodox versus secular.
that have rockets and missiles.
And then you marry that to the centrifugal forces inside the society that you were talking about, right?
It's ultra-Orthodox versus secular.
And even within the secular community, you have right-wingers and left-wingers and so forth and so on.
When you think about all of those centrifugal forces, and then you think about the external threat environment, you see that Israel is in really deep, deep trouble today.
And it only gets worse with the passage of time.
Well, I don't want to be reductive about your foreign policy views and your view of international relations, but my understanding of it, having talked to you many times and read a lot of things you've written over the years about it, is in some way I think it kind of relies on an assumption that The decision makers of a country are acting on, to some extent at least, based on enlightened self-interest.
That is, you can predict outcomes to some extent by understanding the strategic perspective of one country or another based on what's in their self-interest, how they respond based on their realist view of where they are in the world and how power operates.
To what extent, though, do you think inside at least some sector of Israel There are impulses and desires and sentiments and decisions that aren't being driven by rational self-interest, but instead maybe some kind of religious messianic views, or maybe just still an ongoing kind of irrational rage over October 7th.
I say irrational not because it's in the word anger, but because it's sort of piling up and the desire for vengeance seems to be in some way increasing.
All of that might impel the Israelis to have motives beyond, as you say, you can't understand why they're willing to go down that path.
To what extent do you think that's possibly a part of it?
Let me make two points, Glenn.
First of all, My view of international relations is that states usually act rationally.
They usually act according to realist logic.
But no theory can account for every case.
And there are a good number of cases, not the majority by any means.
My intuition is about 25% of the cases out there don't fit with the realist story.
And there are cases where great powers like the United States do act in an irrational or non-rational way.
I think I could make a compelling case that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was irrational.
I think I could make a case that the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy administration's performance during the Bay of Pigs operation, was irrational.
So it's important to understand that sometimes states do act irrationally, or to put it in slightly different terms, they don't act according to realist logic.
Now, my second point has to do with Israel.
You know, there was a piece in Haaretz today about the growing interest in messianism inside of Israel, which dovetails with what you are saying.
And it's a really worrisome piece, because the argument in the piece is that it's not only people who are deeply religious who are being caught up in this messianic fervor, it's people who tend to be on the right.
So it could be.
I haven't studied what's going on inside Israel careful enough to know if that's playing a key role in driving the train.
Furthermore, you could argue that some of it has to do with the fact that Netanyahu understands that if he leaves office, or he ends the war and leaves office, that he'll then be held accountable by the Israeli judicial system, because he is under indictment.
And therefore he has a vested interest in keeping this war going forever and ever.
And that, of course, would not be rational.
So you can make that kind of argument.
You made the argument also about rage.
The fact that October 7th has blinded the Israelis, it has knocked a few gyroscopes loose, and therefore they're behaving in remarkably foolish ways.
I mean, that is possible.
It's just very hard for someone like me to assess what's going on inside Israel and going on inside the head of key policymakers at this point in time.
I imagine that afterwards we can, you know, look at what happened and make some sort of sound judgments.
But it's just hard to say now.
But I would say just looking at how Israel is behaving today, in my humble opinion, it is not rational.
It's not what I would be doing if I was driving the train in Israel.
And as you know, I am a hard-nosed realist.
I'm not a softie.
So I, you know, I would be willing to use force if necessary.
But I think that Israel's behavior does not make good strategic sense.
Well, that's I guess what I was alluding to.
I mentioned just a little bit ago this interview we conducted with a representative of the Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem, and they had just this week released a very well-documented report about systemic torture and all kinds of deranged abuses taking place inside the Israeli administrative detention system where people are in prison with basically no due process, they're not convicted of crimes.
And it's well documented what's going on inside those prisons now.
And just this week, you know, there were well-documented stories about Palestinian prisoners being anally raped to the point where they have to be hospitalized by the IDF prison guards.
And it's by no means the case that Israel is the first country in history to engage in those abuses when they're in a state of war.
But You know, I remember when the US, and this wasn't all that long after 11, when the Abu Ghraib images emerged, it was a source of great national shame.
Nobody came out and defended that, or virtually nobody.
