Jim Jatras: US-Russia Tango In Syria Is Really About Iran And May Lead To WW3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJHMLAm3Ozo Former U.S. diplomat Jim Jatras discusses President Trump's rush to war in Syria, the false flag chemical attacks warned about by Russia, Putin's options in case of U.S. strikes, and the real geopolitical game being played in the Middle East which can lead to fatal escalation. Transcript G&E Podcast:                     We are speaking with analyst, former U.S. diplomat and foreign policy advisor to the Senate GOP leadership, Jim Jatras. We will be discussing the U.S.-Russia tango in Syria. Let's start with Russia. First it was U.S. election meddling, then Olympics sports doping, then the Russian media acting as foreign agent, and now this incredulous Salisbury nerve gas attack. What's next? Am I going to discover that my mother has actually been a KGB spy my entire life? Is there any truth at all to the neo-McCarthyism? Jim Jatras:                           Well, I think calling it neo-McCarthyism is unfair to Joe McCarthy, that back in his day there really were Stalinist agents at the State Department. Even if his methods went a bit overboard, there was a real concern. What we're seeing today is made out of whole cloth. I think this is simply part of a political campaign against Russia. The term "deep state" has gone from going virtually unknown to being totally overused, but I think there is a reality behind that concept. It's not just U.S. deep state. It's not just the CIA and NSA and FBI, the Department of Justice. It also includes our British friends, MI6, the GCHQ. I've been writing for months that there are British fingerprints all over the Steele dossier, all over the whole Russia-gate, FISA-gate thing. We see it, obviously, all over the Skripal case. [spoiler] Jim Jatras:                           It looks like that is coordinated with these latest accusations on the use of chemical weapons in Syria, which, unfortunately, looks like it will lead to military action as early as tonight Washington time. Where I am it's a little after 10:00 p.m., and the talk is now within a few hours we should be launching an attack against Syria. I had hoped that that would have been held off until the OPCW investigators, who are on their way to Damascus, would have had a chance to look at the evidence. Honestly, I think there are people in this town, and certainly in London and some other capitals, who don't want there to be an independent investigation, that do not want their handiwork being exposed. Jim Jatras:                           This has nothing to do, really, with chemical weapons at all, in my opinion. It has to do with the fact that at the end of the Cold War in 1991 the United States emerged as the sole Superpower, unipolar moment and all that. There are people who are willing to risk plunging the world into a third world war to preserve that global hegemony against a Russia that's reasserting its own national interests, and, of course, also China. G&E Podcast:                     Let's just backtrack a bit. You are a former diplomat. Can you tell us about the significance of the recent, unprecedented, expulsion of Russian diplomats from the U.S. and the E.U.? I don't think this even happened during the first Cold War. It's quite startling. As you mentioned, it's fabricated chemical attacks with the neo-McCarthyism, and now this expulsion. If we put that all together what does this mean? Jim Jatras:                           I think what we're seeing is the kind of demonization against a target country, and especially its leader, personally, in this case Vladimir Putin, that we've see so many times in the past, whether it was Milošević in Yugoslavia, or Saddam Hussein, or Muammar Gaddafi. Everybody is Hitler. We call it "The Hitler of the month club", is that we frame the target as this horrible, evil person who must be destroyed. Animal Assad now, President Trump is calling him. That means that the rules of normal conduct are suspended because, after all, if you're literally Hitler nothing could be out of bounds. I think that's the kind of mentality that's being used here. Jim Jatras:                           Right now Russia is the target country. Syria, of course, too, but Russia is as well. The fact of the matter is Russia's not a pipsqueak little country you can do this to. Let's remember that what was done with the expulsion of these diplomats, supposedly based on the Skripal case, and the certainty that the Russians did it, even though there's no evidence that they were involved at all, but a lot of evidence that MI6 was involved. That this is part of isolating and setting up a country for regime change. I would also add that the latest round of America sanctions, which seemed designed to ... I think the thinking is if they can put enough squeeze on Russian oligarchs, and, of course, Russian rich people are oligarchs, but America rich people like George Soros or Zuckerberg or people like that, they're