like share subscribe my channel #funfilmsStudios like
share comment
subscribe #funfilmsstudios
-------------------------------------------
States fight to reinstate net neutrality - Duration: 0:53.
Attorneys general from 22 states and the District of Columbia
asked a federal court to bring back net neutrality rules. The
coalition of attorneys general represents more than half the
U.S.' population. They filed suit earlier this year to block
the FCC's move to end net neutrality, an Obama-era policy
that prevented internet providers from slowing down
certain websites or offering faster service for a higher
price. Monday evening, the attorneys general filed a new
motion in the case asking a judge to reinstate the laws. The
FCC voted to end net neutrality last year, and the new, looser
regulations went into effect in June. Other groups are also
fighting to bring back net neutrality. A number of internet
companies and advocacy groups filed a brief Monday in defense
of the regulations. Six state governors have signed executive
orders regarding net neutrality, and three states have passed
their own versions of the laws.
-------------------------------------------
National Prison Strike Begins: Prisoners in 17 States Demand End to "Slave Labor" Behind Bars - Duration: 16:04.
Prisoners across the United States are set to go on strike today in a mass mobilization
demanding improved living conditions, greater access to resources and the end of what they
call "modern day slavery."
Prisoners in at least 17 states are expected to participate in the strike, coordinating
sit-ins, hunger strikes, work stoppages, commissary boycotts, from today until September 9th—the
47th anniversary of the deadly Attica prison uprising here in New York.
Prisoners first called for the strike in April, after a bloody altercation broke out at the
Lee Correctional Institution in South Carolina, leaving seven prisoners dead and 17 others
seriously injured.
It was the deadliest prison riot in the United States in a quarter of a century.
Six of the seven prisoners killed were African-American.
The violence was allowed to continue for hours.
One witness described bodies of dead prisoners, quote, "literally stacked on top of each
other."
No guards were hurt.
The riot became the rallying cry for a movement.
In the weeks after that, prison advocacy network Jailhouse Lawyers Speak issued a list of 10
demands, among them greater sentencing reform, more access to rehabilitation programs, the
right to vote and the end of "prison slave labor," what they called "prison slave
labor."
This is a video made by the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee with the nonprofit Planting
Justice, explaining why prisoners are striking.
Some people will look at me, possibly, as a ex-felon or a parolee.
I consider myself to be a survivor of a system that was made to target me and have me doing
life in prison.
Because I know how to strip floors, wax them, take the gum up off floors, and so I started
doing that.
And that was 16 cent an hour.
I started out as a line server, serving food for breakfast and dinner.
Then I became a dishwasher and just all the maintenance of the kitchen.
And it didn't pay much.
It paid 13 cent an hour.
Basically, I worked and made $20 a month, and they took 55 percent of that out for restitution.
It's kind of like a modern-day plantation situation, specifically targeting poor people
and, most especially, the most marginalized community, black and brown and LGBT community.
The weeks-long strike begins today, on the 47th anniversary of the killing of Black Panther
George Jackson, who was shot and killed by guards during an escape attempt from San Quentin
prison.
The strike is expected to be the largest prisoner action since the 2016 prison strike, which
saw at least 20,000 prisoners participating in collective action across 11 states, the
largest prison work strike in U.S. history.
Well, for more, we're joined by three guests.
In Oakland, California, Cole Dorsey is with us, former prisoner and activist who helped
organize the strike, one of the voices we just heard in the video explaining it.
In Detroit, we'll speak with Heather Ann Thompson, the American historian, author and
activist.
She just won the Pulitzer Prize for her book Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising
of 1971 and Its Legacy, now being adapted for a film.
She's professor of history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
And in Seattle, Washington, we'll speak with Amani Sawari, a prison strike organizer
working on behalf of Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, a network of prisoners who are helping organize
the nationwide strike.
We welcome you all to Democracy Now!
Cole Dorsey, let's begin with you.
You're a part of the video that we just saw.
Lay out what this what's expected to be a several-week strike is about.
Yeah, so, the prisoners—this has been completely prisoner-led.
Jailhouse Lawyers Speak can speak more to that.
But due to the brutality in Lee correctional facility earlier this year, it was decided
that action had to be taken now.
And that led to this list of demands, 10 demands, that are really just a human rights declaration
of basic demands that we would ask of any human across the world.
But especially now that we're going to start using prisons as warehouses, these issues
are more and more relevant, as overcrowding prison conditions, lack of resources and for
prisoners to gain those resources, and the continued institution of racism that it enforces,
from chattel slavery.
So, while those things continue, these conditions will only exacerbate into what they were in
Lee correctional facility in South Carolina, where nine prisoners were murdered.
And yes, it was a, quote-unquote, "gang situation," but it was initiated by the
guard officials.
In my involvement in prison, they fed on that division among prisoners, whether it be religious
or racial, so that they kept fighting amongst themselves instead of addressing the issues
that were core demands for all of us, whether it be the exorbitant rates of commissary or
the conditions or the torture or treatment or solitary.
So, they really feed on those things.
And that's what's really important about this strike and continuing on.
And what we've learned from the prison hunger strikes is an agreement to end hostilities.
So, while there may be differences on religious and racial boundaries, we can still come together
over these core demands, like this list of 10 demands that these prisoners have drafted.
And again, the demands are?
Yet, the demands—you know, specifically, number one is the immediate improvements to
all the conditions of prisons, and prison policies that recognize the humanity.
Again, I said this whole declaration is really a declaration of humanity.
But the humanity of imprisoned men and women—this is now almost 2.5 million people.
These are our sons and daughters and mothers and fathers.
These are people that are neighbors in our community, especially most marginalized working-class,
poor people, black and brown people especially.
So, an end to the draconian, racist laws, like gang enhancements, that automatically
increase a person's bid by 10 years just because of their last name or their uncle
or where they're from, what part of town.
It can be completely arbitrary.
But, again, that points to the issue that it's more about warehousing than it is about
rehabilitation, or even making money through these corporations that do profit the millions.
But some other demands are like Pell Grants for prisoners.
They should be paid for the work that they do.
Why should prisoners—when I was in, I got 13 cents an hour, so I was a disgruntled employee.
I chose to find ways to sabotage my lawnmower so I didn't have to mow the lawn.
I don't want to have to mow the lawn for 13 cents an hour, you know, so I'm going
to run over rocks and bushes.
But it gets you out of the cell.
That's why people take these jobs.
Or they give you incentives, you know, to have more freedom or have an extra cake during
dinner, those kinds of things.
So, the major demands are Pell Grants reinstated; the end of the Prison Litigation Reform Act,
so prisoners can start to, again, fight some of the conditions in the legal courts and
have access to the legal library on a real basis, where they can really get the material
and have assistance; an end to oversentencing, of black and brown people especially, the
most marginalized communities; end to the racist gang enhancements.
And again, no—we believe no human being should spend the rest of their life in prison.
Most of these conditions, as some of the other strike leaders had mentioned, especially the
lead-up to 2016, was that if these jobs that they're now giving to prisoners—meat packing
and call center workers—if they were giving at a prevailing wage in those same communities
that those prisoners came from prior, then they wouldn't be in the prisons now.
But the system has recognized that it's easier to control the population while they're
inside prisons than it is if they're outside, because then they have the right to strike,
they have federal protections, whereas inside it can just be called an insurrection.
Automatically, the leaders are sent to solitary.
Automatically, they're transferred.
Automatically, privileges are denied—no more family, no more phone calls.
So, from a social justice and human rights aspect, it's really draconian, and it's
a lost era.
Cole, I want to bring—
And the only way their voices are going to be heard is through us on the outside amplifying
their voices and letting it be heard and known as much as we can through medias like this.
Cole Dorsey, I want to bring Amani Sawari into the conversation.
Can you talk about the various actions?
And, I mean, this is planned for something like 17 states.
