Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 8/31/23 Branko Marcetic on the Ousting of Imran Khan and Washington’s Plan for Ukraine

Episode Date: September 1, 2023

Branko Marcetic joined Antiwar Radio this week to talk about two articles he wrote recently. The first concerns the ousting of former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan in a no-confidence vote. U.S. officials and their friends in the media had said, emphatically, that the American government had no role in his removal. But a recently published cable appears to contradict that claim. Scott and Marcetic discuss. They then turn to the second article which examines the U.S. government’s apparent plan to extend the war in Ukraine, despite the failures of the counteroffensive. Discussed on the show: “Imran Khan’s Ouster Is a Story of US Power and Propaganda” (Jacobin) “U.S.-Israel Plot Against Pakistan: A Desperate Imran Khan's Big, Bad Conspiracy Theory” (Haaretz) “Are US officials signaling a new ‘forever war’ in Ukraine?” (Responsible Statecraft) Branko Marcetic is a writer for Jacobin Magazine, a fellow at In These Times, and host of the 1/200 podcast. He is the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden. Follow him on Twitter @BMarchetich. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; 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, August 31st, 2023. I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. already. Time to end the war on terrorism. You can find my full interview archive, almost 6,000 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show and all the other video channel sites and stuff. And you follow me on Twitter, if you dare. I'm still calling it Twitter, because I think X is stupid. Follow me on Twitter, if you dare, at Scott Horton's show. And sorry in advance for some of that stuff. Okay, welcoming back to the show. It's Bronco Marchteach from Jacobin and also he's got one here at the Quincy Institute website that we want to talk about.

But this one's at Jacobin. Imron Kahn's Oster is a story of U.S. power and propaganda. Welcome back to the show. Bronco, how you doing, sir? Hey, good. Thanks for having me. I also agree, by the way, that X is a terrible name. The thing is so stupid.

Everybody has to call it X, you know, the site that was renamed from Twitter the other day. I read that in a news story this morning. Just call it Twitter. No, I'm not going along with it. I'm just sticking with Twitter. Absolutely. All right. Well, I'm sticking with you, man, because you're so smart and writes such great stuff all the time.

Who's Imran Khan and why should I care? Well, Imran Khan was a very famous cricketer, sort of known as a playboy for a very long time. And some years back, I mean, he was very critical of the Pakistan government, very critical of the U.S. government's involvement in Pakistan. and it's sort of, you know, intertwining with the Pakistani military and spy services. Ended up running for president, won. And, you know, didn't have a particularly successful presidency,

but ultimately was sort of deposed a couple of years ago in a no-confidence vote. And he claimed for a long time that this was, you know, part of a U.S. plot to get rid of him, that because he had posed certain US policies, most notably the use of Pakistan basically as a base from which to drone bomb, you know, neighboring countries. Because of this, the US got rid of him. There's been kind of an over-year-long political crisis over this, and a lot of people have kind of purported his claim. But, you know, certain information has come to light to quote the Bigelbowski.

and it makes Kahn's claim a lot more credible now. All right, so, you know, first of all, it's really interesting because, you know, I don't know, anytime there's something like this, especially a guy like Kahn who had denounced America's war in Afghanistan and refused to let, you know, Trump or Biden have a drone base to attack Afghanistan and all this stuff. You can see him get overthrown. You just assume that America had something to do with it, you know, without knowing. But it was interesting because there were quite a few reports that said,

this really is just domestic and you know I travel around so much I kept meeting Pakistani cab drivers and they were totally divided on this Pakistani American cab drivers who'd say oh yeah no it's definitely a CIA plot or oh no way everybody hates this guy in fact I even had one guy really liked con

and said still it wasn't the Americans it was you know he has all these domestic enemies who are constantly out for blood and they had their chance or whatever but now we know about American intervention in his overthrow. So please help clarify and set a straight Bronco March Teach. I mean, I think it's a bit of both.

I think sometimes we in the United States and the West can kind of overstate U.S. involvement and U.S. power, or at least its ability to influence events in other countries. And so I think at least by what has come out so far, it's probably a little much, as Kahn's been saying, to say this was a U.S. plot, you know, from the beginning. No confidence vote was just orchestrated by the United States to get rid of him. It does seem like very much, as those cab drivers were telling you, that he did have a lot of political enemies, he pissed off the military and the, you know, the spy services over there. And that was kind of the thing that led to the vote.

