Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 10/31/24 Connor Freeman on the Georgia Election and Biden’s Blind Loyalty to Israel

Episode Date: November 5, 2024

Connor Freeman joined Scott on Antiwar Radio to talk about the election in Georgia and the Biden Administration’s ongoing support for all the terrible things Israel is doing in the Middle East. Discussed on the show: “State Department Threatens Georgia With ‘Consequences,’ Amid Rigged Election Claims” (Libertarian Institute) “Georgia: Election was just as much about the economy” (Responsible Statecraft) “Biden Administration Overwhelmed With Reports of Israel Using Weapons To Kill Civilians but Has Not Taken Any Action” (Antiwar.com) Connor Freeman is the Assistant Editor of the Libertarian Institute, primarily covering foreign policy. He is a co-host on Conflicts of Interest. His writing has been featured in media outlets such as Antiwar.com and Counterpunch, as well as the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. You can follow him on Twitter @FreemansMind96 This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Pacifica Radio, October 31st, 2024, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm the editorial director of anti-war.com, and I'm the author of the book, In Nodewart. already. Time to end the war on terrorism. You find my full interview archive, more than 6,000 of them now going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton show and all the various podcatchers and video sites and so forth. And of course I'm here

every Thursday from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. And this week's guest is Connor Freeman. He is assistant editor at the Institute. and at anti-war.com and is here to get us all caught up on what's going on in the Middle East. Welcome back to the show, Connor. How you doing? I'm doing great, Scott.

Thanks for having me back on. Really happy to have you here. And listen, in fact, now that I think about it, before we get in to Gaza, Iran, Lebanon, which will take up most of the show today, I want to ask you about what's going on in Georgia. And by Georgia, I mean, former Soviet Georgia.

And, you know, I thought it was funny because I read your great article that you wrote for the Institute about it. And I think it was one of the articles that you linked to in there. But anyway, it was an AP article that I read about it where the author of the news article is explaining why Georgia is so important to America's national interests at the same time explaining where Georgia is over there between Russia and Turkey, she said. She might have said between the Black and Caspian Sea. In other words, you don't know how to get there from here wherever you are in the United

States of America and don't care either. So I just thought that that was funny. But the thing is that she's right that the U.S. government sure is involved in what's going on over there, like always. And so tell us what's going on and what difference does it make, Connor? Yeah, sure. So the state department and the European Union are incensed at the results of this weekend's parliamentary elections that were held in Georgia, where the Georgian Dream Party, which compared to the opposition parties, which favor more integration with the EU and the West, they are more pro-Russian and don't, I mean, they don't want any more of this interference.

from the Americans and their partners, which has manifested itself in this law, which is basically very similar to the Foreign Agents Registration Act. They have a new law that requires agencies that receive more than 20% of their funding from foreign governments to identify as foreign agents. And they have an obvious interest in doing that because the U.S. has overthrown the government of Georgia before and installed Shakishvili in one of the color-coded revolutions in Russia's near abroad. This was the Rose Revolution of 2003, and that led to further integration with Georgia and the NATO alliance and culminated in the 2008 war when Shakishvili was bombing

South Ossetia and killing Russian peacekeepers and hundreds more other people and Russia intervened. We have a similar situation as we've seen in Ukraine, where the West really comes into these countries that are former, you know, in the case of Ukraine, a former USSR state, and basically overthrow their governments, start implementing policies with their chosen puppets, and then turning them into bulwarks against Russia, or at least attempting to. And this can lead to a myriad of problems. But basically, the election took place, as I said, 54% of the vote went to Georgian Dream, the opposition parties that are more pro-EU, each one between three and 11%. So that means Georgian Dream is going to have at least 90 seats in the 150 member parliament. But the president of

Georgia, Salome Zorozvili, is saying that the election was a total fraud, that it was stolen. The opposition parties are saying they're not going to participate at all in the new legislature. They're saying the election was stolen. And they're saying that Georgia is being moved in this a Russian orbit. And Matthew Miller, who's famous for his genocide denial lately, actually threatened Georgia with consequences. And he says, you know, this took place, this election took place an environment shaped by the ruling party's policies, including misuse of public resources, vote buying and voter intimidation.