What form these actions will take, Amani?
So, it really depends on the location and the status of the prisoner.
So, as you mentioned earlier, prisoners have the ability to participate in the strike in
a multitude of ways, one being work stoppages.
So, if prisoners do have jobs in the prison, they can participate by refusing to go into
work.
But some prisoners don't have the privilege to have a job, so they can participate through
a sit-in, which would just be prisoners coming together and sitting in a common area, refusing
to move, doing so peacefully.
Some prisoners don't have access to being a part of general population, so they can
participate by boycotting.
And this is done through just not spending any money in the prison.
All of the money that prisoners spend or that families send into the prison do support the
system.
So prisoners are refusing to talk on the phone—that's a cost—even buying commissary, as you mentioned,
or buying clothes, hygiene products, cosmetic products.
Anything that they would be spending money on in the prison, they're refusing to do
so for those two-and-a-half weeks.
And then, for prisoners that don't even have access to spending money, they don't
have the privileges to do that.
They'll be participating through hunger strikes.
So, regardless of where a prisoner is or what their status is, they are given food, and
they can refuse to take that food.
And that's a way that they can participate in the strike, regardless of where they are
or what their privilege status is.
Cole just mentioned, in the list of demands, ending gang enhancement laws.
Amani, explain what they are.
So, racist gang enhancements are the act of labeling individuals with different gang associations
just based on where they're from or even the tattoo markings on their body.
Those might be associated with a gang, and then prisoners are then labeled with that
gang.
And then, when they get into prison, really being a part of a gang is one of the only
forms of insurance that a prisoner might have.
So even if they weren't associated with a gang prior to being incarcerated, they find
themselves in those populations.
And then, when prisoners refuse to be a part of a gang, they are subject to isolation.
So, that's really miserable being isolated within an isolated place.
So a lot of prisoners just gravitate towards their racial groups, different gang groups,
based on locations where they were from, the people that they see from high school, and
then they just gravitate towards those groups.
And then those labels are used against prisoners.
So, where they're placed in the prison, where their room assignment is, that is determined
by the gang that they're in.
And then, when staff officials want to incite violence, they'll switch up those room assignments,
place gang members and rival groups into different assignments, which is what happened in Lee
County.
Prisoners were—their lockers were taken away, and then they were placed into rival
units, which incited violence.
And that went on for over seven hours.
And that's when how many people died?
Seven people were killed, prisoners?
Yes, at least seven people were killed, but there have been numbers of nine and 12.
Actually, when prisoners were killed, a few were transferred to other prisons to sort
of lower those numbers.
But seven is the official number of prisoners that were killed.
Cole, how do you organize?
You're on the other side of the bars now.
You're free.
How are you helping to organize this strike on the outside?
Yeah, so there's a number of ways that we've learned to adapt to organize, and number one
is through correspondence.
We have regular correspondence.
We do have members.
I've got a phone call in my pocket that I keep on me 24 hours a day, and I receive
phone calls from different facilities across the country, typically on the West Coast.
But I can relay messages from one facility, within one facility to the same facility,
just in different cellblocks, to let know what movement is happening, what's going
on.
We found a number of different ways.
The Bay View has been instrumental in getting the word out.
San Francisco Bay View has been a publication for a number of years.
The newspaper.
It's gone into facilities across the country, and it's really been pivotal in spreading
the word of this type of collective action that prisoners have been taking.
But there's a number of different ways that we've found to creatively get the message
through to prisoners.
And a lot of times it's word of mouth.
So, we'll send a thousand or 500 newsletters in, that just, you know, are innocuous on
the front, that describe, "It's winter.
These are the things to stay warm and cool."
And buried on the inside, in very small text, would be the actual important information
that we want to get through.
They found those out, and we anticipate they will, but the number that get through is enough
to be able to transfer from prisoner to prisoner.
And again, as their—our leaders especially are transferred.
Imam Siddique Hasan, even in the lead-up to this strike, has been withdrawn his phone
privileges, thrown in solitary.
And our leaders consistently have been retaliated against physically and also tortured through
solitary confinement.
So, it's not to be taken lightly.
But we've found, through telephone communication, connection, relationships with families, getting
information, also direct communication through visits, and a number of different creative
ways, that we can't explain all to you—
You're an electrical line—Cole, you're an electric—
—but we definitely can get the word out.
And the great part is that prisoners share this information.
So, even if it's only sent to one person, that gets shared to another person, that goes
to another facility.
So, it can get shared either through word of mouth or directly through the piece of
paper.
But word travels quickly throughout prisons.
Well, you're clearly redefining a cellphone.
Cole Dorsey is an electrical lineman who's a member of the IWW's Incarcerated Workers
Organizing Committee.
Amani Sawari is a prison strike spokesperson.
And we're going to continue with them, as well as Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Heather
Ann Thompson when we come back from break.
[break]
"George Jackson" by Bob Dylan.
That's right.
George Jackson, 47 years ago, he was killed by guards at San Quentin when he attempted
to escape.
-------------------------------------------
Community Property States And PSLF - Duration: 3:03.
Do you live in Wisconsin, Washington State, Idaho
California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, or Louisiana? If so, then you live
in a community property state. Are you going for the Public Service Loan
Forgiveness Program? If so, then you really need to pay attention, and if
you're married legally then you really need to pay attention to this video.
What the rules are for community property states are totally different from rules
in the other 41 states that are not community property states.
What that allows you to do if you live in one of those nine states is you can file
separately for taxes and you can equalize your incomes. Why does this help?
For one, that eliminates most of the tax penalty for filing separately as a
married couple. That's very advantageous if you're trying to only include one
spouse's income for purposes of calculating your student loan payment
under the PSLF program. Now, the other benefit is imagine you're a very high
earning person, say a physician at a not-for-profit hospital, married to a
stay-at-home spouse. In that case, you could take say $300,000 of income
and $0 of income, split the two into $150,000 and $150,000, and on either the Pay As You
Earn Program or the IBR program you could base your student loan payment off
of $150,000 instead of $300,000. This could result
in savings of tens of thousands of dollars on your student loans if you're
utilizing the PSLF program. That's huge news to anyone living in one of those
states. I would highly recommend that you contact a CPA who understands community
property rules so that that CPA can help you equally divide the income. Now there
are some situations where this is not going to help you. The main example would
be somebody who makes a lot less than their spouse does who would have their
income raised if they filed separately if compared to if they had their income
certified on a lower level. So this can get very complicated. My suggestion is if
you're living in one of those nine states, your CPA will probably have no
idea how this impacts your student loans. We're experts in this area. We make
plans for borrowers with six figures of student loan debt. Reach out to us on our
website studentloanplanner.com and hit any one of the contact buttons that
you see in the bottom right hand corner, for example, of the page and we'll give
you information on how we might be able to help you save a lot of money by
taking advantage of loopholes that are only available to borrowers that are
using the PSLF program in one of those nine states that's a community property
state. So take advantage of the loopholes that you got because you won't exactly
get all of them in the future because I'm sure taxes are going up to pay for
all this. So get every dollar that you can now and put the money that you could
be putting towards your loans towards things like investments in bettering
your family's financial security. I'm Travis with Student Loan Planner and thanks
for watching this video.
-------------------------------------------
America and the Rogue States with Thomas Henriksen - Duration: 1:02:00.
[APPLAUSE] >> Well,
good afternoon and thank you very much for coming to the talk.
As they say on the airlines, I know you have choices.
>> [LAUGH] >> So I appreciate you coming.
On the way over here I thought, well, I should really begin with a story.
Academies can't tell jokes, no one ever laughs.
But I thought I should start with a story that would be apropos,
somehow, of a lecture and classes about quizzes.
So I thought of a story that takes place in 19th Century Italy with Giuseppe Verdi,
the famous composer, who was walking through a palazzo one day and
he began to hear his own music played by an organ grinder.