not oligarchs. That they somehow can stage a coup to remove Vladimir Putin from power. Anybody that knows anything about Russian know that that's not going to happen. This is not the 1990s when the oligarchs are powerful enough to do that. Jim Jatras:                           All it means is that, I think, the Russians are increasingly going to take the view that they are being targeted for destruction, that war is going to become inevitable. That's a very dangerous notion that should end up in their consciousness because where does that leave us, then? What steps may they take on their side in anticipation of hostilities that may, to them, appear inevitable? This is far more dangerous than what we saw even during the first Cold War. No Soviet leader was ever demonized, not even Stalin, ever demonized in the way that Putin is. G&E Podcast:                     Going back to the deep state you mentioned, at a university where I was teaching years ago I would introduce these topics with my students, and people on campus sometimes would mock this idea of deep state and conspiracy theory. I even Skyped people like yourself into my classrooms. We talked to Peter Dale Scott, who they call one of the grandfathers of the deep state, deep politics term. You recently wrote a piece called Mikhail Octavian Trump, that the best we can expect from President Trump is make some kind of deal with North Korea, not bomb Russia, withdraw from Syria, avoid impeachment in order to preserve some semblance of the America republic. G&E Podcast:                     However, it seems that, in this moment in time, Trump is, perhaps, forfeiting everything he campaigned on if he goes through with the Syrian attack, which is not unlike every predecessor. Obama, "I'm going to close down Guantanamo." A year later nothing happens. Pull out of Iraq, they put more troops in Iraq. Then you say that this will have fatal consequences for Washington, and usher in or accelerate the collapse of the empire. We're hanging by a thread. Can you tell us more about the situation Trump finds himself domestically with the deep state? I understand they just raided his lawyer's home. Jim Jatras:                           That's right. I've been saying, maybe my timeline is a little wrong, but I've been saying that our situation here in the United States, or let's say on the eve of the 2016 election, was, in many respects, comparable to the situation of the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s. A system that had become completely unworkable, that urgently needed some kind of reform. That's what Gorbachev tried to do. Instead of saving the system and revitalizing it, he ended up destabilizing it further toward its inevitable collapse. I think that there are other examples like that in the past. The most obviously one being Octavian in the late Roman republic who replaced it with the principate. That's what we tend to think of as the empire, which, I would argue, wasn't the death of the republic. In many ways the only way the republic could have been salvaged at that time. Jim Jatras:                           I think if you look, for example, Madeline Albright has this new book out where she's warning against fascism. Everybody's a fascist, Trump's a fascist, Putin's a fascist. Viktor Orban is a fascist. I think there is a counter movement against the dysfunction of the neo-liberal globalist order where people want to return to their roots, return to some sense of identity and of self-respect, and in many cases return to religion, as we've seen, not only in Russia, but in Poland and Hungary and other countries. I think to some extent Trump was tapping into that revival of traditional American identity, which, as we know, is synonymous with racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia and so forth because the globalist order doesn't like that kind of unique respect for one's own tradition and culture. Jim Jatras:                           I think that's all the more reason why Putin needs to be destroyed because, in many ways, he is seen as kind of the prototype of a, let's say, a new return to the old ways. A new return to the old bedrock sources of social tradition and strength. I think even China is doing this in its own way, except their values are not Christian, they're Confucian, and I respect that. Those are not my values, they're China's values. I don't see anything wrong with that. I think that it's a complete reversal of the Maoist anti-Confucian campaign whereas now Confucian thought as very highly-respected in China. I think this is a positive development. Jim Jatras:                           I think the global order is very much opposing that, and that is, at least in our country, center within the organs of government, which are, in some ways, kind of like the old Soviet nomenclature. They have their genetic code. They do what they do. Then don't even necessarily think, the people are just cogs in a machine, but they see Trump as a threat to that machine.