I haven't seen much evidence of that. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe report actually praises. the voter turnout, the diversity of options on the ballot, the presence of citizen and party observers, but they do claim that the party is exploiting an already uneven playing ground and say that there were instances of intimidation and coercion and pressure on voters, including especially public sector employees, but they say that the legal framework is adequate for holding Democratic elections, and they say basically we're moving down the right path, but the headlines are that this election was mired in this coercive kind of atmosphere.

And so we have the EU demanding that they investigate the election and identify these irregularities and hold people accountable. And Miller is, as I said, threatening consequences to the country and say, we do not rule out further consequences if the Georgian government's direction does not change. And he says, would they need to withdraw and repeal anti-democratic legislation, which what he's obviously referring to is that basically mirror image of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which prevents the U.S. and its partners from meddling in Georgia in elections, or at least that's the intended purpose. And they're also concerned Well, and in fact, I mean, that law doesn't even go that far. They passed this. They tried to pass

it a year ago and big riots stopped it. But then they did pass it last spring. And all it says is that any NGO that gets more than 20% of their money from outside the country has to disclose it. That's it. Yeah, exactly. They have to declare it, not that it has any other thing to do with their license to continue operation or any other thing. And that was what they freaked down about because, in fact, they're all foreign agents. It's the best job in the whole country to get is to work for a Soros group, one or another, and there are many. Right. I should say it makes it easier to identify the foreign influence. Yeah, and that's really all it does, which makes it exactly equivalent to the American

Foreign Agents Registration Act, as you said. And very importantly, I'm sure anyone, you know, who's listening to this, who takes interest in foreign policy stuff at all have heard them say, oh, well, it's a Russian-style law. It's a Russian-style law. Well, you know, they always do that with these funny little slogans, but look at the thing. And they all say, and they give away the game every time. They'll try to say, oh, this is all about health care for women and children and also the European Union and eventual NATO membership. And, you know, they get right to the point every time about what this is about. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the what's good for the people of Georgia and everything to do with the contest between the United States and Russia

over who controls the Caucasus. And after all, we have that very important BTC pipeline that runs from Azerbaijan through Georgia and Turkey to the Port of Jain, which, you know, they completed back in the Bush years and which, of course, threads the needle between Russia and Iran to get that oil out of the Caspian. And of course, you know, if Russia really did dominate Georgia, that would open up all kinds of options for them in the future, too. But wouldn't that be funny if anyone actually thought that the Americans cared about the people of Georgia? and whether they were free to express their opinion through their electoral process or some kind of ridiculous thing like that.

No, I should say that there's a report in responsible statecraft, an analysis published by this author Ian Proud, who makes a great case that the real reason the Georgian Dream, the ruling party won these elections, has far more to do with economic and immigration crises. For instance, the war in Ukraine, the U.S.-backed proxy war that's funded exorbitantly by the EU, has caused 90,000 at least people to emigrate from Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine just in the first two years of the war. And this has led to an unemployment right now of over 26%, which over the last, you know, 10 or so years was actually dropping pretty considerably. And Georgia is a very poor country in the first place, too. It's not like they got plenty to share around, yeah. Yeah, and so housing prices are up 35%.