And Verdi was, of course, upset by this, a lowly organ grinder playing his music.
And as he walked by and saw a sign above the organ grinder that said,
Antonio Barreto, renowned musician, and Verdi set his teeth on edge and
he spat out something like, well if you're gonna play Aida, play it slower.
So, off he went.
Next day came through again, walks through the palazzo, looked up at the sign, still
heard his music being played by this lowly organ grinder, and the sign had changed.
It said, Antonio Barreto renowned musician and
humble student of Giuseppe Verdi.
>> [LAUGH] >> So, that's my student joke.
What I'm going to do this afternoon, I'm going to encapsulate a lot of material and
put it in a nutshell.
And as someone once said, anything that can be put in a nutshell probably belongs
there, but I'll try to get beyond that.
What I want to say about rogue states, I want to take sort of a big picture.
I will talk about individual ones, and I'll be happy to have your questions on
individual ones, but to have you somehow take away, with a kind of
historical perspective and also a contemporary look at these rogue states.
And to start off with, rogue states have been with the international state system
for a long time.
They didn't have nuclear weapons, but they've been with us for
a long time, and all powers have had to deal with them from time out of mind.
The Romans, for example, dealt with a pirate kingdom called
Pontus which was located on the coast of contemporary Turkey.
It was a pirate kingdom, caused them a great deal of trouble, and
the Romans had a lot of problems with piracy in the Mediterranean
as they tried to establish their order throughout the Mediterranean world, and
piracy was a real problem for them.
And finally they had the crush it, because these pirates from Pontus
would go up into, actually into the Italian peninsula, they attacked Greece,
they were into Asia Minor, and so on, but finally they had to crush it militarily.
Another example, and maybe it's a little stretch but
it's an example, again with classic Romans.
When they had their huge fight, their long-term battle with Carthage,
this went on, and this huge war.
They had the Punic Wars with Carthage and during the course of that, sometimes
the Carthaginians, particularly Hannibal, would make alliances with the Galls.
The Galls, as you know, couldn't be converted as Julius Caesar said, and
they would make us align.
So in a sense, they performed that task or that
function as a kind of a rogue entities, difficult for the Romans to deal with.
You might even say that the Vikings, who swept through northern Europe, right in
burnt the city of Paris, in fact, and terrorized the northern part of Europe for
two centuries beginning in 800, were also sort of a piratical state, a rogue state,
of their time, which struck terror throughout the British Isles, for example.
Coming in to more contemporary times, There was in fact,
during this great standoff between Elizabethan England and
Spain, they both resorted to pirate kingdoms in the Caribbean.
And that was a kind of foreshadow of something, that rogues sometimes cozy up
to great powers and are used by great powers in the struggle on international
chess board as pawns, as feints, as proxies, for great power struggles.
And this was an example that these Caribbean pirates could do so.
For example, the famous pirate Henry Morgan was dignified by the English
with the title of admiral.
He wasn't an admiral, he was a pirate, but
none the less they used him to raid the Spanish main in the 17th century.
Going forward a little bit further,
just to give you another example, the Barbary Pirates.
You're all familiar with the Barbary Coast, North Africa,
it encompasses states like Tripoli and Algiers and Tunisia.
These little principalities were break off states from the Ottomans.
The Ottomans had swept across North Africa and occupied Eastern Africa, Levant,
until World War I and Lawrence Arabia came along and contributed to the Arab revolt,
and Egypt was the last state, big state, to break away before that.
That was in 1880's.
But prior to that on the more western
fringe of the North African coast these Barbary states.
Now initially, the British Navy, the Royal Navy, had protected United States,
but once we won our independence that protection was gone and we fell prey.
That is to say that American ships fell prey.
And these pirates would go out, sally forth in their feluccas,
their sailing ships and attack ships, and then, also they would
run protection rackets unless countries in Europe, major European powers,
paid them tribute or protection money, they would raid their ships.
Americans don't realize that at one point, when
George Washington was President of the United States, our first president, 20% of
the American budget was paid tribute to North African states, to leave us alone.
And it wasn't until Thomas Jefferson and James Madison came along, and
Stephen Decatur and the Marine Corps, that we began to attack and counterattack these
pirates, these kind of early versions of rogue states that preyed upon us.
What really ended the rogue states in North Africa,
we had a great role in that but not all, is when the Italians and
the French colonized North Africa and that did away with it completely.
But human nature doesn't really change.
The characteristics of warfare may change and countries may change, but
this was a kind of view of rogue states, as this is we inherited.
I could also argue for you that Nazi Germany and
Bolshevik Russia were also rogue states.
Well they did play conventional roles as well.
Certainly an aggressive power were the Nazis, and they also looked for
the nuclear weapons as well and so did the Soviets later.
And the early Bolsheviks were interested in smashing the international system,
not playing within it.
They had a lot of crazy ideas, the early Bolsheviks, people forget about,
cuz we tend to think up is Brezhnev and Khrushchev and later on.
But when they first came to power they believed in free love and
they thought the children should not be raised in families, but
in the communal, the state would do a better job.
But among the more serious challenges to the international state system was
the idea that they would displace it and put their own system in place and
there would be no states, of course, under the Soviet model.
So those are kind of background up to the contemporary period.
So when we think about rogue states, this is not a new phenomena for it.
It's an old phenomena in history.
One that reoccurs and the other takeaway I'll give you, and
I'll give you a couple, is that rogue states, they come and go unfortunately.
Good news is they go, but sometimes they're replenished by others.
So let me come into more of a contemporary period.
For you, and the whole idea of where we come, how do we get this term rogue,
how do these states, where do they come from, and so on.
During the early 1960s, it began a rash of terrorism throughout the world.
Much of it was Palestinian but not all of it.
They were things like the Red Army Faction or
the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany for example.
There was an Italian equivalent, even a Japanese equivalent.
And these were small,
conspiratal parties that usually met in a cellar somewhere in Berlin.
And they had grandiose ideas that if they could kill somebody
prominent in government, they could change the system.
They weren't interested in the kind of vanguard of the party that
Lenin talked about.
But nonetheless, this terrorism picked up.
It was also used by the Soviets and
a number of countries began to deal in terrorism.
Now some of these countries were active supporters of terrorism, such as Iran and
Syria, Libya.
As you know, Libya was held responsible for
downing Pan-American flight 103
in the late 1980s and killing almost 300 people in the plane and on the ground.
But some states were more passive.
They didn't engage, they didn't promote or sponsor terrorism, but
what they did do was to let their territory be used by terrorists.
For example, the Sudan, the Sudan let in all kinds of unsavory people,
such as Carlos the Jackal.
Osama bin Laden spent four years there after he left Afghanistan,
from 1992 to 1996, and then he went back to Afghanistan.
So it was kind of a hang out for terrorists be there.
They were safe to be there, the Sudanese government
did not in fact sponsor terrorism, much as states like Libya or
Syria did, but it did offer its territory for training camps.
But this was a background of what happened and
finally the Congress mandated in 1979 that every
year the State Department come out with a list of states that sponsored terrorism.
And this the background for rogue states.
And they weren't all placed on this list immediately, some earned it along the way.
But there were suspects that I mentioned.
Iran was on there Iraq, Libya, Syria, Cuba was on there,
Sudan, and a country called the South Yemen which doesn't exist anymore.
There is a Yemen but not a South Yemen.
That was one of the reasons it was finally taken off the terrorist list,
because it no longer existed as an entity.
Northern Yemen was much more passive, much more traditional.
The two states came together in 1990 so it was taken off it.
But this is a background for the listing of certain states on it.
Now later that list was expanded to include organizations,
things like Hezbollah, for example or Hamas.
But also it was broadened to include individuals as well.
So it's gone a long way, it's gone through different iterations.