But the thing is, what this diplomatic cable that came out that was leaked to the intercept, which Kahn, by the way, had been saying existed. He's saying this, I had this, have this cable that shows that U.S. is involved. He said this for over a year. And people just said, you know, he's making it up. But it was leaked to the intercept and it shows that, okay, maybe the United States did not orchestrate this no-confidence vote. But when the no-confidence vote was set to be held, you know, it wasn't necessarily a done deal that he was going to get ousted in it. And basically, the U.S. State Department made what you might quote.

you know, a sort of mob boss like threat or suggestion, you know, whatever term you want to use to Pakistan basically saying, look, we have this war in Ukraine happening. We want to rally the world against Russia. Emran Khan decided to travel to Russia on the day of the invasion and generally has taken this neutral stance, which is impossible to do. If he remains the prime minister, then, you know, we're going to, it's going to get tough for Pakistan. Pakistan will be isolated on the world stage. They'll be isolated from us, and certainly Europe will probably feel the same. However, if he has gotten rid of, then I believe the quote was, all will be forgiven.

And ultimately, he was ousted. And I think that's actually a very good illustration of the way that the US uses its power or the US government uses its power on the world stage. It's not necessarily always to orchestrate things, although obviously that happens too. but it's also taking advantage of domestic instability and situations that are cropping up in these countries and then sort of using its power, using its way to tip the scales

in the direction that the government views that's serving its interests. It's Brunco Marchteach from Jacobin. We're talking about his piece about the overthrow of Imran Khan in Pakistan here. You know, whenever a critic talks about American intervention in other countries, elections, or political processes, or kud.

The defense is always, oh, yeah, well, you're denying the agency of the people on the ground there. Obviously, the Parliament of Pakistan, they're the ones who called the shot, but obviously America is the world empire and told them which shots a call. So somehow this is supposed to make it deniable or something that they're having their way when it doesn't seem deniable to me at all. Seems like, you know, the barest of alibis, really, is all. Well, and I mean, look, I've heard this claim before that, you know, oh, the U.S. role here didn't matter at all, or, you know, this wasn't that

big a deal. Well, okay, if you think so, it seems like the state department and the entire U.S. government disagreed because they did not say, yeah, well, you know, we expressed our opinion about what we would like the outcome to be,

but ultimately, you know, we didn't have that much of a role. No, they strenuously denied that they had any role, and they said, we have no position on who is the ruler of Pakistan. And ultimately, that was proven untrue by documentary evidence. So, I mean, the fact that the U.S. government itself goes out of the way to, you know, issue this maximalist denial of its involvement, to me, makes it completely absurd that the

U.S. had no role. And, I mean, let's be honest. I mean, the United States is the most powerful government in the entire world that has a massive military. It dolls out aid, both military aid and humanitarian aid to countries. It obviously has great sway in terms of what's able to convince other governments to do. It is ridiculous this idea that, you know, that has become popular now when people talk about agency. This idea that the United States as the hegemonic power of the globe simply has no impact on anything that happens in the rest of the world, if it decides to weigh in either behind the

scenes or publicly. It doesn't even accord with what people who are usually interventionists, military interventionists, who want the US to throw its weight around more for the sake of humanitarian concerns. They're constantly asking the United States to make statements, to issue public proclamations, condemnations, so on and so forth, because they know that even when the United States doesn't actively intervene or is not yet at that stage, its words carry a lot of weight and carry a lot of influence. So, you know, this idea is just completely absurd.

But I can see why people who want to minimize the role that the U.S. government has and kind of influencing events in countries and internal politics, I can see why they would want to take up this argument as ridiculous as it is. Yeah. I'm Scott Horton. It's anti-war radio here on KPFK. I'm talking with Bronco Marchteach from Jacobin magazine about America's role in the overthrow of the Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan. Yeah, no, exactly right. Bronco, the narrative is America is number one. USA, the world's superpower. But it's not like America acts in the world. And if you say that it does, then you're a conspiracy cook. And you have quite a catalog in your art.

article here of these different press statements, basically ridiculing anyone who would suspect that the Americans would let it be known that they would like to see this guy unmade prime minister in Pakistan. Yeah, absolutely. I went back and I want to read some of the coverage about Khan's claims because I was interested, you know, the claim conspiracy theory or misinformation, disinformation, fake news, all that stuff. It's so pervasive now, and it's all used to justify censoring usually independent media.

So here we go. Here's a thing that was widely called a conspiracy theory and widely called fake. And, yeah, that's exactly what a litany of commentators then and now call it. They said, you know, look, oh, he keeps saying he has this diplomatic cable, but he won't show it to us. Some people even saw the diplomatic cable, and they said, well, that doesn't, doesn't prove anything, which itself is interesting. Some people went through the timeline of events, and they said there's no way that even if the US had said anything, that Khan's trip to Moscow had anything to do with it. If you look at the timeline, it just doesn't make sense.