Rent prices have gone up as much as 50%. And they talk about how a lot of people, a lot of young Georgians are losing work to high-skilled, you know, basically Russian emigres who, you know, are taking their jobs. And it's causing a huge problem. And it's because of the war. and the other thing is the trade relationship since between the EU and Georgia since they signed the EU Deep and Comprehensive free trade agreement in 2014,

it hasn't really benefited Georgia. Their country is getting flooded with exports, but the EU states don't buy much from them at all. And that's the thing is the American Empire is so full of contradictions. You know, how do they think that they can hold this EU together when they force all these countries to participate in our wars

that cause the immigration crises that move all their governments to the right and against America's interests there and make them more nationalists. It's built into the program. It's a self-defeating thing. And by the way, I want to go back to what you said too about the OSCE

that in all these color code of revolutions or attempted ones, the OSCE is a major variable there as far as how willing they are to play ball with American shenanigans mostly and how well they are to line up their interests and their statements with those of the IRI. That's the

International Republican Institute, the NDI, which is the National Democratic Institute, the National Endowment for Democracy and others here. And as you pointed out, it's so important to emphasize, you have these Americans, their NGOs, and their sock puppet NGOs who are doing all this complaining, while the OSCE is saying, yeah, not too bad, and doesn't seem to think that 54% is a lie and all of this. So anyway, I guess I expect this thing to fail and for for Georgia to remain lost to the American Empire for now. But maybe I really shouldn't prognosticate, especially about the future. So there are apparently plans a senior U.S. official told Voice of America, which is American state-funded media, by the way,

that Washington is preparing sanctions on the former prime minister, Benizza Ivanshevili, which is the founder of Georgian Dream over his opposition to Georgia joining the EU or NATO. And that was Kyle Anzlone, our news editor at the Institute, wrote that up last month. And those sanctions have been implemented, but to your point, I'm not sure exactly. how they can overthrow a ruling majority in the parliament, right? I mean, you know, I mean, maybe they're going to do more of this, you know, continuing the interference in the politics of Georgia. But as you were noting, you have these NGOs that are involved in these kinds of operations like the Rose Revolution. And it's not long before you find out that a lot of those same groups

or those same orgs are funded by USAID. And so the same thing that we accuse Russia of doing abnazium and what we're accusing them of doing here is actually what the Americans do constantly with these kinds of countries. And so the whole thing is, as usual, you know, Matt Miller is the face of American hypocrisy in foreign policy. Well, you mentioned him before. You mentioned him before. That's the State Department spokesman, right? Yep. And now you were saying that his new thing is he will be remembered in history for being an apologist for genocide. Is that right? Yes, absolutely. Well, he's the most infamous, you know, right now because I guess he could say John Kirby gives him a run for his money and Vendat Patel as well at the State Department. But, you know, there's this

new report. It's up, Dave DeCamp has an article about it up at the page in antirewar.com today, which is that, you know, covers how the White House is getting this deluge of nearly 500 reports of American weapons being used to kill Palestinian civilians amidst this genocide in Gaza. And they refuse to take action on these policies, even though we all know that American laws are being violated flagrantly every day from the Arms Export Control Act to our Foreign Assistance Act to the Leahy Act, which make it illegal for the U.S. to provide military aid to governments whose forces are engaged in deliberately blocking humanitarian aid and slaughtering civilians. And same for if they have a secret nuclear weapons program, which the recent NSA leak again confirmed. Officially, right? Absolutely. Absolutely.

This has been illegal since 1976 since the Simington Amendment was implemented and we're not supposed to be giving military aid to countries that have clandestine nuclear weapons like Israel and who are not signatories to the nonproliferation treaty like Israel. Notably, we're constantly told to fear Iran is building a nuclear weapon, which even the CIA, the Pentagon, our nuclear posture of view, they all say it's not true, let alone. the IAEA and the defense, excuse me, the Director of National Intelligence Office threat assessment this year reconfirmed that Iran is not seeking nuclear weapons. Hey, you guys coming up this October 7th through the 11th, join Miguel Thorup,

host of the expat money podcast, the heroic Ron Paul, the great Tom Woods, Doug Casey, Mark Faber, Tom Luongo, myself, and many other great speakers for the online expat money summit, 2024. My presentation will be on the subject of my new book, Provoked, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine, which is not quite out yet. And learn how you can reclaim your freedom by moving abroad, legally reduce your tax bill, and protect your assets. More than 8,000 people attended last year. And it's free. My guy's Kyle Anzlone and Dave DeCamp from the Institute and Antiwar.com will be joining a panel discussion as well. Just go to 24.xpatmoneysummit.com

for all the info. That's 2004.xpatmoney summit.com Well, I guess it was just a matter of time. I drank so much coffee I turned into some. Hey guys, check out the Scott Horton Show special blend at Moondoseartisan coffee.com.

