Latest / The Nation Podcasts / Gaza and Elite Accountability w/ Connor Echols / The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer

Transcript

Gaza and Elite Accountability w/ Connor Echols / The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The old world is dying, the new world struggles to reborn.
• 0:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now is the time of monsters, with those words from Gramshire walking to the time of monsters podcast.
• 0:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm G. here, the host of the podcast, which is sponsored by the Nation magazine.
• 0:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now I have just a little bit of news today, which is, we're going to be relaunching the podcast,
• 0:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, if you're a regular listener, go to the Nation Substack and subscribe there and we'll be doing a radio programming or podcasting through Substack.
• 0:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I'll keep everyone notified on social media and on the newsletter.
• 0:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: So today I want to return to the Gaza conflict.
• 0:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Israel's war
• 0:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: It remains a unsettled business, both because it's ongoing, but also because of this herd of poll it costs on the officials involved, particularly in the Biden administration.
• 1:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of new reporting and writing that's being done about it that's getting attention.
• 1:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And my guest today, Connor Eccles, who is a managing editor of responsible state craft, has written about that.
• 1:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, first of all, Connor, welcome to the program.
• 1:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
• 1:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's good to be on the show.
• 1:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: So let's just get started in terms of like why in sort of recent weeks as this issue of the sort of Biden administration's complicity or actions or guilt in Gaza become a hot topic again.
• 1:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right, well, there's a lot going on.
• 1:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think one of them is just the release of journalist Dr. Pashita Ahmed's big book on this, called Crossing The Red Line, and that was sort of the jumping off point for my piece.
• 1:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then you've also now seen a lot of reaction from former Biden officials trying to sort of set the record straight from their point of view about what exactly happened.
• 2:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: inside the administration you have this piece from Brett McGurk who was the senior director for the Middle East on the National Security Council about basically how Hamas was the problem the whole time you know all these different things about how ceasefires broke down.
• 2:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then you also had an incident where Akbar was being interviewed on, I believe it was MPR, and then suddenly the host says, oh, we've gotten a statement from Jake Sullivan's spokesperson saying that he'd take some bridge, essentially, at this idea that he was not working very hard to let aid into Gaza, that he was more focused on that than anyone else, and that he's offended by the very suggestion.
• 2:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, you're seeing
• 2:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: suddenly a lot more people from the Biden administration feeling a desire to clean up their records probably in part because we have the midterms coming up and the politics of all of this is really sharpening.
• 2:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, no.
• 2:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think then, as we've seen in the midterms, there's a lot of Democratic primary voters that are very unhappy with APAC with the Warren Gaza and vote along those lines.
• 3:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I believe isn't there also some like sort of lobbying efforts being made to make sure that anyone who and the Biden administration or at least a senior people who are involved with Gaza policy not be hired again in future Democratic administrations.
• 3:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, exactly.
• 3:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: And this has sort of been bubbling up a little bit, but there's this initiative called Drop the Genocide 20 that highlights a very sort of specific set of 20 people.
• 3:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And again, if you read Akbar's book, these are sort of many of the villains.
• 3:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's voices, again, like Brett McGurk, who has been particularly unrepentant about all of this stuff.
• 3:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And even outside of government has really made no effort to sort of rehabilitate as image I would say.
• 3:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, you've also got people like, like, I mentioned Jake Sullivan who has made some effort has talked about, oh, I've kept up at night, I guess, by this issue, or I have some regrets, but never seems to name them.
• 4:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And some of those things from people like Anthony Blinken,
• 4:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And others, and so it's sort of been this interesting.
• 4:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's been this interesting effort.
• 4:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's been really unconvincing, and, you know, hence efforts like that blacklist to to ensure that people don't come back.
• 4:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Not just, I think, because they view these people as being guilty of complicity and war crimes, that's obviously part of it, but also just because the policies that they enacted and that they advocated did lead to continuing and expanding disaster in the region that we're still living in the wake of.
• 4:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, I mean, this initiative is very interesting because traditionally there has been very few consequences for American foreign policy makers to be involved with disasters particularly if they keep sort of a maritime if they keep the sort of code of silence of not criticizing each other.