But this origin of these seven or
eight states that are on this list, that's the background of the rogue states.
Now how did this all come about?
I remember back in the early 1990s, all of a sudden the rogues appeared.
And people would say well, what happened?
Where did these states come from?
Well most of them were Soviet clients, or
at least aligned some of the, the one exception to this, and
an exception in many ways, is Iran, but I'll come to Iran later on.
In these states, many of them were clients of the Soviet Union,
rr the Soviets supported them.
And the reason for this is that both the United States,
during the Cold War, both the United States and
the Soviet Union got the daylights scared out of us with the Cuban Missile Crisis.
That was too close.
And luckily, both sides behaved rationally, and nothing happened.
We weren't pushed over the brink into a nuclear holocaust.
But because of that, great powers began
to turn to a different kind of way of challenging each other rather than
a head-on challenge which might result in a nuclear confrontation.
The Soviets turned to wars of national liberation,
and they sponsored many of these.
Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Nicaragua, even tried in Bolivia.
This is one way they could do this.
This is kind of an indirect way of challenging the Americans,
keeping the Americans off-balance, and yet broadening their number of countries.
And as challenge to change the state's system by taking, having more and
more countries become Marxist-Leninist states, or
at least aligned with them in this great confrontation.
Now the Americans, us, we also had our client states.
Our client states were not so good either.
I mean, we tended to support some pretty unsavory people.
The Duvaliers for example in Haiti,
Papa Doc and Baby Doc as they were known affectionately.
They were supported, but they didn't really try to spread democracy elsewhere.
>> [LAUGH] >> They weren't aggressive powers.
They tended to be more passive.
And the only thing we ask of them is don't let the communists come in.
But we don't expect you to really be our spear points.
The same was true with Maputo in the Congo,
another despicable person who was kind of aligned with the United States.
And we had some of these people around the world.
But our clients tended to be as, I said, more passive, they weren't so
interested in spreading things.
The communist surrogates were a little more aggressive, and
sometimes the Soviets had to reign them in.
The Soviets were worried sometimes that these states, such as Iraq particularly,
or Syria would get them involved in a very serious war with the United States and
there would be a confrontation in the Mediterranean.
What they wanted to do in the Mediterranean was simply keep us off
balance and
make us spend a lot of money in keeping the seventh fleet in the Mediterranean.
And so this was their strategy, it wasn't a direct confrontation with the West,
it was a more indirect, a more sneaky subversive way of confronting us.
And these states that they trained, or helped,
now not all of them were simply pawns, these states had their own ambitions.
Certainly they were anti-Israel, again,
Soviet Union didn't want this thing pushed too far.
In fact, they weren't in favor of a 1973, the so-called Yom Kippur War.
They told the Egyptians and
the others they didn't want them to really get into a war with Israel.
But they did it anyway.
So they weren't total pawns, I don't mean to indicate that.
But they were sympathetic.
Many of them got their military supplies from the Soviets,
their tanks and their artillery and their MiG aircraft.
Many of them, in fact, got training at various Soviet camps.
And one of the things that the Soviets were very good at was terrorism,
people forget that.
Again, in our own lifetime, we look back at Brezhnev,
he looked kind of old and doddering.
And then Gorbachev came in and he was so refreshing.
But we forget how aggressive the Soviets were in their early days.
And when they came to power with the second coup in Russia in October of 1917,
they began to use terrorism very systematically.
And all states have used terrorism time and out of mind, and political murder.
But what these Soviets managed to do is institutionalize it, bureaucratize it.
And make it an instrument of state policy.
And I think that also, that training,
that characterization carried over into the rogue states.
Not as to say that they wouldn't have also used terrorism, but
perhaps not on such a great scale.
When the Soviets collapsed, in 1990, when the Soviet Union dissolved,
these states that had been formal surrogates or
clients, or at least close to the Soviet Union,
were cast up on the international scene with no tether from the Soviet Union,
with no connection, they were on their own and they were rogue.
They were very difficult states.
And the term itself, it's hard to pin down and I did look into this.
I spent a lot of time looking into this.
I think the first official use of it by President of United States
was Bill Clinton in 1994 when he was in Brussels and
he used it as a reference to Iran and Libia building missiles, and he said,
these rogue states can cause you problems as much as they're causing us.
The term itself might have come from English statutory law,
which mentions vagabonds and rogues.
It might have come from that.
One of Clinton's advisers used the term backlash states.
He called them backlash states.
But that didn't stick What stuck was a rogue state.
And so these rogue states, for the most part, again,
Iran somewhat of the exception, were allied with the Soviets,
were now tether free and now on the international scene.
Now not all of them were Soviet clones.
The only two that were really communist states were Cuba and North Korea,
and still communist today, but Cubans have moved away in certain respects.
The other states, such as Iraq and Syria and Libya were really
military dictatorships with some sort of weak civilian political party.
But they were really military type dictatorships.
And in the case of Iran, as you know, it is a Theocracy or is a Theocracy, and so
it's quite a bit different.
So what I'm going to do now is just give you a picture
if I can here of the rogue states.
The recognized rogue states are Cuba of course, Libya, the Sudan,
Syria, Iran, Iraq, and the DPRK, the Democratic Republic of Korea.
These are the ones that everybody considered.
Not all of these are rogue states today, and I'm gonna go into that and
try to lay it out for you in a way that they became about.
Next, I just wanna give you the criteria.
What I use is a criteria for rogue states.
Number one, first on the list is the most important one as a rogue state.
One that goes for elicit manufacture of weapons of mass destruction,
and by weapons of mass destruction, I mean chemical weapons,
biological weapons or nuclear weapons.
There's been some reference, and I think it's the perversion of a term,
about the two Boston bombers, the marathon bombers.
People said they used weapons of mass destruction.
I don't think those explosives, what I would define as weapons of
mass destruction, as horrible as it might have been.
It was.
It's not, they're not ranked with nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons are in a category all their own, and so
this is the number one criteria.
There are plenty of these states that meet these other criteria, export of terrorism,
destabilized their respective region, they flaunt international laws and
United Nations sanctions, they're dictatorial governments.
There are lots of dictatorial governments around the world.
They're nasty governments, but they usually try to stay out of scrutiny.
They lower their profile and
they try not to cause too much problems internationally.
The governments are horribly corrupt and their abuses of their own citizens.
So these are the main criteria, the most important I always ranked
was weapons of mass destruction and how these would be used.
So just to recapitulate a little bit, since this is a class,
we have these rogue states that don't differ so much in human nature,
as rogue entities earlier but in characteristics they truly do.
With nuclear weapons and the capacity to project international terrorism,
that makes them a lot different.
They can export terrorism over broad areas.
For example, Iran and blowing up Jewish centers in Argentina in early 1990s.
That's a long range project.
Or blowing planes up out of the sky.
What I'd like to do now is with that background,
just say a few words about each one of the main rogue states.
I characterize the three principal ones as Iraq, Iran,
and North Korea, and I'll deal with the others as an entity.
Iraq was never really a state until it came along after World War I.
It was thrown together.
It had been occupied for
300 years by the Ottomans, who divided it into three broad areas.
In the north, the Kurds, in the south, the Shiites and the Sunni.
It'd been ruled by them.
And one of the reasons, I think, that the Ottomans got away with this long
rule of 300 years, with some opposition, but nothing like other powers experienced,
certainly the United States, it's because the Ottomans were fellow Muslims, and
it was more acceptable to be ruled by Muslims than non-Muslims.
But that fell apart.
This area fell apart with the rest of
the Levant in World War I and it became a state.
It was a British mandate state briefly.
The British set up a crown, a king, who came from the Hashemite kingdom
in Saudi Arabia and that didn't last too long.
The king was overthrown and a series of military dictators came along,
culminating in Saddam Hussein in the late 1970s,
who ruled the country for over 20, almost 30 years.
Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a very capricious state.
It was an aggressive state.
It fought two major wars.
One with Iran beginning in 1980,
it lasted eight years, in which chemical weapons were used in large numbers.
And large number of Iranians were killed by chemical weapons by
Saddam Hussein who thought, in his own mind, if it hadn't been for
chemical weapons that he probably would have lost the war.
And so that stuck in his mind and that kind of sends him off to building,
not just chemical weapons, but nuclear weapons.
Saddam Hussein next engaged in another war with the invasion of Kuwait
which resulted in, and you know, George Herbert Walker Bush put together
a United Nations sanctioned intervention and Kuwait was liberated.
Saddam Hussein was thrown back across the border into his own country.
This is so-called Desert Storm I, first, and the first Persian Gulf War.
During the course of that, inadvertently, there was discovered, and
I mean inadvertently, they discovered nuclear weapons in Iraq.
And this was a great blow to Western inspection agencies.
The International Atomic Energy Agency
got a very black eye over this cuz it never came out with weapons.
They got away with it.
They weren't discovered until the war itself.
And then there were some attempts, briefly perhaps.
Saddam Hussein started nuclear capacity again but then abandoned it.
But he would such a good bluffer.
So one time, he must not be too good a bluffer, he bluffed so
much that he had nuclear weapons, and this was to intimidate the Iranians partly and
the United States, that We believed them.
The United States believed them, and it was a huge intelligence failure resulting
in the invasion, as you know, in 2003, United States.
Saddam Hussein was pushed out.
The United States endured this bloody war, and
at the present time, Iraq is no longer a rogue state.
It's a wobbly democracy that is fighting a huge sectarian war,
much as we experienced back in 2006, 2007.
But it's faced that, so what's the upshot?
Well, one of the conclusions you can draw if you're a rogue state,
you might not have a happy ending.
And so you might go from rogue state to failed state and
a few other examples I'll come to.
So being a schoolyard bully is not necessarily a good longtime profession.
You may end up badly, and certainly Iraq ended up very badly
in this idea.
The second one, Iran, Iran is a far most interesting rogue state.
It's a real state.
I mean, it has a history as an entity.
They have a culture, a Persian culture which is very strong in literature,
particularly in poetry.
It's been a power for centuries.
There was a Persian empire.
It confounded the Romans, it beat Roman armies at times.
It had an empire later.
It established much of the region.
It fell through hard times and
became more backward economically than the Western world.
But nonetheless it was an entity, not like Iraq which was
carved out of this mass of territory at the end of World War I.
Our relationship with Iran has always been tortured, and it's twists and turns.
At times we've gotten along very well.
When, for example, Woodrow Wilson talked about the 14 Points and
the self-determination of peoples and the right to have independence,
that struck a responsive chord in Iran.
And Iranian people and Iranian society, they liked that.
And at other times we've helped the Iranian people.
At the end of World War II, the Communists and
the Soviets occupied a little bit, whoops,
of the northern part of the country, if I can get a.
I don't know if this is working, oh, in this region was occupied by the Red Army,
and the United States and Great Britain managed to push them out.
So that was a good, we did good there.
And Iranians liked that, and it was a good relationship.
They hold us responsible, however, for
a couple things which soured the relationship.
In 1953, there was in ruling
a man by the name of Mosaddegh.
Mosaddegh belonged to the Tudeh Party, which is a communist,
almost communist party.
He was a dictatorial person.
He believed in a redistribution of goods.
He had a lot of enemies in Iranian society.
It wasn't just United States came in and kind of plucked him out of power.
The people aligned against him were very powerful.
He had the military against him.
He had the merchants against him, and he had the clerics against him.
They don't mention that today.
They didn't like Mosaddegh.
They didn't like Mosaddegh because like the Soviets, he was not a believer.
He wasn't strong on the clerics, and so these groups conspired to get rid of him.
Now, the CIA, depending on how you feel about the CIA, it gets a lot of blame or
a lot of credit for helping out on this coup.
In my own mind,
they may have helped, they provided some money and some advice, but you'd
almost have to be an idiot not to know how to do a coup in a third-world country.
>> [LAUGH] >> I mean it's pretty easy,
you roll the tanks up to the palace.
You seize the general post office.
You take the radio station, a few other places, that's it.
That's a coup.
In fact, a scholar once did a book,
it was almost a cartoon book, on how to do coups in third-world countries.
And that was just what I outlined.
You could turn one page, the tanks in front of the general post office.
The tanks in front of the broadcasting system, the palace, and so on.
And that was it, over, game over.
So, the Americans didn't have to teach the Iranians that.
They could do that themselves.
But they did.
And we were blamed, and it doesn't matter if it's true or not true.
If people believe it's true, it's true.
It's truth to them that we instigated and carried this coup out, and so
we've been blamed ever since.
The Shah, who was ruling and was almost thrown out over this,
a Shah is a monarchical figure, from his father.
And he was in as many sense a progressive man.
He didn't believe in a lot of human rights, but
he did champion women's rights.
Women got lots of rights in Iranian society, they were educated.
They came into their own in many respects.
He believed in Western education, that is to say, hard sciences, engineering.
And he began to try to remake the country in the so-called White Revolution.
Well, this angered the clerics who were losing out.
And so, as you know, the Shah was overthrown in 1979,
and overnight, Iran became our implacable enemy.
Where the Shah had been our policeman in the Middle East,
what happened next was that the Iranians detested us.
The government detested us.
Not all Iranian people, but the government and
their various official agencies and organs in this society preached hatred.
Now, one of the things that's interesting about these sorts of developments, and
all of these rogue states have this phenomena of hating America.
And the Iranians carry it to a fine art.
They call us the Great Satan.
And they call Israel Little Satan.
But the reason they do this is not just cuz they don't like us.
That's true, they don't like us, but they do it for legitimacy.
You see, these governments don't have a lot of legitimacy.
They're elected in the case of Iran, at least quasi elected.
But many of the states such as North Korea,
being anti-American is a way of establishing your legitimacy.
You don't have a vote, and also you don't
have hereditary rights such as monarchs did in the medieval period in Europe.
You don't have that hereditary background to justify
the divine right of a king or a queen.
And so consequently, this is the way they get their legitimacy,
by protecting the people against the Great Satan, America.
And so they would polish this to a very fine tip against us and use it.
But there have been other incidents.
And so the relationship since 1979, and
there have been spots where we thought that there was an Iranian moderate.
There were times what we thought things were going along very fine between us.
And then it would be thrown back.
But right now, as you know, the United States has re-entered negotiations,
and we can come back to that in the Q & A period.
But what I wanna do is just go on and mention a few other states here.
This one is a little harder to see.
This is North Korea.
North Korea emerges at the end of Word War II and before that was one country.
The Japanese had occupied it from 1910 until 1945, the end of World War II,
when they were pushed out, and these two states evolved.
The state in the north became a kind of satellite,
or looked to the Soviet Union as an ally.
And then, in the case of South Korea, it became an ally of us.
It was a dictatorial regime for a while, until it became in the 1980s, a democracy.
The North Koreans has this very opaque society,
it's very difficult for outsiders to determine exactly how it's run.
It is a communist system, but it also has a hereditary,
a monarchical system, a dynastic system in that we've gone through
three rulers all from the same family.
Kim Il-Sung, Kim Jong-Il, and then finally Kim Jong-Un,
the present leader, and it's very odd for a communist society to do that.
Usually the central committee chooses the next leader,
that's what happened in the Soviet Union.
That's what happens in China, that's what happened in a lot of other places.
But in the case of North Korea, one family dominates, and so
we have a little bit different kind of Communist system.
It's a warfare state.
It's a very militaristic state.
It's also a shakedown state.
It's one of the rogue states that really doesn't engage in, for example,
Libya didn't need money, it had oil, same with Iraq.