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for free and then you'll never have to believe them again. All right now and let me stop you right there because it's such an important point and I got to do a station ID. I'm Scott Horton. It's Anti-War Radio and I'm talking with Connor Freeman from anti-war.com

and I think that now when this subject comes up I want to start building in my disclaimer and I always do say this but I want to make it clear that well I certainly never said that Iran will never get nukes and could never decide that was never the point

the point was always that the Ayatollah has said we're not making nukes and he is the boss on that but he has authorized clearly since the W. Bush years the construction of a latent nuclear deterrent. They have mastered the fuel cycle. They have proven that they know how to enrich uranium up to 60%,

meaning they sure could go on ahead and get it up to weapons grade, purity of uranium 235. And, you know, a Hiroshima bomb is just a simple gun-type nuke, which is extremely easy to make and not a problem. And so essentially, the deterrent has amounted to. they have a revolver in one pocket and some bullets in the other and they've been saying look don't make me load this thing we don't want to fight now but that could change and things like israel bombing the crap out of them with american assistance is the kind of thing that could force the

iatola either in his own mind or under pressure from his circles of advisors that now's the time to change that fatwa and that has always you know and in other words go ahead and change that latent deterrent to an actual nuclear deterrent and which is something that they've said all along is exactly what they're trying to avoid and so if we take a look at the rest of their track record from north korea to ukraine to everywhere else they get always the exactly the exact opposite of what they said that they were going for and you know this ayatollah is is old and sick, too. He could die and be replaced by who knows who at any given time. And the Americans are not just playing with fire. They're allowing the Israelis to play with this fire.

Joe Biden up there taking a nap, whoever's in charge of his government, presumably Jake Sullivan or whatever, are just letting the Israelis make all these decisions for us. And that seems rather dangerous. So with that, Connor, could you please give us sort of a summary of the extent of the recent Israeli attack on Iran and where we are as far as that tit for tat? It seems to me from, and I haven't been paying close attention to this because I've been doing other things, it seems like maybe these are mostly symbolic strikes back and forth and that maybe the Israelis don't have permission from America to go much further and the Iranians are still trying to ramp the thing down without just getting smacked around and turning their other cheek, which apparently they cannot do either.

But give us your assessment of that, would you? Sure, yeah. So, I mean, on the surface, it looks like it was a more or less symbolic strike. I've seen some reports and analysts who have suggested that, you know, during these standoff strikes over Iraqi airspace, which is going to cause a major problem because Khatib has blas vowed to punish the U.S. for using. Iraqi airspace to attack Iran. They, you know, the idea is that they encountered a very sophisticated air defense system, which is, you know, almost certainly the Russian S-300s or S-400s. And basically, they called off the scale of the attack that they had initially intended.

So the thing started and then ended very quickly Friday night, our time. It was Saturday morning, very early Saturday morning in Iran. And they basically, I mean, they claim that they really hit all these, you know, ballistic missile storage sites and air defenses and they knocked out air defenses in this area and that. But what we actually know, at least from the Iranians, is that they hit bases in three provinces, and Alam, Kuzatan, and Tehran. And although they're saying that they hit all these air defense systems, the Iranian military is saying only some radar systems were damaged and that their air defenses or missile defenses

successfully countered the assault. And now are the Iranians vowing for the retaliation? Yeah, but I think that that is not, they don't, that doesn't mean that there's going to be some counter attack here, you know, in the next month or so. I think that what they're saying is this was light enough. Now, four Iranian soldiers were killed and at least another civilian. These are men who were working the air defenses to protect the country. and they're saying, you know, the criminal Zionist regime was attacking us, and these men died in their efforts to safeguard our security and protect the nation.