And these were all very credential, very quote-unquote serious commentators, writing in the pages of the most influential newspapers and magazines, usually considered by people who censor things, kind of quote-unquote authoritative sources. And look, I mean, I was careful around the story. I did not want to jump to conclusions that did not have the evidence for them yet. And I mean, I think that was prudent. But, you know, how am I at that point going to rule out that there's any U.S. involvement? I mean, Khan was saying it.

There was nothing, you know, there was not enough evidence out there to say one way or the other. And given what we know about not just the history of the US's involvement in Pakistan, but also, I mean, do I have to go through the long history of US attempts to foment unrest and sponsoring coups and just outright regime change operations of the countries? So I'm open, some secret, and sometimes taking years to actually come out. in that history that, you know, any actual, I think, serious commentators should be pretty familiar with. I'm not going to stand out here and say, no, there's no way this could have happened. And of course, all these people were completely wrong. And the sad thing is that they'll, you know,

I don't think it'll change a single thing. I think the next time something like this happens, you'll get the same exact rushing to conclusions. No one will have learned anything. There'll be no consequences whatsoever. But that's the nature of the beast, I guess. Yeah, exactly right. All right, it's anti-war radio. I'm Scott Horton, talking with Bronco Marchteach from jacobin.com. And this one is called Imran Khan's ouster is the story of U.S. power and propaganda. And I like this one.

In Haaret's Hamza Azar Salam called this conspiracy theory anti-Semitic. Even though you say in here in parentheses, the latter was never explained. were there any Jews in the story at all? Are they just like throwing things around? Go ahead and call you a flat earth guy as long as they're at it, right? I read that piece a few times because I could not wrap around my head

how it was anti-Semitic. I think this is the tenuous connection. I believe it was because anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the United States exist. Therefore, to say that the United States had a role in Ginghamer of Khan was also to say

that the Jews did. That seemed to be the argument. Very much of a stretch. Seriously. And look, I mean, even on the basic conspiracy theory level, if your conspiracy theory is about an intelligence agency engaging in covert action in the interests of the nation state that it, you know, purports to work for, I'm willing to listen, you know? It's not like, you know, that is their job after all, you know? No, no, for sure. I mean, look, obviously there's a lot of ridiculous conspiracy theories out there, but conspiracies do exist. Those are real. I mean, you know, M.K. Ultra was a conspiracy.

It was covered up for a long time. It may not have even seen the latter day if it was not for, you know, accidentally finding some documents in a box one day. The Iraq war, the lead up to the Iraq war, that was a conspiracy. It was a very high-level conspiracy to lie the country into a war. And, I mean, you know, you could go down the list. So conspiracies do exist. It's not always, usually they're kind of banal as this one is. It's just wanting to get rid of one leader who is viewed as unhelpful to another

powerful country's interests. But it's a bit ridiculous to say that, you know, well, you know, this could never have happened. To me, actually, that's just as irresponsible and unsurious as, you know, the people who immediately point to everything as a kind of, you know, waste of conspiracy. Yeah, exactly right. Well, folks, sad to say, they lied us into war. All of them. World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq War I, Serbia, Afghanistan,

Iraq War II, Libya, Syria, Yemen, all of them. But now you can get the e-book, All the War Lies, by me, for free. Just sign up the email list at the bottom of the page at Scott Horton.org, or go to Scott Horton.org slash subscribe. Get all the war lies by me for free. And then you'll never have to believe them again. Hey, y'all, Scott here. Let me tell you about Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc. Who knew? Artificial bank credit expansion leads to price inflation and terribly distorted markets. If you've got any savings left at all, you need to protect them. You need to put some at least into precious metals. Well, Roberts and Roberts can set you up with the best deal

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proving that marriage isn't always a bed of roses. See The Roses, only in theaters, August 29th. Get tickets now. And as you said, when the story, he came out, you said, I don't know, I guess we'll have to wait and see. Looks like maybe domestic thing, but couldn't possibly rule it out. How could you rule it out? Same thing here. I talk with Ted Snyder. I go, I don't know, Ted. America does like overthrowing other people's governments a lot. And he goes, yeah, but, you know, in this case, we're just

waiting on data, right? Why jump to conclusions? We don't really know. But the idea that we would rule it out and say, oh, no, it's crazy. America would never do such a thing. I don't know. I'm sure there's somebody in the audience right now who is counting off on their fingers how many times America has overthrown the government of Pakistan just in the post-war era. Yeah, I mean, it took a long time to get, you know, a few years at least to get official confirmation of the U.S. role in the overthrow of Aende in Chile. That was not immediately, I think it was suspected, but it was not sustained. We just had some new docs the other day, actually, on anti-war.com. Right. Yeah. And I mean, look, I think what's kind of interesting about this is I think it's

