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[Bulsajo]

Fantastic interview. There's something in there for everyone here to agree with and disagree with- for better or worse, the man certainly has a lot to say-

http://www.chronogram.com/issue/2006/02/news/index.php


Some excerpts:

LT: The American public has a love/hate relationship with the CIA.

RB: It's more like a hate relationship.

LT: The CIA is looked upon as being meddlesome in other countries' business, assassinating people—

RB: Well, it has since 2001. Who were the 16 people that died in that village? [On January 13, US missiles struck a house in Damadola, Pakistan, killing 18 people, including women and children. The intended target of the attack was Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's second-in-command. US officials claim the attack may have killed four al Qaeda members, though Zawahiri was not in the house at the time.] This starts to eat away at the consciousness of Americans. I don't know who actually pulled the trigger. In that village in Pakistan it's like a black suspect in Washington, DC, murders a white journalist, and the DC police [go] into a black neighborhood and start machine-gunning people because they might be suspects. When these policies are laid off on the CIA, people are mistrustful. In Syriana, whether people liked it or didn't, their reaction is, "This all happened." You say, "No, it didn't happen, this is a fictionalized drama."

LT: You're saying the CIA isn't involved in these things and was not allowed to be killing people, and yet the CIA in the movie is depicted as such.

RB: Yeah, but I didn't write the script and it's not a documentary. They had to get that feeling of dread across. They couldn't do it by just simply adapting my book. But there are these instances, like the one in Pakistan and the one in Yemen in October in 2002, where you're killing people on the slightest or wrong information.

LT: We don't have enough well-trained people on the ground. They don't know Arabic or Farsi.

RB: It's also difficult to get in these groups. Remember, they're made up of true believers. People who are ready to die are not going to be good spies. You could recruit American Arabs, send them over there to work in a business, and then get them to infiltrate these groups. At least you'd know that they were recruiting for suicide operations, and who is doing it now. It's not rocket science.

LT: No, but the fear is, where is the fine line, then, between you finding out the information and blowing up the house in Pakistan?

RB: We don't attack the mosques in Saudi Arabia where these people are being recruited. We don't even want to know. They're the people who are killing us now. Not Zawahiri. Zawahiri is not in charge of Qaeda. And Qaeda is just an idea. Going after him we're seeking retribution as opposed to stopping future attacks, which are coming out of Saudi Arabia.

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LT: In terms of US connective tissue with Saudi Arabia, you talk about the money, oil, Saudi fundamentalism, and about how the Saudis fund these fundamentalist groups through charitable organizations—

RB: In the book my ideas become simpler and in some cases more refined. The point is that most Muslims—largely, you can't put a percentage on it—think that we, the US, are at war with Islam. The other fact is that they've got 70 percent of the world's oil resources, so our economic welfare is in their hands, and yet we're at war with them. That's the contradiction, that's [what] it comes down to.

LT: The LA Times published an article recently about how more than half of the Arab fighters in Iraq are Saudis, how millions of dollars continue to flow from wealthy Saudis through Saudi-based Islamic charitable and relief organizations to Al Qaeda and other groups, and that the Saudi government has not come through on any promises to monitor this or to really do anything—

RB: They haven't done anything. Who are the clerics that recruited the 15 Saudis that were recruited in Saudi Arabia? Who ultimately paid for 9/11? They haven't given us even the basics.

LT: What about the responsibility of our country to extract those answers from the Saudis?

RB: Well, it's like the administration's approach to global warming: Just deny it's happening and get through the 2006 elections.

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LT: We talk about wanting to get Osama Bin Laden, we have oil lobbies that are directing our politicians away from doing anything about any of this.

RB: But it's also in their interest. Obviously, Syriana was over the top in terms of conspiracies, but they can get away with it because Americans don't want to pay the real price of oil—no American does.

LT: So you're saying it's ultimately—

RB: The people of America's fault. The irony is, we're dumping billions and billions of dollars every time we go to the gas pump into a jihad against us in Iraq that's killing American soldiers. I've read, "One kid is dying in Iraq so the father of the kid next door can drive his Hummer." And what's more, the money's coming from Japan and China, and in a certain sense from the Middle East, and then it's filtering back. Blackwater, SAIC, Custer Battle—all these companies just basically got the 20 billion dollars that was supposed to go into construction. Construction was never going to happen.

LT: Why?

RB: You can't dump 20 million dollars in a country in the Middle East and have even a tiny fraction going into real projects. That's not the way the place works. So when Congress voted for that money, it was out of stupidity. It was either going to go into the hands of the American contractors or into the hands of Iraqi crooks. Iraq is a corrupt system. The only way you can really get around this is simply line the contractors up and shoot them if they stole the money, which of course is not acceptable to Americans. It goes back to Ottoman corruption, corruption under Saddam, where his family was stealing vast amounts of money, taking the oil profits. For us to go in and turn this around overnight was insanity, to think we could do it—nationbuilding.

LT: You opposed the war in Iraq. Why?