And in this case, what North Korea would do would be try to shake down support from
the United States, from Japan, from South Korea, or even China for a cent.
Initially it was a vassal of the Soviet Union for many years.
Then when the Soviet Union collapsed, it shifted more toward China.
During the Korean war the North, as you know, invaded the South.
The United States fought a very bitter war, 1950 to 1953 there,
which froze the border between the two.
And to this day there's only armistice,
there's not a treaty between the South Koreans and
the United States ending the war that concluded in June of 1953.
[COUGH] And so there's a state of warfare.
There's a demilitarized zone which you can see.
Right across the bottom here, it's roughly,
it's about 4 kilometers, that's a little more than 2 miles.
It is completely demilitarized.
It's just sort of a no-mans land, but on each side of that,
it's extremely militarized.
It's the heaviest defended border in the world.
And these two powerhouses look at each other in this surreal atmosphere
across the border to each other, and that's been frozen since 1953.
There are some openings through it which have been breached by common agreement.
There's a railway and some roads but nonetheless,
the two societies are somewhat different.
The South, as you know, is a democracy, it has a free market system.
The South is a totalitarian government that is very close to what
Joseph Stalin wanted with gulags,
with secret police, with a cult of a personality.
The sort of things we think of Russia
in the 1930s are more typical of North Korea today.
What makes North Korea most disconcerting to us is the fact of its nuclear capacity.
After the Korean War, the North Koreans begged the Russians to
give them a nuclear reactor, and finally the Soviets relented.
They built a small nuclear reactor and Yongbyon,
which is just a little bit north of Pyongyang, the capital.
And that has been the kind of the source of their nuclear capacity, and
they have expanded that throughout the years.
It's caused a great deal of concern in the west,
beginning even at the very end of the George Herbert Walker administration, and
in on into the Clinton administration, and up to the present time.
Every president has had to wrestle with what to do with North Korea, and
there have been agreements.
The North Koreans because the Soviets made them join the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty
in the 1980s, signed it, ratified it, and then promptly broke it.
They've broken every international agreement they've ever entered into,
and they don't seem to feel any compunction.
In fact, they take a certain pride in it.
They feel like the South Koreans are simply puppets of the Americans.
And they're very envious of the South Koreans, because the South Koreans
have produced a lot of nuclear energy for electrical power.
They have roughly 25 plants in South Korea, and
the North Koreans have never been able to catch back up in civilian goods.
They're very good in military things so that's a state that is difficult,
it's atypical in some respects of the other ones.
But it also is, as I say, a shake down or
a blackmail state in trying to get goods, and services, and promises.
It's a state that's so bizarre, that it deals in narcotics.
Not many governments actually deal in narcotics, but it deals in narcotics and
phony cigarettes.
Not real cigarettes, phony cigarettes which they manufacture.
But most disconcerting for United States is they make $100 bill,
that is to say $100 American dollar bill.
Which is so good, that it's hard to detect.
It is called the supernote, US Treasury has labelled it.
So not many governments do that kind of thing, so it is irascible.
It is a really quintessential rogue entity.
Let me then just, those are the main rogues, I can't encourage that.
Now we still had some other rogues to deal with, briefly, Libya.
Libya was an interesting country, it was, again, put together by the Italians
mostly who occupied it after World War I until the end of World War II.
It had a king, a monarch interest, and it was overthrown by a young
colonel by the name of Muammar Gaddafi who instituted a military dictatorship.
Gaddafi was always a sort of eccentric guy.
He either would dress in these very flowing robes, or
else he would in almost a caricature.
He'd look like one of the generals out of the North Korea army.
He had medals that came from his neck right down to his waist on his jacket.
And he also did other bizarre things, he was a character.
[LAUGH] When he finally went, after many years of isolation, he went to Paris,
he refused to stay in the French hotels.
Now what normal person would do that?
And he brought his own tent.
He had a female praetorian guard and
in addition to that, he also brought a camel, so
they wanted to have a desert tradition inside Paris.
So he would do these sort of antics, but
what was really bad about Gaddafi was he did spread terrorism.
And he would sponsor it, such as downing, as I mentioned earlier,
of Flight Pan Am 103.
And there was also a French flight a few months earlier
which 170 people were killed, which is attributed to Gaddafi's agents.
He also began to engage in nuclear weapons and chemical weapons.
But what happened to Gaddafi's interesting,
sanctions actually worked against him.
Sanctions actually worked in bringing him in from the cold, and
he renounced his weapons.
He was never accepted into the international community the same way as
others was, he was like a felon.
He paid his time, but he couldn't quite re-enter.
When he was overthrown and killed in 2011, Libya became, again,
a sad ending for a rogue state, a kind of failed state, which it is today.
Cuba, Cuba is not a rogue state.
It was a rogue state at some time.
It was the Hessians of the Soviet Empire,
it tried to spread subversion in Nicaragua and Bolivia.
At one point in the 1970s, it sent between 15 and
20 thousand soldiers to Angola, that's a lot.
Carried in Soviet ships fighting on the side of the MPLA.
Which was one of the guerilla insurgent groups.
A communist aligned group in Angola.
MPLA stands for Popular Movement for Liberation of Angola in Portuguese.
But anyway, today it's no longer.
When the Soviets collapsed Cuba went down the tubes as well.
Its army was left without provisions.
It had no outside source of oil.
They had to, in fact, the army had to grow its own food.
And what bailed it out, and this is really interesting, was Venezuela.
Venezuela, Hugo Chavez when he was alive,
looked upon Cuba the way the Romans looked upon the Greeks.
In other words, he wanted to be, when he grew up, Hugo Chavez wanted to be a Cuban.
He wanted to make a reflection of Cuba in Venezuela.
He tried to make it a socialist state.
And so you have the instance of a rogue state going
into another state looking for help.
That happens also elsewhere.
I'll just jump ahead here because time is marching on.
Syria.
Same phenomena.
Syria was another state carved out of
this Levant area by the Ottoman Empire.
Became a French mandate, that's why the French are so concerned.
Also the crusaders when they went back in,
beginning in the 13th and
14th centuries, the French were very entrenched for about 100 years in Syria.
[COUGH] Before being expelled.
[COUGH] But nonetheless Syria was one of those countries that
became under a military dictatorship under Hafez Assad.
Then his son, who is currently the leader as you know, and
now it's in fact, again, the school yard bully didn't do well.
It's now more of a failed state.
We can come back to Syria in the question and answer period.
It began to moderate its policies in the 80s.
It did export terrorism.
But then it began to draw back.
When the Soviets collapsed, it, too, shifted from being a client
of the Soviets to a client of the Iranians.
And so that's the interesting phenomena.
Some of these militarized states can't stand on their own two feet.
They have to be clients of someone else that provides them with money, resources,
military equipment and so on.
So these were the states of terrorists that were listed,
the state terrorist list.
You can see Cuba, Iran, so forth.
South Yemen I mentioned was no longer on the terrorist list.
This is a list that's come out.
It hasn't been modified that much.
We lost South Yemen but the rest are pretty much on there except for Iraq.
Iraq, as I said earlier, as you know, is not a rogue state.
These are non-rogue states, to conclude, these are non-rogue states.
And let me go through each one of these,
in my estimation, why they're not rogue states.
[COUGH] Afghanistan, interestingly enough, was never placed on the terror list.
And the reason is typical Washington bureaucracy.
During the Clinton administration they said, well, it's true that Osama bin Laden
has a haven in Afghanistan.
He has a haven there, and he's launched attacks.
The first attacks came in 1998, outside that.
He's issued fatwahs.
The 1988 attack was on the American embassies in Dar es Salaam and
Nairobi and 200 people were killed,
12 Americans, and over a thousand African people were wounded.
And then in fact there was the attack on the Cole, the USS Cole,
in October of Port of Aden.