shows you the way that kind of power and propaganda reinforce each other as the headline kind of makes clear. Because on the one, you know, you have the U.S. behind the scenes, putting its thumb on the scales to get rid of Khan, whose neutrality in the Ukraine war it sees is unhelpful. And then what happens is there is a sort of platoon of, you know, again, quote-unquote serious commentators, people with credentials, people with years of experience. working in governments in official circles, who I think for a variety of reasons, one, because they naturally identify with power and the people in power. Number two, because of the desire to be seen as serious and what that means, and often, sadly, in journalism, is to basically

take the side of the particular government you're working under. And they all come through. I don't think there's any memo that went through, but they all, of their own accord, come out and say, no, this is a fantasy, this is all fake, don't listen to this, completely untrue. And anyone who says it is a conspiracy theorist and a liar. And immediately, that ends up setting the kind of boundaries for a debate on the subject. Now, because all these very important authoritative newspapers and such have said this, it means it closes off the possibility.

for other commentators who maybe are not as secure in their careers or in their public standing to counter that because they could fear some sort of career repercussions or reputational damage, so on and so forth. And so I think, you know, beyond everything else that we've talked about, I think this episode is kind of an interesting case study in the way that the U.S. media and political infrastructure kind of works to just narrow debate. to a very small spectrum. All right, it's anti-war radio.

I'm Scott Horton talking with Bronco Marchteach. This one is at responsible state craft. If we could spend a few minutes here on Ukraine, are U.S. officials signaling a new forever war in Ukraine reads the headline? And this is, I guess, your take on where are we now after the failed summer offensive. That's correct. And actually, there's been some more developments to this story, because I think maybe the week after this came out, there was a David Ignatius piece for Washington Post, and he's a very well-connected person in Washington basically kind of tells you what the elite are thinking and saying.

And he says across all levels of the US government, the consensus is now that this war is going to go on for another year, if not longer, because, quote, the U.S. cannot be seen to abandon an ally. So to me, this is number one, obviously, it's not a good thing for anyone, least of all Ukrainians themselves, for this war to continue, a war that already has sent amputation statistics in Ukraine to the heights of the First World War, which is crazy. But beyond that, it's not good for the world because the longer this thing goes on, the more chances there are for something stupid. and dangerous and, you know, a misunderstanding to happen that triggers something much more catastrophic than what we're seeing. And beyond everything else, the US just continues to move the goalposts

to shift what its lines are. It's done that repeatedly on the weapons transfers. It's now done that on the timing of the war, because last year the war was meant to end after this offensive. Now it's gonna go until the next offensive. And so the question is, Is there at any point going to be a time where any, I mean, next year is an election year?

Is anyone going to be satisfied in the next two years with having this thing wind up? Or is it going to be like every other U.S. military intervention when the ambitions get bigger, the goalposts move, and we constantly shift around our definition of victory and acceptable withdrawal until the war just goes on and on on? So that's basically the thrust of the piece. Yeah, but Bronco, I've been told repeatedly that Russia, far from being the second most powerful military on the planet after ours, they're only the second most powerful military in Ukraine. And that total victory is imminent. Yeah, I mean, I think obviously the Russian military underperformed and made a bunch of mistakes. And people who are much smarter and better versed in military strategy have written.

about those mistakes. But it seems to me pretty clear at this point that what happened was these mistakes and these errors led to a wild overestimation, number one, of Ukrainian militaries, hopes for success for military success against Russia. And then number two, a kind of underestimation of what the Russian military was capable of. That didn't really look at the facts of the ground, but sort of was tied up in this kind of emotional. fervor that, you know, understandably followed the invasion. But what that's meant is that we just have been presented with and kind of been living in a bit of a fantasy world for the past year and a half, where we keep being told all these

things by people. And it turns out to be mostly just wishful thinking. It's not even really necessarily based on the military realities. And what it's done is it's meant that not only is, uh, the option of ceasefire or just even diplomacy to end the war considered wrong and unassetable. It's been banished from public discourse for the most part because people go, well, hold on, Ukraine's going to win. So why would we want to do that?