No one said, oh, well, the people we're dealing with are so primitive and animalistic that we should be sexually assaulting them and humiliating them and torturing them and stripping them of their humanity.
There was this kind of sense that maybe it was for strategic reasons, but I think it was moral reasons as well.
There was a kind of disgust about it.
The people who did it were fired.
They were disgraced.
And now what you're seeing in Israel, I mean, even members of the Knesset went to the IDF base where some of those Israeli soldiers were detained who were responsible for the inter-rape and tried to break into the base in order to object to the detention of the Israelis.
You go and look at the most mainstream Israeli television networks and you will hear on these programs people not denying that it's taking place but justifying it, even calling for more of it, saying, my only objection is that it's not done systemically by the Israeli state.
We should be doing this as an instrument of torture and vengeance.
They deserve it.
That is some very dark sort of rhetoric, not on the corners or at the fringes, but very close to the mainstream of Israeli politics.
And so I guess what I'm asking you, and I understand you're saying it's kind of hard for you to judge based on your distance and the fact that you're not in the middle of it, and I totally get that.
I feel the same way.
Have we seen things since October 7th from the Israelis that give you concern that some of that at least is at the steering wheel?
I think there's no question that the Israelis are doing absolutely horrible things to the Palestinians.
But you want to remember that Israel has long been an apartheid state.
And to run an apartheid state, you have to dehumanize the Palestinians.
There's just no way around that.
So the Palestinians have long been dehumanized, and they have been treated in the most ruthless ways for a long period of time.
I think what happened is that after October 7th, that horrible treatment was jacked up even further largely as a result of the shock of October 7th and the way it was portrayed in Israel.
So I think this horrific behavior that you've seen since October 7th is really consistent with what was going on beforehand.
Although I think what was going on beforehand, this is going to sound funny, but I think it's accurate, was not as horrific as what has happened since then.
And this is, you know, not altogether surprising.
You talked about Abu Ghraib, but the better example to use, Glenn, has to do with what happened at the black sites to people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the main perpetrators of the 9-11 attacks.
The reason that you can't put those people on trial, as so many people would like to do, is that if you put them on trial, All of the information, or lots of the information, will come out about what the CIA did to them in those black sites.
And under no circumstances does the CIA want that information to come out.
That's why they destroyed those tapes, because it would probably make Abu Ghraib look like a picnic.
And what I'm saying here is that, you know, in the wake of 9-11, what happened is that the CIA basically lost its mind or the administration lost its mind temporarily and did absolutely horrendous things to these perpetrators of 9-11.
I think what's happened in Israel is a similar thing, that after October 7th, the Israelis were willing to do absolutely horrible things to the Palestinians.
And there has been no end to that.
And this is, again, not terribly surprising, given the history of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, which is to treat them as subhumans.
Yeah, I mean, just to kind of push a little bit at that point, I mean, in terms of the analogy between the post-911 reaction of the Americans and the post-October 7th reaction of the Israelis, you know, you said the CIA's treatment of the perpetrators of the 9-11 attack, you think, You know, we're finally now seeing some evidence emerge from those CIA black sites.
The first photo ever was just released and published in the New York Times of an extremely emaciated and obviously psychologically abused person after a year in one of those sites.
But it turns out that a lot of those people who were put in Guantanamo, were transferred in the rendition program, were not actually perpetrators of 9-11, but were utterly innocent.
And a lot of the detainees in the Israeli Camps, what you could call kind of torture camps, are not even from Gaza.
There are people who have been there before October 7th.
They obviously didn't participate in that attack.
There are people from the West Bank.
There are people the Israelis are releasing, which is an admission that obviously they're not dangerous terrorists.
And they're the ones coming out and saying, we're being abused.
I guess the distinction I'm drawing was that, I know, and I remember this so well, since this is really the first thing I focused on as a journalist, was there was always a sense of shame around what the US was doing.
I mean, they didn't want the photos released.
They didn't want it to be known what we're doing.
Abigrade was the one time that it kind of made manifest and we acted as though we were all horrified, whereas that seems to be missing in a lot of Israeli discourse.