• 4:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, going back to the Vietnam War, which was like a major disaster by any reckoning, but Robert McNamara, one of the architects, you know, was like elevated to being the head of the world's bank, and then other architects like Eugene Rostau got academic positions, Henry Kissinger got to teach at Harvard and became, you know, very wealthy consultant.
• 5:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: or with the, you know, Iran war.
• 5:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, one could say, I mean, the Iraq war and the global war and terror under Bush.
• 5:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: One could say there were consequences in terms of Republicans losing office, Rumsfeld losing their job.
• 5:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I mean, like, in terms of long term, good
• 5:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: social consequences, like not a lot.
• 5:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, a lot of those figures, you know, like, got recycled back into politics.
• 5:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I always think it's not like LED Abrams as a class example, that even if you're convicted of surgery in front of Congress, that that doesn't recleave you from getting thing-tabbed jobs or future government physicians, which is remarkable.
• 6:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right, yeah, Abrams is a particularly noxious figure, but yeah, I mean, it's interesting and it goes all the way down to, you know, one of the things that really comes through when I talk to former Biden officials or people that are in the space is that it's it's hard for a lot of these people to get out of the mine frame of the war on terror.
• 6:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: right so they could acknowledge that we've made certain mistakes.
• 6:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think everyone agrees that that Iraq was wrong and that the way that we did Afghanistan in a lot of ways was wrong, but there's an inability to sort of learn the broader lessons maybe about what if we did not try to seek military solutions for political problems, right?
• 6:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you saw these problems come back up because you know people like, again, I've mentioned Jake Sullivan a couple times,
• 6:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: He was had a policy planning under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, you know, in the early Obama administration.
• 6:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so he was sort of brought up in this environment of OK, we're trying to manage what we have in the global war on tear.
• 7:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that informs your thinking as you move up.
• 7:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he moved up very quickly.
• 7:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sort of seen as this wonder-kind, this guy that was, you know, and theory going to be a great leader of Democratic foreign policy for a long time.
• 7:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: But he took a lot of those lessons maybe and didn't learn them all the way.
• 7:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so we've got this whole generation of national security leaders and there's a real big spectrum here and I don't think that we should lump them all together because there are significant differences but that came up through this environment in which military force was the first thing that you reached for.
• 7:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think that that actually comes through very well in your piece and I take the point about like you know that there's a sort of spectrum of responses and maybe one way to like sort of break this down is you know the different component parts because on the one hand you have like a president was the commander chief setting policy and he has the second layer would be the sort of inner circle of advisors and then you have the broader sort of bureaucracy that's involved with implementing policy.
• 8:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that what we'll want to see in this debate over who is responsible is parsing blame or thinking in terms of different degrees.
• 8:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And let's start with Biden, because I do think that there is a ways in which he is like the chief actor and certainly his particular policy preferences is like really dominated.
• 8:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you know, in your piece you sort of bring out is almost like a sort of
• 8:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: responsible.
• 8:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: But what can we say about, you know, Biden's role in all of us?
• 8:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's indisputable from my point of view that Biden is most at fault, right?
• 8:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Biden had very strong views about Israel coming into this.
• 8:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: He had very strong views about the Middle East.
• 8:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: He felt that he was an expert on these issues and it would have been difficult to move him whatever your view, right?
• 8:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's very hard to argue otherwise.
• 9:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: And out is basically the argument that former Biden people will make
• 9:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: to me to try to sort of absolve this broader group is to say that at some fundamental level Biden couldn't be moved and and there's definitely some truth to that.
• 9:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: He was a guy who is seriously passionate about this.
• 9:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: He cared very much about Israel and its leadership and he was always going to be difficult to move.
• 9:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: But that does not, in any way, take away some of the responsibility as you move down the chain, and that's because all of these people had to go to great lengths, right?
• 9:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Especially this inner circle, which, you know, I've mentioned Jake Sullivan.
• 9:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've mentioned Brett McGurk.
• 9:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: I would also include, I mean, you know, at this point it's a pretty small group, but the people who were actually in the conversations, maybe the Deputy National Security Advisor John Feiner, uh, was in those conversations,
• 9:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Bill Burns, the head of the CIA, these are people that were frequently in these conversations.