But given the, I think the Iranians are more keen on saying that the attack really was much ado about nothing. And they are vowing to take revenge, but they're saying, you know, very specifically, this will be done at the correct time and place. Yeah. And look, I just think without having any specific information about it, the overall setup on the board remains that the Pentagon does not want to take on Iran and that any Israeli attack on Iran that is severe enough would force them into a war with us and or and us into a war with them and or drive them to nukes, which is what we're trying to not do. And so I don't know the communication between the Americans and the Israelis, but it just must be that we insist that you only go this far and not further than that, that there's got to be a leash on how badly they are allowed to provoke Iran on our behalf when we have tens of thousands of troops in Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and Saudi all up and down that Gulf at jeopardy from an Iranian strike if the war really devolved into a general thing. And that's not to say it's foolproof and that it won't happen. But I think the assumption has to be that probably the Israelis, but especially the Americans, don't want a real war with Iran. And I don't think the Israelis do either because I don't think they have much of an ability to wage one.

They can do strikes here and there. But what are they going to do? Field an army and Persia? No, not anymore than the Iranians are going to be able to invade them. So the whole thing is can only be one or another level of tit for tat. it could get worse but and of course yeah i think iran is the irailles do have nukes so there is that yeah exactly and i think the iranians are only going to really go to full-scale war with the americans and the israelis if they're pushed into a corner to the extent where they have absolutely no other

options well i mean but see that's really not right it could just be where their political leadership feels that for domestic political reasons they have no other option which as we have discovered is quite different from the national interest and there's no reason to think that things run any better over there. And that's part of it. All this game theory depends on people being clear and people making decisions as though they were states, but they're not. And so... Well, yeah. And the Israelis are very high on these decapitation strikes that they've been carrying out, particularly after assassinating the Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah

by dropping 80,000-pound bombs and leveling five apartment buildings on an entire block in southern Beirut, you know, and killing Sinwar, the head of Hamas. They took out Hania, the political bureau chief of Hamas in Tehran with reportedly a missile strike while he was there visiting to attend the presidential inauguration at the end of July. And, you know, the risk is that they may try and do some sort of decapitation strike on the Ayatollah or, you know, or potentially the president. And if they did do that, that's the kind of thing. where what you're saying, the likelihood of them saying, you know what, we're going to not only go to war, but we're going to get, we're going to go for nuclear weapons too. That's a very big possibility.

And as you say, Israel is not being reigned in at all by this administration. It doesn't matter how many laws they break. I mean, Lloyd Austin and Anthony Blinken, you know, they leaked this to the press, to Axios, that they send a letter to the Israelis that if you don't ease the start, basically the blockade, the starvation blockade on Gaza and 30 days, meaning well after the election, this was on October 14th, then, you know, there's going to be implications for military aid per our foreign assistance laws. And the State Department is clarified that they don't have any consequences really in mind. And we've had State Department officials who have resigned in protest of the genocide saying this is just a PR ploy, a pre-election PR ploy to, because they're

desperate to get Democratic voters who are going to stay home or vote for. Jill Stein in protest of this war on the Palestinians to try and give them something that they can justify or provide a pseudo-justification for their vote for Harris, but it doesn't really amount to anything. And as you can see, I mean, right now we have the U.S. ambassador in Lebanon trying to foment basically an internal revolution to destroy Hamas, excuse me, to destroy Hezbollah. I mean, that's their goal. And we have, we know that from Politico that Brett McGurk and Amos Hostin, who's the envoy for peace between Lebanon and Israel, is an Israeli-born IDF veteran, they told Netanyahu before he invaded Lebanon, before he launched all the massive attacks in the Pager attack, and the massive bombing on September 23rd that killed well over 500 people bombing residential homes and buildings throughout eastern and southern Lebanon, they,