They, I watched Israeli discourse over the last two weeks and they were explicit, a lot, not, I say they, I mean, a lot of them were horrified, but many were explicitly in favor of that kind of treatment and even advocating that more of it be done, which is a kind of coarseness in mainstream discourse which is a kind of coarseness in mainstream discourse and a crudity and just a kind of, ah, maybe you could say evil that I don't think I've seen before from a democratic country. - I think that's a good point.
I agree completely, and I apologize for giving the impression that I was trying to equate the American reaction with the Israeli reaction.
I agree completely.
And just to buttress your point, just think about all the videos that Israeli soldiers are posting on sites like TikTok or X, where they are in those videos doing terrible things to Palestinians.
And they're proud to post them.
It's just horrible what they're doing, the Israelis are doing.
And not just in terms of killing people or torturing people, but in terms of humiliating them as well.
It's hard to believe the extent to which the Israelis are willing to humiliate Innocent Palestinians.
The idea that they're killing pregnant women and bragging about the fact that it's a two-for-one is truly disgusting.
And I don't want to make light of that for one second.
And I think in the United States at this point in time, if you did something like that, you would pay a truly serious price, as should be the case.
So I do think in terms of the reaction Right, and I guess the question is, how does that affect their behavior internationally or in terms of war responses or foreign policy and the like?
Let me just ask you a question about the broader region.
In the wake of the Israeli bombing of Gaza, we saw a lot of populations in that region becoming quite agitated in opposition to the Israeli bombing of Gaza.
A lot of these countries are run by U.S.-supported dictators.
Whereas the populations have much different ideas, the whole point of those dictators are kind of to keep the public sentiment in control and suppressed.
But we've started to see some very large public protests in places like Jordan, other US allies, to the point that it at some point looked like it may become destabilizing.
What would be the impact of say, an Israeli mass bombing campaign of Lebanon, or some broader regional conflict that escalates significantly from where we are now in terms of these other countries in that region as well?
It's hard to say.
I mean, you can easily imagine in Jordan the government being overthrown.
I mean, you know, roughly half, if not more, of the population in Jordan is Palestinians.
Lots of those people were driven out, or their descendants, people who were driven out of Israel in the various ethnic cleansings.
So you could see the king being overthrown.
Similar situation in Egypt.
It might be the case, however, if the IDF were to, you know, bomb Lebanon and Destroy Beirut, that what would happen is that the king of Jordan and Sisi, who was the leader of Egypt, sided with the people against Israel.
They just joined in the condemnation and they both survived as a result.
That's another possibility.
It's just hard to say how it plays itself out.
But the two countries that matter here, which are the two you went to, are Jordan and Egypt.
And Jordan and Egypt have both had good relations with Israel.
And this is in large part, by the way, a result of the fact that those are two economically bankrupt countries that depend on American largesse to keep them afloat.
And that's the coercive leverage we have over both Jordan and Egypt, right?
It's economic leverage that we have.
We tell Sisi and we told the king in Jordan that if they don't dance to our tune vis-a-vis Israel, we'll cut off the economic aid, and that will bring them both down.
So these are two governments, the Jordanian government and the Egyptian government, that are remarkably pro-Israel.
And US-supported Arab dictators, which is strange given how often we're told that we hate authoritarianism and tyranny and try to spread democracy everywhere in the world.
I don't think we want that in either Jordan or Egypt, or places like Saudi Arabia or any country in that region, really.
Let me ask you the sort of elephant in the room that's been hovering over everything we've been talking about since the start, which is the question of what this means for the United States.
And just, I don't want to be glib about this, but The reason Joe Biden was forced out of the race was because his own party basically not only concluded but made publicly very clear that they believe he's in a sort of state of serious cognitive decline that was evident in the debate.
You're talking about very complex and sensitive and highly consequential questions that an American president would be making that I don't believe or doesn't seem like Joe Biden really can participate in the way that he could have before.
And obviously the vice president is focused only on one thing, which is making sure that she replaces him and not Donald Trump.
So who do you think are making these decisions?
And does it really matter in terms of just, I don't know, questions about like democracy and stuff?