RB: I didn't know about the weapons of mass destruction, whether [Saddam] had them or not; I knew there was no evidence that he had them. The point is, you can't have us going in and removing the Arab leader. People forget history. Saddam was the shield of the Arabs, which protected them against the Persians. I knew that if we destroyed the Iraqi army, the only thing that'd hold that country together were American forces, which would mean a lifetime commitment. I don't want to spend my retirement on building a nation in Iraq. There's one study that came out that said it would cost two trillion dollars if we stay there until 2010. I don't think if Americans had been told the truth—that we'd have to spend 10 years there and two trillion dollars—that they'd be really excited about this.

LT: Your laying a lot of this at the feet of the Arab community and the corruption. Most of the people I spoke to in Baghdad in February of 2004 loved George Bush and were very happy to be free of Saddam Hussein. They took me to task at times when I said I wasn't going to vote for George Bush. I was shocked by that.

RB: That's the initial euphoria. Not to defend Saddam, but if we're going to liberate the whole world, where are the resources going to come from? Who is going to liberate those tribal areas of Pakistan we're too afraid to even send a company into? Who is going to liberate Russia, which is going back into czarist times? I just don't understand the terms of this argument.

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LT: You say [the Wahabis] serve as the inspiration of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and other radicals.

RB: Generally, at the risk of oversimplification. The Saudis certainly were happy the Taliban took over, even though they're not exactly Wahabis. Because they were going back to an Islamic society and they thought this is the way to reform. The same corruption we're talking about in Iraq. Whether it's neocommunism or secular ideas, it's going back to a religious state.

LT: Do you feel that this represents the majority?

RB: We don't know. You see polls occasionally saying that more than 50 percent of Jordanians believe that Bin Laden is justified in committing suicide operations. The majority of Pakistanis, Saudis certainly, were happy about 9/11, because they feel like they're under attack. I could be wrong, but there's a strong anti-Western, anti-American sentiment. They think that we are trying to destroy them. And our outpost is Israel. I think it's bizarre, in a very pragmatic sense, that America would be so strongly behind Israel. Simply in economic terms, it costs so much. I'm not just talking about direct aid, the billions we've given the military.

LT: So why are we supporting Israel so strongly?

RB: I just don't know, I guess the Judeo-Christian idea. If it's true that we have 60-90 million Evangelicals that believe that Israel has to exist at the end-times, that's probably part of it. A part of it is guilt for the Holocaust.

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RB: Get out of Iraq. Any time you're bombing Muslims around the world, it makes things worse, it's not going to make them better. And the chances of solving your problems with Predator and Hellfire missiles are zero. Try that in a large American city. Have the police put up Predators and say, "All right, we think there's a suspect in this building, we're going to knock it down with a Hellfire missile," and you'll see what you get from that. Why should it be any different for them? You've got to do your best to implement [UN Resolution] 242 and bring along all the Arab countries and all the Arab organizations.
[UN Security Council Resolution 242 calls for Israel to withdraw from territory it captured during the Six-Day War in 1967 (East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights), areas mostly in Israeli control today—in exchange for defensible boundaries and an acknowledgement by its Arab neighbors of Israel's right to exist.]

LT: Iraqis tell me they hate the occupation, they hate the troops being there. I ask, "Do you want them to leave?" They say, "Well, not just yet..."

RB: Well, they know what's going to happen.

LT: "...not until we have a security system."

RB: Which they won't ever have. Saddam tried to create a security system, and every time someone tried to kill him or his sons, he'd take whole villages and line them up and shoot them, which kept everybody quiet for a while.

LT: But that's based on a dictatorship. Are you saying that it's impossible for these people to live peacefully?

RB: Yeah. Because you just have to read the Koran. Apostates are not tolerated and the Shia are apostates. They can't join the military in Saudi Arabia, they can't own property in a lot of cases, they're not trusted, they've been removed from the oil industry, they're not considered as humans. These people can't live with each other.

LT: That's not my experience on the ground. Sunni live next to Shiite, they intermarry—

RB: I know all about the tribes. In Anbar province [Sunnis] are married [to] Shia and they've got extensions. But the fact is, the vast majority of Shiites want the oil in Iraq, and they're sitting on the major fields. In the [Iraqi] constitution it says, "We get the oil, Sunnis don't." And the more instability you get, the more these people are going to fall back on these primal differences. I think it's a wonderful, generous experiment; a lot of people believe in it in this country. They just don't get it. It's not going to happen. We're not going to make a democracy in Iraq unless we stayed there a hundred years and we trained 100,000 Americans in Arabic every year to go over there and completely dismantle their society. If that's the way people want to spend their money. Who is paying for the war? The taxes haven't been raised. We're borrowing money. The supplemental budget for Iraq is a hundred billion dollars.

LT: Do we just pull out tomorrow? What now?

RB: I think people ought to start telling the truth, I think the president should get up and say, "All right, we're going to be in this for the next 50 years. The people who were supposed to retire at 60 now get to retire at 75." And then watch. And let the American people decide. I just don't think anyone in Washington can tell the truth.

LT: Regarding the Iraqi people, do you think the troops should leave tomorrow?

RB: Probably, and let it happen. Let the divisions occur.

LT: Then what do you think would happen?

RB: There'd be a civil war.

LT: With how many different factions? I have heard that there are 20 different militias or brigades.

RB: It would make Somalia look civilized.

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And there's a lot more, so check it out.

[bucheon bum]

[igotthisguitar]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Baer