American Exceptionalism and Unjust Wars

Mike Talks With Dr. Srdja Trifkovic

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “Dr. Srdja Trifkovic is on the Dude Maker Hotline with us, live from Belgrade, Serbia.  You had written about how Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, doesn’t want any of these negotiations, doesn’t want a nuclear deal, certainly doesn’t want the United States and the P5 to enter into any sort of an arrangement with the Iranians.  Why not?”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  You had written about how Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, doesn’t want any of these negotiations, doesn’t want a nuclear deal, certainly doesn’t want the United States and the P5 to enter into any sort of an arrangement with the Iranians.  Why not?

Trifkovic:  Because he wants the United States to fight a war against Iran.  It’s crudely put but accurate.  What he suggests is a zero nuclear program, which means no enrichment for medical purposes, no enrichment for electricity generation.  That would put Iran outside the pale of other signatories of nonproliferation treaties, of which Israel is not a signatory, by the way.  It will never be accepted in Tehran, regardless of the kind of regime, whether it’s Islamic, whether it’s monarchist, whether it’s Persian nationalist.  To cut a long story short, the checks and balances put on Iran under the current proposal make it well nigh impossible to jump to nuclear weaponry.  It would take really a complete abdication of Western intelligence agencies and International Atomic Agency supervision program to perform such a feat.  I am not suggesting or a moment that the Iranians should get a bomb.  I’m just saying, if you want to follow Netanyahu’s prescription, it is really whether Iran fights for what, reasonably speaking, is the right to enrich to five percent or ten percent or fifteen percent, or whether you want an outright ban, which no self-respecting sovereign country will ever accept.

Mike:  If they don’t accept it – when you say war, that he wants the United States to start a war with the Iranians, unfortunately, most of the American neocon population that’s not in the political class has bought that this is the inevitable solution here as though the 3,000-year-old people of Persia that we call Iran today, as though this is going to be some sort of cakewalk that Iraq was supposed to be.  These people are significantly advanced both militarily and otherwise, aren’t they?

Trifkovic:  I’m really glad you mentioned Iraq.  Netanyahu told Congress in 2002, “Once Saddam has nuclear weapons, the terror network will have nuclear weapons.”  He said, “If you take out Saddam, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.”  We know what the reverberations have been.  Iraq is in chaos.  Iran is actually more influential in Baghdad than it would ever have been under Saddam.

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And we have the rise of ISIS.  The regional consequences of war on Iran, quite apart from the military unpredictable, is that we would have Hezbollah in Lebanon and various Shiites along the Fertile Crescent, both in the Gulf, in the Emirates, and, of course, in Iraq itself support Iran.  But what would it do for ISIS?  It would do wonders.  Iran at the moment is defector ally of the United States in suppressing ISIS in northwestern Iraq.  Their troops and their advisors are actively involved in effectively acting as U.S. allies.  What I would add, particularly important, is that the Iranian territory is two and a half times that of Iraq.  The population is over 70 million.  To try and hit Iranian nuclear facilities would not be a surgical strike.  It would result in the kind of quagmire that we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, but multiplied to the nth degree of magnitude.

Mike:  Dr. Srdja Trifkovic is on the Dude Maker Hotline with us, live from Belgrade, Serbia.  Of course, you’re in Serbia, you’re in another country that’s already been tainted by American exceptionalism.  During the Clinton administration, we fixed Serbia for you, too, right?

Trifkovic:  That’s a long story.  We’ve seen the glorious results of the 1999 Clinton intervention against Serbia in the rise of a jihadist hotspot in the heart of Europe, in Kosovo, which is really the worst-administered part of Europe today.  It’s a hotbed of not only Islamic extremism, but also of heroin and weapons smuggling and white slave trade.  It is indeed lamentable that American taxpayers’ money was used to bomb a nation that has been a steadfast ally of the United States in both world wars and was never a threat to anyone.  However, this misguided so-called humanitarian interventionism is just a smokescreen for color-coded revolutions elsewhere.

One of them is the Ukraine, which threatens to become the new 1914.  We don’t know how it will turn if indeed, as the Congress has suggested, there is the supply of U.S. lethal weapons to the Kiev regime.  My hunch is that the Russians will treat it as an essential threat because they need a substantial strategic buffer between the West and themselves.  The historical experiences, the Polish invasions, the Swedish invasions, the German invasions make it absolutely imperative to have a neutral Ukraine, which would have remained relatively peaceful were it not for the attempt of the United States, and the European Union I must add, to change the balance of power.  Whenever you have an outright attempt to change the existing balance, you have a crisis.  We’ve seen it in 1914, in 1939.

Mike:  When you say 1914, you’re referring to the Kaiser?

Trifkovic:  Absolutely.

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Mike:  A lot of Americans hold the point of view that the new Lucifer of the world is the former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, and that all of what President Putin has done was evil, is evil today, and will be evil in the future.  I’m not an apologist for President Putin; however, I am willing to listen and try to objectively view that he is leader of a very large population of people.  He does have some responsibility to those people.  In your estimate – you’ve studied these things – what does President Putin get right and what does President Putin get wrong?

Trifkovic:  Putin gets right the need for the rejuvenation of national identity and faith.  If you look at his speech at Valdai Club in Sochi last fall, he stated it outright, that many Western nations are ashamed of their past and calling their holidays euphemistic names so as not to offend others.  I think that fundamentally his idea of Russia as a Christian nation which does not want to conquer others but which will defend its near abroad against intrusion by the hostile powers is sound.  What he doesn’t get right is Russia’s resistance

to the soft power of the West, the subculture.

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I’ve visited Moscow six times over the past year.  I can tell you that in all kinds of ways, Russian television, Russian media, and Russian youth culture is permeated by Western nihilism, by Western hedonism.  I don’t think that he has succeeded in offering a long-term project of cultural renewal of Russia because it is no good if you follow a strong line on the defense of national interests by economic and military means, but in the cultural sense your youth is still subjected to the same decay that has doomed the West to decrepitude and to moral downfall.

Mike:  That’s a problem that we’re not very good at tackling either, unfortunately.  I think we’re on the shallow end of that pool as well.

Trifkovic:  It’s a long story, and, of course, it would merit a whole new interview.

Mike:  It will, and we’ll do the whole new interview.  As always, doctor, thank you.

End Mike Church Show Transcript