Leaving aside the question whether this is democratic or not, I think the big question you have to ask yourself is, if Joe Biden were not the president, if Donald Trump were the president, or Barack Obama were the president, or Hillary Clinton were the president, would our policy since October 7th have been different?
The story I usually tell is it would make no difference at all because of the power of the Israel lobby.
There's no American policymaker who could really I actually don't believe it.
I hope they're true.
especially after October 7th.
I have a number of friends who do believe that if Barack Obama had been president, he would have put significant pressure on Israel that would have had an effect on Israeli behavior.
I actually don't believe it.
I hope they're true.
We're never gonna get to run the experiment because we can only do it one time and Joe Biden was in the driver's seat.
But I would just say as a general point, Glenn, it's hard to imagine any president really playing hardball with the Israelis, both before October 7, and after October 7.
And I think whether Trump comes back into the White House or Kamala Harris becomes the president, not much is going to change.
I like Kamala Harris's rhetoric more than I like Trump's rhetoric on the Israel issue.
But rhetoric is rhetoric.
The question is, what happens when the rubber hits the road?
And it's just very hard to imagine any American politician getting tough with Israel.
And that's unfortunate, not only for us, but for Israel as well.
OK, so I agree with that, obviously.
And given that, earlier when you were describing the risk of escalation, you were saying the United States is going to do everything possible to prevent or try to prevent the kind of escalation that might get very out of hand very quickly.
And given that we have our own soldiers and seamen and airmen and the like deployed in the region, that incentive is even higher.
But then the question becomes, given the proven unwillingness of the United States government To impose serious limits on Israel.
How many times we've seen since October 7, the Israelis not only reject U.S.
directions, even when Biden called things a red line, but humiliate the U.S.
government by making very clear that they were the ones in control and not the U.S.
What can the U.S.
really do?
I mean, if Israel is intent on a broader regional conflict, why would the U.S.
have any leverage since the U.S.
has already made very clear that they're going to do everything necessary to side with Israel in their conflict?
Yeah, it's a great question.
I think the Americans had no influence, virtually no influence, on Israel's move to initiate this conflict, what happened on April 1st, and then again what happened on July 31st.
We had virtually no influence there.
And we're going to get a war in all likelihood.
The question is, can we, once that war starts, Exercise coercive leverage over the Israelis.
And my view is that once the war starts and you go up the escalation ladder, the Israelis will quickly develop an interest in putting an end to the conflict, because they'll see the cost, number one, and they'll see that if they go further up the escalation ladder, they're not going to win.
There's no war-winning strategy here.
And I think given that situation, we will be able to push the Israelis.
Of course, is too strong a word, but we'll be able to push the Israelis hard and the Iranians and Hezbollah to reach some sort of agreement, some sort of ceasefire before things get even worse.
So what I'm saying to you, Glenn, it's the prospect of real destruction that will give us some leverage over the Israelis.
But that's only once the war starts and once it's clear that the Israelis are not going to win.
All right.
I hope everyone understands why it is I have such difficulty getting to questions about China, given all these things that I would be very remiss if I didn't talk to you about.
We've been going almost an hour or so.
Out of respect for your time, I just want to ask you one question about that other war that, just by the way, is still raging and that the United States is still financing and arming.
Which is the war between Russia and Ukraine that is now in its it's two and a half years going on to three years by the end of the election by the time the next president is inaugurated.
Just give us your assessment of where that war is in terms of how it was say three months ago or six months ago.
Well, I think, as I've said for a long time, Glenn, this is a war of attrition.
And what really matters is not how much territory is being conquered, but how many people are dying on each side?
What's the balance of casualties look like?
And furthermore, what is the balance of available manpower look like?
And what does the balance of available weaponry look like?
And if you look at what's happening, it's very clear that in terms of weaponry, the Ukrainians are at a huge disadvantage.
If you look at the balance of manpower, It's clear that the Ukrainians are at a significant disadvantage.
There are many more Russian soldiers than there are Ukrainian soldiers, and the Russian soldiers are much better equipped.
And that situation is not going to change anytime soon.