17 sailors died in that attack, but they didn't put it on the terrorist list.
You know why?
It's too difficult to get a country off the terrorist list, so
let's not put it on the terrorist list.
>> [LAUGH] >> So that was the reason.
Cuba?
I don't think Cuba's a rogue state anymore.
It's a country that, it's gonna perplex us, I'm worried, because I think, in my
own estimation, in my own opinion, and my own opinion counts a lot with me anyway,
I think it'd be better if we encouraged Cuba to loosen up more.
Its not a democracy, we know that.
But there's a lot of countries we deal are not democracies and
we deal in trade with them.
And I think its better for
us to begin to trade more off them to bring their economy up.
We want a soft landing in Cuba when Fidel Castro and
Raul Castro pass from the scene.
We don't want a hard landing.
We don't want a civil war.
We want Cuba to do well and
return to what it was back in the 1950s, a playground for American tourists.
[LAUGH] But none the less it seriously it needs spirit.
Lybia. No longer a rogue
state because Gaddafi is gone.
And before he was gone he renounced weapons of mass destruction.
He opened his country.
It was a very interesting phenomenon.
He also, he was reactant to sanctions which pulverized Libya.
But he also had grander ambitions which he fulfilled.
He wanted to be the leader of Africa.
So, Libya is no longer.
For a while people thought Myanmar, Burma, was in fact a rogue state but
never really made it.
Sudan is more passive.
Sudan does engage in some ugly things once in a while.
It has a horrible human rights characteristic and
it does smuggle arms from Iran into Sinai to help Hezbollah and Hamas there.
So it has an unsavory part, but I don't think it's a true rogue state.
Finally, Venezuela is not a rogue state in my estimation.
It's a populous leader, he's anti-American.
It was under Chavez.
But it is not today a rogue state.
So, let me at that point take the slides off and open this up for questions.
I'll stop, I thank you very much for listening attentively and
I look forward to your questions.
[APPLAUSE] >> Yes, sir.
>> Other than the historical and cultural connections between France and
Syria, what interests does France have in the Syrian Civil War?
Do they have money, development there?
Do they have interests that would get them involved,
they didn't get involved in previous Mid East conflicts?
>> You know I think the French are interesting.
There was this terrible, and I thought it was wrong at the time,
criticizing the French in the run-up to the American
intervention in Iraq in 2003, how the French can't fight.
No, anybody who knows anything about French history, the French can fight.
Ask the Germans at Verdun in World War I, they stopped them.
I think also the French president, the French government did a good job in Mali.
They have the ground troops.
They're still there chasing a terrorist.
We're not hardly involved in Mali at all.
We have some satellites, a few special forces, and that's it.
I think it's part of that lingering that the French could do that.
They were also trying to champion things in Libya.
And I think as part of that the French still see themself as a military power.
They have nuclear power, they have ships, they have a military force somewhere.
Units are quite good.
And they're not afraid to take casualties.
So I mean.
I think that explains the French still have that lingering influence.
But I don't see a lot of economic connections.
[COUGH] Some, but not enough to sway a government, certainly.
>> Do you remember a book called Mission to Civilize, about 20 years ago?
That's the answer to his question.
>> Oh, okay, Mission to Civilize, well, there was that.
This is just anecdotal, once in a while I'll get in a cab in Washington DC and
I'll talk to somebody that's clearly from Africa or somewhere else, and
they all say they want the colonial powers back in Africa to bring order back.
And I say, I don't think that's going to happen.
>> [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] But there is that feeling.
So its not just a mission, the other side sometimes wants
the colonial rule back to establish some sort of order,
particularly in these very chaotic countries such as the Congo.
Yes?
>> So, a question about North Korea.
So, what would need to change between the Chinese relations with North Korea, for
that regime to change?
Maybe down the path of reunification or some other path.
From where I sit, I don't see any scenario where the Chinese would want the US on
their doorstep, which, fundamentally, that's what that would mean.
>> Oh no, I think that's accurate.
Did everybody hear of that?
The Chinese are really not too interested in having a kind of, a gathering
between North and South Korea so the United States is suddenly on the border.
Or a free market country such as South Korea and
at least a democratic society on their own border.
I think, when I look at American foreign policy,
I see all these different groups speaking out.
When I look at China I think the military has one policy,
the civilian government has another policy.
I think that the military government likes to twist American feathers
by having North Korea cause us grief.
They're angry over the fact that we help Taiwan, we supply military hardware.
And so the consequences could be payback.
Other elements within the Chinese society are probably worried that this country
could get them into a war.
Or it could collapse, and then suddenly you're gonna have an invasion north again
as MacArthur led, General MacArthur during the Korean War, and
you'll have the Americans on your doorstep.
I don't think that'll happen, but from their point of view, it could happen.
And so I think it's a relationship that China is not
eager to have the North Koreans misbehave too much.
They maybe want to cause a little bit of problems here in the United States, but
clearly they were upset by these missile tests and the nuclear tests.
There's been three nuclear tests in North Korea, 2006, 2009 and this past February.
None have been great, but
they've been enough to rivet the world's attention on this country.
So, it's a tortured relationship.
This gentleman here and then I'll come back to you, sir.
>> I'm trying to recall a circumstance where Cuba engaged in the illicit
manufacture of weapons of mass destruction.
I can't recall one, and therefore, they don't meet your first criteria for
those states.
>> There were rumors that they were doing biological weapons.
They've said they weren't, tut there were, about ten years ago.
But the point is that they never really were in that sense, but
they certainly did a lot of the other things that worried people.
And they did, in fact, allow nuclear weapons to come into their territory,
as we all know, all of us who lived through that period.
I was in South Florida at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis,
I just wasn't in the Army yet.
And I tell you, South Florida was an armed camp.
Hour after hour, there were trains going by with military equipment,
tanks trucks going through in South Florida.
And all my friends in the 82nd Airborne division had gone out and
bought their combat jump wings.
They thought they were going.
In fact, it was so close that they issued blood plasma and
ammunition down to the platoon level, that's the last step.
So we thought we were going to war against,
because the introduction of nuclear capacity missiles into Cuban soil.
So that always rivets me.
I think that's one of the reasons we're still a little anti-Cuban,
aside from the Cuban constituency in Miami.
So I don't know if I answered your questions.
Yes sir.
>> Each of the recent US presidents have talked about Iran would never get
a nuclear weapon under their administration.
And Israel is always discussed as whether, if they don't believe
the United States president is sincere in accomplishing that,
then Israel is gonna have to do it on their own.
What's your view of that?
>> Well first, the idea that Khamenei issued a fatwa
against nuclear weapons has been disproved.
The people have looked into it.
There was no fatwa issued against nuclear weapons, none.
What happened was, people said he said it.
It's the same thing as if the Pope doesn't say something, and
the people said the Pope said something, that's not the same.
He never really said,
there is no fatwa against Iran getting nuclear weapons, that's a hoax.
Second, the idea that what we're going to do as a state.
As you know we're entering in negotiations.
I don't us to be too eager for any agreement.
We can get an agreement.
We had an agreement with North Korea [LAUGH] and everybody knows what happened.
The so-called 1994 framework agreement was hammered out in Geneva, they broke that.
But I'm a realist in this in the sense that,
deep in my bones I think Iran will either get the nuclear weapon or
come up to the brink to the point it can at any time it wants.
But I don't know what kind of agreement, because they want the sanctions lifted.
This administration has put in extremely severe, particularly financial,
sanctions, and they're hurting them a lot.
And they would like to see those lessened, but whether we get a full,
ironclad agreement, I'm very doubtful.
>> What's your view on Israel?
>> If the Israelis will do it you mean?
Well, Netanyahu says he doesn't want another Munich, and that's pretty clear
what he means by that, Munich as settlement over Czechoslovakia in 1937.
I don't know if the Israelis will do it or not.