• 9:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And again, bringing different things to the conversation, but then as they go and face towards the rest of the government, or as they face towards advocates, these are people who were showing themselves to also be hyper-concerned about, for example, the ways in which pro-Israel forces in the United States might bring pressure to bear on them.
• 10:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we're sort of
• 10:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Blinded to the pain and suffering of Palestinians in ways that just frankly does not reflect well on their judgment and on their ability to form opinions individually So I think yeah, you do have to blame Biden first and foremost, but the idea that he is the only person to blame for me is just doesn't hold water
• 10:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so let's move on to these sort of inner circle, though, which you sort of named and alluded to, and you know, like certainly they closed ranks around this Biden policy beyond and they would defend it against critics both external but also internal like within, you know, they're their own government and then made every effort to
• 10:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: to carry it forward.
• 10:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as you say, there's a spectrum, some of them did so in a kind of, you know, a liberal hand-ringing way, Pontius Pilate, you know, like I watched my ads of those.
• 11:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: But for others, you know, like, I'm a jerk.
• 11:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think, you know, you're counting, and another reporting.
• 11:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, like he sort of whole hog for this, and I think he might be worth signaling out like in terms of like what was the actual policy here and what what it was a guided by because I think that certainly I there's no dispute that you know he has he did not consider a Palestinian suffering you know something that should
• 11:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: be of concern for him or guide policy.
• 11:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I wouldn't necessarily say it was more to be an animusic towards the Palestinian, but rather by his sort of commitment to a grand structure of policy.
• 11:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what was this sort of policy vision that he thought would justify continuing with this policy?
• 11:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right.
• 11:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, before I get into that, it's worth just giving a little thumbnail on McGregor himself.
• 11:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: He is the the consummate bureaucrat of the war on terror, right?
• 12:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: He served under every single administration from the first Bush administration, first George W. Bush administration all the way through the Biden administration, right?
• 12:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: So this was one of the very few people serving
• 12:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: really quite high levels of government throughout basically the entire war on terror.
• 12:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: So that sort of framed his point of view.
• 12:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: He dealt a lot with these leaders in the region with the leaders in the Gulf, had a lot of relationships there.
• 12:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that ended up having a very sort of palace-centric view of how the Middle East works.
• 12:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is how I might say, right?
• 12:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: So his big goal, according to Akbar's reporting and many others and just conversations I've heard too, is that
• 12:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: He wanted a grand bargain for the Middle East where by you would have, you know, the full ceasefire in Gaza, you'd have an end to that problem.
• 12:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: You'd have Saudi Arabia, normalizing relations with Israel and exchange for some sort of pathway to a Palestinian state and then in order to, you know, make it a sweeter deal for Saudi Arabia.
• 13:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: You'd have the United States offering a security guarantee for read and so all of
• 13:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: into basically reshaping the security architecture of the region and in order to continue sort of pushing towards that goal and continue doing all these things, he was consistently saying, oh, well, the cease fires just around the corner, we're almost there.
• 13:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm still working on this.
• 13:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm pulling it together and sort of fudging a little bit to all of these different
• 13:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: oh okay well maybe the Saudis aren't going to be maybe they don't need a two-concrete of a path to a Palestinian state maybe he'd say something like that when he's talking to the Israelis and then talking to the Saudis maybe it's a bit of a different story and it ended up being this house of cards and and yeah i mean he just comes off
• 13:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: more than anyone else from the administration as completely unrepentant.
• 13:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he's clearly with this new book trying to sort of rewrite the history of what happened.
• 14:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: I do hope that other people in the administration do respond to what he writes and this it's coming out soon because he's he's trying to basically make the argument that, you know, we did all the things the right way, it was going to be a mess anyway.
• 14:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that is a comforting thing for him perhaps, but
• 14:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, I would want one of the thing I'd add on MacGurik is that he was one of the important people in sort of preventing real findings about human rights violations on the part of the Israelis and about drawing firm conclusions on any of those that would have maybe forced the government to act.