told them, go ahead. Now is the time to attack Hezbollah. They're weakened and this is a great opportunity. And it's this same logic we've seen before from, you know, Condoleezer Rice saying back in 2006 that these are the growth pangs of the new Middle East. They're still holding on to this idea of eliminating any faction, any militia, any state that can oppose American and Israeli hegemony in the region. This was the point of the Abraham Accords, frankly, was normalizing apartheid at a minimum and then using the U.S. taxpayer dime to buy off all these Gulf dictatorship satellites in the Middle East of the Americans and building this anti-Iran NATO-style coalition. And I think that this current war has thrown a huge monkey wrench into that,

and we've seen even before then in March of 2003, the Chinese brokered a real landmark peace deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia. And I hope that that continues to put a damper, on these American aspirations for this coalition. But at the same time, the Israelis are completely out of control as they brag all the time. We were fighting a seven front war and they're bombing Yemen. They're bombing Syria. They're bombing Iran. They're bombing leveling Lebanon right now in the south.

I mean, they're taking some casualties on the ground. But the air war has killed well over 2,000 civilians. There's a great report on anti-war.com. about how many health care workers have been killed in these strikes. Hey, let me ask you this, man. I'm sorry, we're so out of time here, Connor, but let me end with this. Who's really good on Iraqi politics right now? I would always go to Jason and Jason Ditz from anti-war.com.

But, I mean, Trita would be better on Aram, but maybe he's got some strong insight into what's going on in Baghdad right now. Yeah, it's all hysteria and bother that rule the place. And they've always been very close to Iran, but they're very much on the take from the Americans, too, and always trying to split that difference. So it would be interesting to know more about that. I have not looked very closely at what's going on in Baghdad for a while. But anyway. Right.

You have Khatib Hasbila, like I said, saying that they're going to impose consequences on the Americans. But I haven't seen yet what Baghdad's official position is going to be going for it. And like you said, they're in a very delicate situation. I mean, when they assassinated Qasem Soleimani and I. Abu Maldi al-Muhandis, one of the leaders of the PMF back on January 3rd, 2020, they, the parliament in Iraq voted unanimously to expel the U.S. occupation forces, and Donald Trump threatened to sanction them into oblivion with penalties and the likes of which they've never seen, which is a, you know, that's a very serious threat because

Federal Reserve holds their reserves and can basically shut down their economy at any point. We have imposed sanctions on Iraq in the past in the 1990s under Bill Clinton that killed hundreds of thousands of children and other civilians. And, of course, that was a policy that was pushed by Israel, the dual containment policy, and it was along with their occupations that motivated September 11th. And as we're done recording this and preparing to say for today's show, the breaking news, Connor, is that Bill Clinton just spoke to Michigan Muslims justifying the slaughter in Gaza. That's the message of the Harris campaign going into this election here. here is not just Americans, but Michigan Muslims ought to get used to it and like it and get behind it. It's the right thing to do when they're over there doing Bill Clinton-style Waco maskers

day after day after day for a year against those poor people. Because of his eight years of failure to solve this issue back when he had the power to do it when he was the emperor of the world in the 1990s. But anyway, all right. That doesn't work, send Liz Cheney. Yeah, I'm sure. She'll just get the Muslim Brotherhood to solve it for us. All right, we're out of time. Thank you, Connor. Appreciate you. Thank you, Scott.

All right, you guys, that's Anti-War Radio for today. That there was Connor Freeman. He is assistant editor at the Institute and at Anti-War.com. Check out his great new piece at the Institute on the goings-on in Georgia. And I'm Scott Horton, and I'm here every Thursday from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week. You know,