Furthermore, if you look at the balance of casualties, my sense is that the Ukrainians are suffering much higher levels of casualties than the Russians are.
This is not the conventional wisdom in the West, but that's because propaganda dominates in the West.
I believe the Russians are using smart tactics these days to minimize their casualties, and because they have such a firepower advantage when you look at the balance of weaponry, they're able to inflict much greater casualties on the Ukrainians.
So the Ukrainians are being bled white, and they are going to lose this war.
The Russians are in the driver's seat.
Just to take this one step further, The Russian Air Force has basically destroyed 50% of the electricity network in Ukraine.
And if you take out the nuclear sites, the nuclear power sites, the Russians have destroyed 90% of the electric grid.
in Ukraine.
This is going to have disastrous consequences when the winter comes.
It's already having disastrous consequences for the people, for the economy, and for the military as well.
So the Russians are really doing quite well here, even though they're only slowly but steadily capturing territory.
And there is no way the Ukrainians can turn this one around.
And the West recognizes that.
So it's only a matter of time before this war ends, and when it ends, the Russians will be the winners.
It will be an ugly victory.
I don't want to make light of that.
This is not going to be like May 8th, 1945, when the Soviets finally defeated the Germans, and it was a decisive victory, and the Red Army was in Berlin.
That's not what's going to happen here.
But the Ukrainian army at some point in the not-too-distant future is not going to be able to continue the fight, and the Russians are going to end up gobbling a large chunk of Ukrainian territory and leaving Ukraine as a dysfunctional rump state.
Which is what you've been saying all along, including when very few people were.
Now, just last question.
In contrast to the situation in Israel, where you say, I think with lots of evidence and great accuracy, that it really won't matter in terms of US policy whether Trump returns to the White House, whether Kamala Harris wins.
It'll essentially be the same for all the reasons you've said, the reason you wrote a book about.
But in terms of the war in Ukraine and the U.S.
role in it, do you think that the election matters in terms of that?
In other words, will there be, in your view, different outcomes based on whether Trump returns or whether Kamala Harris becomes president?
Well, I think that there is a possibility, if Trump and Vance come into power, that they could in effect threaten to pull the plug on the Ukrainians and force the Ukrainians to negotiate with the Russians.
But then the question you have to ask yourself, Glenn, is will the Americans—and here we're talking about Trump and his lieutenants—will they be willing to accept Russia's terms for ending the war?
Very important to understand here that the Russians don't trust Trump as far as they can throw him.
They don't care whether Trump is in power.
Harris is in power or Biden is in power.
The Russians are finished trusting American leaders.
They've been there, done that, and it did not work out very well.
So what they're going to do is they're going to drive a really hard bargain.
They already have said, before we agree, this is the Russian speaking, this is Putin speaking on June 14th, he has said explicitly, before we even agree to negotiations, and we agree to a ceasefire, you have to number one, pull all Ukrainian troops out of the four oblasts that we have formally annexed.
That means abandoning a lot of territory that the Ukrainians now occupy.
And number two, Putin says you have to say, officially, that Ukraine will not become part of NATO.
This is before we, the Russians, even agree to negotiate, and before we agree to a ceasefire.
Trump has said, he's been asked, he said he would not agree to those terms.
Now, he may have to agree to those terms to get a deal, which he wants, once he is in the White House.
I'm not sure he can do that.
And if he can't do that, I think the war will just go on.
The Russians are not going to accept a half-baked deal to satisfy Donald Trump.
They're going to want the whole enchilada this time, as they should.
And that whole enchilada involves a really hard-nosed deal that will be difficult for even Donald Trump and for Vice President Vance, assuming these two get elected.
Well, it's always not necessarily uplifting to speak with you, but it is always enlightening and thought-provoking, and I'm always thrilled at the chance to be able to speak with you, and today was no exception.
likely to happen.
Well, it's always not necessarily uplifting to speak with you, but it is always enlightening and thought-provoking.
And I'm always thrilled at the chance to be able to speak with you.
And today was no exception.
I want to thank you, as always, for your time.
You're welcome, Glenn, and thanks for having me on the show.
I always enjoy it.
Absolutely, me too.
Thanks a lot.
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