We don't want to hobble their impending military victory. But the other thing is I think it's kind of encouraged the Ukrainian political and military leadership, to take extra risks and to overinflate their military ambitions instead of kind of, you know, there was a chance last year after that counteroffensive that managed to push the Russians back, that would have been a very good time to sue for peace. Ukraine had the kind of upper hand in negotiations that the West kept saying that this was, this is what the aim of the war was to get Ukraine to that position. but what happened was

Ukrainian political leadership said well no we're actually not going to go on to talks now because we think we can get more we're going to go further and everyone shared that no one was really able to say anything about you know hey hold on is this a good idea is this actually feasible

and what have we seen I mean first it was the absolute slaughter in Bakhmud and now this counter-offensive God knows how many people have lost their lives there but I don't think it's been pretty. I think the New York Times, or at least the U.S. officials through New York Times put the dollar debt dollar at half a million, or sorry, casually told. But that's a horrific

number, especially over just a year and a half. And obviously, you know, half of that is the Ukrainian number. So I think, yeah, sadly, we've all been led astray by some very, very bad commentary and some, I think, poor leadership. Yeah, for sure. It was so clear last fall when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, hey, great job there in Curzon and Harkiv. You boys ought to go to the table now while you're only this far behind and not worse. And Joe Biden, the President of the United States, let Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken win that argument and told the Ukrainians, don't listen to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Jake Sullivan knows what to do. And so here they are. They lost another, you know, 50,000 guys or whatever the number is, and they achieved absolutely nothing for it.

Well, and don't forget, that's all totally fine because as people like Lindsey Graham and others keep reminding us, these think tank people, well, it's not Americans dying. This is actually great bang for the buck for the United States government. It's just Ukrainian people dying, and they'll fight to the end, even though, you know, we have. have reports and we've had reports that people are trying desperately to avoid conscription this entire time because they understand we don't want to fight and get killed for nothing. Yeah. In other words, this is a slave army. These boys that are getting blown to bits, they've been drafted at gunpoint, forced to fight. Exactly. I mean, and just like the Russians. And the thing is that we understand that when it comes to the Russian military, that Putin has basically

is forcing all these people to fight. But we have been. given this image of Ukraine as this kind of nation of willing cannon fodder, these people who will no matter what, no matter how many limbs they lose, no matter how much family dies, that they'll just keep fighting forever and ever and ever. And that's not true. But, you know, I mean, the sad thing is there was a piece in Politico recently where some U.S. official, you mentioned that thing about Millie earlier this year when he said, hey, now or late last year when he said, hey, now's a good time maybe to push for negotiations. And as you correctly say, all these civilian officials, including the country's top diplomat, if you can even call him

that, Anthony Blinken, said, no, no, no, that would be wrong. We should keep pushing. And now this unnamed U.S. official tells Politico, yeah, actually, whoops, we may have missed the butt on that. Yeah, we probably should have listened to Millie. Oh, well, you know, what's a 100,000 or so Ukrainian lives. Well, look, Bronco, I mean, you know, Danny Davis said on the show, look, they could lose Archive back again now. They could lose Odessa. They should have just implemented Minsk, too.

They should have sworn not to join NATO. They should have negotiated their way out of this war in the first place. Well, well, the irony is, I mean, I'm sure you're aware. I don't know if people generally are that there were serious talks going on from the very beginning of the war, we have this from numerous sources that they were actually bearing fruit. And what happened, we have also been told by multiple sources that basically the United States and Great Britain did not want the war to end. And the reason why I think, I mean, if you go back and read coverage of this from a war start, basically, they say it outright. There was a New York

Times piece about this, that the U.S. goal, once Russia invaded, was to create a quagmire, to trap Russia into its own Afghanistan, or at least it's second Afghanistan, and to sort of bleed the country that way, if not even lead to regime change. And ultimately, you know, they got exactly what they wanted because that may be what ends up happening. Certainly it looks like it from now. But I think we're all realizing a year and a half into this, that that is a horrific outcome, turning this thing into a permanent war with all its nuclear risks and all the risks of instability, internal instability in Russia. It's mind-boggling that this is what they were kind of hoping for from the beginning.

And now, you know, they're the proverbial dog that caught the car. They have it, and it turns out actually they don't really want anything to do with it, but it's It's too late to get out. All right, you guys, and I'm sorry, we're all out of time, but that is Bronco March Teach. Here he is at jacobin.com. Imran Collins-Auster is a story of U.S. power and propaganda, and this one is at Responsible Statecraft.

Are U.S. officials signaling a new forever war in Ukraine? Thank you very much for your time, Bronco. Great to talk to you. Cheers, man. All right, you guys, and that is it for anti-war radio for today. I'm Scott Horton. Find the full interview archive at Scott Horton.org. Follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton's show, and I am here every Thursday from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.

See you next week.