I think it's hard for them because they are dependent some on the United States.
But on the other hand, if Netanyahu, he feels this responsibility,
doesn't want another 6 million Jews killed.
So, I don't know if he'll do it or not.
They have a lot of capacity.
If they do it, I think it'll be more clever than we think they can do.
They'll surprise us, they've always surprised in these things.
Entebbe raids, things like that, nobody came out of the box thinking.
So if they do something I think it'll be very clever, more than we.
There were rumors actually published that had bases on Azerbaijan,
the Israelis did, which would give them striking down.
And then everybody denied it so I don't know.
But there would be something more clever than we're kind of thinking.
Yes sir, okay, go ahead.
>> In Iran, during the 2009 Green Movement,
there's a lot of people power there.
What do you see as happening in the future there?
Do you think that they're going to be, cuz Iran is probably one
of the few places that America is really held in high regard now.
By about 85% of the population.
What is your skew on that?
>> Did everyone hear of that?
How Iranian society, [COUGH] many of the younger people particularly,
hold American youth culture and America in pretty high regard.
That's our saving thing that somehow, if they do get a nuclear weapon,
that some down.
They'll become more transparent.
They'll become more Democratic.
That's what kind of gives me the hope that if nothing else happens that will happen.
But that's the sad part, this is a very sophisticated society.
This is not North Korea.
And that's the sort of tragedy with the whole relationship with Iran.
I have a couple more.
Yes sir. >> [INAUDIBLE]
>> Of a state.
>> Yeah. I am very concerned.
In some ways it's worse than North Korea.
Did everybody hear the question of Pakistan?
Because they have nuclear weapons, a lot of them.
And because also, it's a very unstable country.
The Islamic movements within that country are extremely strong.
There's lots of killing, and I've watched it fairly closely.
Lots of people are being killed all the time.
And made just recently an agreement with the Chinese for
two nuclear reactors to be built outside of Karachi.
That's for power, power plants, but that's even, they won't be coming immediately,
but in the next five or so years.
So that's also disconcerting but they're going to step it up even more, and so
that's some sense because it is so unstable.
What will happen there?
So it is a real way, it's not a rogue state.
But it's a state of concern as Madeline Albright would say.
>> Yes, ma'am. >> Is there a chance that Myanmar could
return to that status because the Chinese,
I was there recently, they are sweeping into Burma, they're building roads
from China to India into Thailand, only hiring Chinese.
People and gradually the Chinese are just moving in in droves.
>> Did everyone hear that?
The Chinese influence on Myanmar.
But that was one of the reasons I think they turned away, because there was
a concern about the dam being built in the North part of Burma or Myanmar.
That there was a kind of revulsion from that.
It is an interesting thing, now it could be word, nothing is sure in this world.
There's always a could be reversion.
A different group comes to power.
But it so far hasn't happened and we have been encouraged.
But Chinese can be very heavy-handed and
the same thing in Africa when they engage there.
>> They tend to hire their own people, bring their own people, and
that has caused some discontent in African countries as it did in Myanmar.
So I don't know if that's a complete answer.
I'll take a couple more.
Yes sir.
>> You used the term embargoed states
such as thinking of South Africa in the late 90s.
I guess we have embargos on all these rogue states, but
what's the distinction of the rogue state versus an embargoed state.
>> That reminds me of a little quip that there's either embargoers,
engagers, or role backers in American foreign policy.
So in But you're talking embargoes.
The embargo idea is that you, in the case of South Africa it was a dramatic case
because first of all South Africa was not a royal country.
It had a quasi-democracy for whites, it was a very exclusionary society.
It was like United States in the 1950s.
African-Americans had to go here, they had to eat in these restaurants,
they couldn't use these restrooms, they couldn't drink from these drinking
fountains all of that was the American South in the 1950s.
And the South Africans enforced it with a kind of
Northern European rigor and they were a little frightening at times.
I'd been there when the Apartheid system was there.
What happened, and it wasn't just economics, you're quite right.
It was also the sanctions on their sports teams.
And they're great sports enthusiasts.
And also I think they had far-leaning leadership among the whites and
certainly Mandela was a statesman, par excellence,
and they managed to get through that, but it was partly embargos from economic
sanctions but also sports, and ostracized from the rest of the world.
And the community there, about one third English background,
two-thirds from the Netherlands.
Considered themselves westerners,
they didn't consider themselves another country.
So I think that helped the embargos work.
Because one of the few times I think embargos really worked well.
Another.
I'll hang around here when this ends.
I just have to end this as long as you have other appointments.
But I'm happy to stay.
Yes ma'am?
>> We mentioned earlier that a rogue state could be an organization, so,
I'm wondering, with relation to al-Qaeda, I'm wondering if you think that
could be a rogue state that is not in any way geographic.
[INAUDIBLE] >> I hope I didn't misspeak.
But there are rogues, on the state department list,
there's individuals in countries, and some are organizations.
I think, you know, this is one of the things that make me angry,
when people say, you know, they talk about terrorists today as if they're phantoms.
They don't need places to ground, to stand on, or ground to lie down on, or train on.
They do.
They have to have entities.
And I think where that could embody itself is watching what's happening in Syria.
Because Syria, I think, is fragmenting.
We're probably gonna have some sort of stalemate, it's already somewhat apparent,
and so you're gonna have little entities in the north and
bordering Iraq which are Al-Qaeda kind of knockoffs or fundamentalists.
You may have other groups with the Kurds, Allah Whiteson, and the whole
Assad group will stay, but you could have a kind of reformation of
smaller rogue entities coming out of an organizational background.
That's a possibility.
I have to end this officially, but I'll stay.
But if, so if- >> [APPLAUSE]
>> any of you have to want to go.
Thank you.
-------------------------------------------
Study ranks North Carolina among top-10 states for school threats - Duration: 2:15.
For more infomation >> Study ranks North Carolina among top-10 states for school threats - Duration: 2:15. -------------------------------------------
State of the State's Health: Tennessee among 10 least healthy states - Duration: 2:18.
For more infomation >> State of the State's Health: Tennessee among 10 least healthy states - Duration: 2:18. -------------------------------------------
Dutton GST plan to cost states $30b - Duration: 1:09.
Costings by the independent Parliamentary Budget Office show $30 billion would be cut from states and territories' ability to pay for critical services if the Liberal leadership challenger's proposal went ahead
"It says everything about the Liberals that this is the sort of guy they want in charge
Someone who sees our health care system as a pot of money to be raided and ruined," said shadow treasurer Chris Bowen on Wednesday
-------------------------------------------
Massive 6.3 earthquake trikes near Oregon off west coast of United States - Duration: 2:03.
</form> An earthquake measuring 6.3 magnitude has struck off the coast of Oregon on the west coast of the United States
No tsunami warning has been issued after the quake which registered at a depth of roughly 10km (six miles) and was an estimated 188 miles west of Bandon, Oregon
The seismic activity was detected at 9.31am (UTC), which is 2.31am local time. There has been an increase in activity in the 'Ring of Fire with 70 quakes recorded in just 48 hours
The Ring of Fire has caused a number of devastating of earthquakes over the years and is where two of the earth's huge tectonic plates meet
There are fears a 'Big One' could be on the way which would cause significant damage and loss of life to the west coast of the US
Today's quake is not thought to have caused any damage. A 7.3 magnitude earthquake struck Venezuela in South America yesterday
No deaths were immediately reported. The incident rocked the north coast of the country and several Caribbean islands
The epicentre was around 100km from Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago's capital city
Part of the Port of Spain's Trinity Cathedral collapsed under the powerful vibrations, as bricks fell onto a car parked on the ground below
Tremors were reported in Caribbean islands some distance away, including Grenada and Barbados, while one witness claimed he felt the tremors 300km away in Oistins, a resort near Barbados's capital
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét