The Johnson - Wilkerson Interview

Larry Johnson has done a pretty much no-holds-barred interview with Larry Wilkerson—a deeply experienced military and diplomatic official. They cover a lot of ground, matters that Wilkerson was personally involved in as Colin Powell’s chief of staff, such as the lying that got us into Iraq, etc. Here’s a link to the hour long interview:

From Iraq War to Escalation with Russia: Inside Bush Admin's Blunders | Col. Lawrence Wilkerson

As usual, of course, there’s a lot more to the interview than the title might initially suggest. As we’ve discussed in the past, the connection between the WMD lies that led us to war in Iraq and the war on Russia is that the same cabal of Neocons were behind both wars. Just as importantly, the same cabal of Neocons have also been behind Anglo-Zionist support for Israel over the years and, more particularly, support for genocide in the Middle East—ongoing since the Iraq war in one way or another. I’ve transcribed a few minutes of the interview which implicitly connects the dots between Russia under Yeltsin (and into the Putin years) and Israel and Palestine today—and where American society stands. The links, of course, were added by yours truly.

[50:29]

LJ: During [Powell’s] first year at State, Putin started making the move against the oligarchs. I recall my friend Bruce Bradley got me connected with a lobbying firm in DC called [Apco?], and they were hired by Mikhail Khodorkovsky. So, did the issue of all these Jewish oligarchs that Putin was cracking down on, did that come before State at any time that you recall?

LW: We talked about it in a personal capacity, private capacity, and I made such assertions as, Anatoly Chubais and Larry Summers had conducted a fire sale in Moscow and sold off all the old Soviet assets to a bunch of oligarchs and made such huge amounts of money off the fees they charged that we were going to regret it. And he was like, 'Well, you know that's just the way things happen when one Empire goes down and the other Empire is triumphant.' I said, 'No, it's not necessarily that the investment bankers descend on the defeated Empire and sell all of its assets to people who are gonna be our enemies in the future.' It didn't register with him that much. And since then I've come to believe that that was precisely what happened.

[58:10]

LJ: We've seen how the sausage is made inside. We know how the final product comes out. Who's making the damn sausage, right now, with respect particularly to Israel--as far as State Department, DOD and the White House goes?

LW: In a very large degree I think Mearsheimer is right. I think there are some Jewish and non-Jewish billionaires in this country who have a lot of the apparatus by the gonads, so to speak, and they are controlling what goes on. But I also think, and it's one of the things I taught at William and Mary--and I think my experience taught me--that there's never a single reason. There's always a multiplicity of reasons and a multiplicity of culprits advocating each one of these reasons. The president's job--and I watched HW Bush do this rather well, and it takes experience, experience with the bureaucracy, experience with diplomacy, experience with security and other factors impinging on, and you have to be able to parse it and find the best solution. Well, we haven't had a president capable of that. They've all been totally inexperienced, from Obama--even Biden! Because Biden, as people used to say all the time, runs his mouth far too much. If [Biden] were ever anything other than a senator he'd be a dangerous man, right?

So when you look at the multiplicity of things beyond what John [Mearsheimer] talks about--the Israel Lobby, which he defines rather well--and you look at the other factors--everything from about 40% of America's visceral appreciation of--but no knowledge of at all, the Holocaust and what happened--and their appreciation of what Israel means and their shame over the United States's performance from roughly the early 30s on, the pictures of the concentration camps and those sorts of things, the Holocaust. The Israelis have been very, very clever in doing this--you know the Holocaust museum is just the peak of the iceberg, if you will. The whole body of things--they're in our high schools, they're in our grammar schools, they're in our middle schools, they control in many states the way the curriculum reflects the situation in the Middle East. They've been very elaborate in the way they've taken over this country and, in that sense, it's bigger than what John says in terms of the Israel Lobby. It's what they've done to the American citizenry. And only now--and this is Netanyahu's greatest accomplishment, I think--is it beginning to unwind, is it beginning to shred.

I had a rabbi in New York whom I've known for 15, 20 years. I think he's the only Jewish rabbi to be in the same synagogue for 50 years. He met Yitzhak Rabin when Yitzhak Rabin was a firebrand, almost a little Netanyahu, and then he met him later when he transitioned into believing in his heart of hearts that two states had to be created, otherwise Israel would be [?]. And so Netanyahu had to engineer [Rabin’s] assassination, which Bibi did just as surely as I'm sitting here, with those political rallies that ginned up the settlers and got one of them to go shoot [Rabin]. So he said to me, 'The greatest cause of anti-Semitism against the largest Jewish community in the world, much of which is right here around you in New York'--we were in New York at the time, at Great Neck--'is Bibi Netanyahu.'

From the link to Wikipedia:

“Rallies organized by Likud and other right-wing groups featured depictions of Rabin in a Nazi SS uniform, or in the crosshairs of a gun. Protesters compared the Labor party to the Nazis and Rabin to Adolf Hitler and chanted, "Rabin is a murderer" and "Rabin is a traitor". In July 1995, Netanyahu led a mock funeral procession featuring a coffin and hangman's noose at an anti-Rabin rally where protesters chanted, "Death to Rabin". The chief of internal security, Carmi Gillon, then alerted Netanyahu of a plot on Rabin's life and asked him to moderate the protests' rhetoric, which Netanyahu declined to do.”

So Bibi is a big factor in divesting some of these people in this country of their enamorment of Israel. And that's gonna be, I think, one of the ultimate unwinding of Israel's fate. One morning--it's not going to happen like water dripping on granite, it's going to be a moment of clarity. Monday night you're going to go to sleep and Tuesday morning you're going to wake up and America's no longer going to be--or Israel's no longer going to be, whichever way you look at it--the others poodle. We are going to break apart. That's gonna be existential for Israel, of course, and this could be part of the ingredients of that breaking apart. But it also could be a part of a truly disastrous situation in the region, and maybe the world.

LJ: Yeah, I call it the Exodus dichotomy. People of our age, we remember the Paul Newman - Eva Marie Saint movie that portrayed Israel as David, and the Arab Muslim world as this giant Goliath--raping, killing, plundering-- and little David rising up to fight him off. That's been the narrative for most of our lives. But now I've started asking random people who are 40 years of age and under, 'Hey, seen the movie Exodus?’ They look at you crosseyed. Never seen it, not part of their consciousness--but they are seeing the slaughter in Gaza, they're seeing Tik Tok, they're seeing a baby's burning hands waving, people screaming, heads blown open. That's what they're seeing, yeah.

I'll leave the easy question to last. Let's assume that Israel is going to launch a retaliatory strike against Iran before the election here in the United States. What do you think are the consequences? What flows from that?

LW: It depends on the targets and the effectiveness. If the targets are what Netanyahu has said--military targets alone, and if they are reasonably effective--then I look for Iran to come back with a little bit up on the ladder. And then all bets are off. But your question, I think, was aimed at the election. I think what we just did with this 30-day statement or whatever was a a gross political act. It was to Netanyahu: 'Let's not do anything that will provoke the Iranians to do something that will disturb the election, so let's not do anything, really, except maybe your very carefully calculated response to their latest before the election, because then we might really get angry with you, especially if you influence the election.' And if Trump wins, of course, that's just smoke--doesn't make any difference, because Trump has already said--this is one thing I believe him on--that he'll be even tougher on the Palestinians and the Arabs in general than than Biden has been. So I think it was a pure political act to do that. I don't think it had anything to do with the change of heart in the US government.

Latest from Lebanon is that Israel is massively bombing so-called Hezbollah financial infrastructure:

Megatron @Megatron_ron

Israel is bombing banks and other financial institutions across Beirut right now

Megatron @Megatron_ron

This financial institutions is non-profit org. that provides small loans with no interest in accordance with Islam to support families

Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese use al-Qard al-Hassan’s services