• 14:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: That comes through very much in the reporting around this that he was that he was resistant to even sort of considering accountability for the Israelis and that reflects poorly on him.
• 14:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, I want to like just underscore, you know, like not just the sort of moral issue of the treatment of the Palestinians, but the sort of crackpot realism of the sort of military strategy or you know, the sort of geopolitics because just looking at it from the outside.
• 15:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: The argument that I think the Biden administration people are saying is that bad things happen, but it was for like this greater good of creating structure for peace.
• 15:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: That this will be the sort of, you know, like happy ending that we're working towards, that will justify everything.
• 15:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it will sort of include these, you know, like basically the Abrahamer cords in a very firm way.
• 15:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now,
• 15:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: I have to say like if one is actually looking at like what actually and I think the second part of that argument is that they would also be saying that by doing all this we're also restraining Israel and preventing it from like, you know, launching like wider wars.
• 15:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: But like everything we've ever seen, like shows it like on its own terms, this policy makes no sense.
• 15:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: The sort of your horrific carnage in Gaza to my mind undermines any like lasting security
• 16:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: friends, but even that's proving very difficult to get them to be friends with this.
• 16:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're like, they have to be mindful of their own public opinion, to some degree.
• 16:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think even Saudi Arabia, you know, you know, which one could say is sort of, you know, a computer regime.
• 16:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: even they have their limits in terms of like, you know, what they're willing to accept.
• 16:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And on the other side, on the Israeli side, I mean, like this every evidence that, you know, you're not just Benjamin Netanyahu, but like a broad swash of Israeli public opinion is not willing to accept a two-stakes solution.
• 16:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: and would have to be forced against that.
• 16:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: So even as a sort of, and finally, the idea is you're creating a structure of peace in the Middle East, well, like right now, like you're, well, what we've seen is that they've actually paved the way for this current situation, where the U.S. is involved with this massive war against Iran, which has turned out to be humiliating and which has actually causing a lot of these Arab countries to start wondering whether the U.S. is itself a reliable ally.
• 17:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, like, on all fronts, it seems like a total disaster, you know, compromising to the Iraq war.
• 17:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm wondering, like, even in terms of their own crack plot realism, like, like, how could they, like, just to fog up?
• 17:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: yeah i think that's i think that's a totally correct assessment and and and again that is the thing that you'll hear from people's that you know we were working carefully to prevent a wider war but the wider war came and they didn't do very much when it happened right you know it's really funny like six different countries they like how could you say we stopped a lot of war related when you clearly were like you know like allowed a wider
• 17:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, Colonel.
• 17:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, exactly.
• 17:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so, yeah, I mean, and even after the invasion of Lebanon to go after Hezbollah in late 2024, even after that, then, you know, about a month later on the anniversary of October 7, the Czech Sullivan comes out and makes the argument that Israel has made enduring strategic gains in the region.
• 18:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: That Israel has, you know, beaten back its enemies, and this is good, and there's these positive things that have come out of the tragedy.
• 18:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's a shocking thing to do, right?
• 18:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: This idea that, oh, we were holding them back from doing a wider war, but when they do a wider war, that's great, right?
• 18:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's sort of they're contradicting themselves throughout all of this.
• 18:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's interesting because like Sullivan and McGurk, I think I'm like Blinken.
• 18:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Blinken, I don't get the sense for anyone that I've spoken with that knows him that he is a
• 18:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: that he's a cold-hearted realist, right?
• 18:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that Lincoln is much more of an idealist, much more of someone who believes in the sort of post-World War II international order who believes as a matter of principle that we need a state for the Jewish people in order for them to be safe.
• 18:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, I think he really does believe these things sincerely and so.
• 18:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: He comes off a little differently than Sullivan who, at times, frankly, comes off as just, you know, there's, there's stories and, and Akbar's book about him sort of denying the images of fame and that we were seeing, these sort of over-the-top.
• 19:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: sort of unnecessary things where it requires a certain level of cognitive dissonance to be able to continue these policies that were in fact in violation of not only international law but of the law of the United States which prevents providing weapons to states that
• 19:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: block the provision of American aid, or did that do gross violations of human rights with our weapons, right?
• 19:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so it took all of this real cognitive dissonance and it took a lot of effort to keep it this way, right?
• 19:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: It took a lot of people, you know, not just McGurk, not just Sullivan, not just Blinken, but you know, Avril Haines, who is the Director of National Intelligence, taking these big effort and saying, you know what, we are not going to do a serious investigation into these because it might
• 19:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, implicitly because it might result in something that we don't like, and we got nothing really strategic for it.
• 19:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, it's hard to look at this group and feel very positive about the impact that they should have on policy.
• 20:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And again, you know, Jake Sullivan has a podcast on box.
• 20:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: We've got Brett McGurk is a CNN analyst.
• 20:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: We've got Avril Haynes is now the president of the Carnegie Endowment.
• 20:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: They are getting a ton of power even if they don't get into a future government.
• 20:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, no, I, I think that's right.
• 20:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I, I, I, I, I, I have to be the question of whether they serve in a future Democratic administration is kind of key because I mean, whatever power that they have now like these kind of scenicures are all designed with the view towards the government of office in the future.
• 20:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: You, you get these posts at like, you know, like Harvard or a thing tanks or on cable, who's not works with the idea that you're going to be a future power player and then these institutions want to be on good terms with power.
• 20:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that, you know, like if AOC or Roy Connell, you know, run for president and, you know, safe-worth, right?
• 20:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: None of these people, there's 20 people on this list.
• 20:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: They will not be in my administration and makes that, like, a campaign issue, that would actually, like, represent a real challenge to the sort of culture of impunity that exists in American foreign policy.
• 21:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, well, well, well, well, well, well, you're certain thoughts on that, like, you know, instead of, well,
• 21:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think so.
• 21:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: I, I, I, a term that sort of came up one of the, one of the sources and, and Akbar's book use the term like herd impunity, which are really like, is this idea that they all sort of make the decision together and so no one's at fault.
• 21:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: But there are people that are more at fault, and there is a genuine need, I think, to have a new generation of people that are at the leadership of foreign policy and that are injecting new ideas into all of this.
• 21:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's not going to be, there's going to be a certain amount of sort of fine grain thinking through it, right?
• 21:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, there's people on that list who a lot of people argue to me, shouldn't it be?
• 21:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's people who aren't on that list that a lot of people would say should be, right?
• 21:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: You'll notice like,
• 21:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: The person that people defend to me more than anyone else at that high level is John Feiner, who was the deputy national security advisor, even had some people text me yesterday some former Biden people being like, okay, it's not fair to put finer in the same sentence, right?
• 22:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's an interesting question, because he was indeed the person in the room more than anyone else, him and Phil Gordon, who is Kamala Harris's national security advisor, who also comes off looking a lot better than these other people.
• 22:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: They were the two people in the room that really were making the argument that we needed to restrain Israel more and that we're losing, right?
• 22:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: But then you have finer come back out and make this argument to superior binary on a podcast recently that his resignation, a few of chosen to do so, would have been self-serving and that's the slap in the face to all these people that did resign and you know, who resigned because they viewed it as a way to draw attention to what they thought was a really bad policy for myriad reasons.
• 22:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right.
• 22:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense to have a new generation.
• 22:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And again, it's not, you know, I don't know that it would make sense to blacklist Vice President Harris's staff necessarily, but you know, it wouldn't be the end of the world if we move on to just a whole new generation of people that weren't in the administration.
• 23:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, I mean, I think there's two like separate issues, one of which is sort of like basic accountability, like, you know, like, you know, if you had people that were basically complicit with, you know, violations, both of international law and of U.S. law, then there has to be accountability, but then there's also, I mean, in your piece and here, this very important issue of sort of like a generational change, the, you know, if you have people who have been so heavily,
• 23:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: formed by the sort of global war on terror framework.
• 23:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, framework that has caused disaster over the last 25 years, like new blood is kind of called for.
• 23:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: I would also just add that, I mean, it's not just about having new blood, but it's about really having a true reckoning with all these problems that we've dealt with.
• 23:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that these people thought that they had had a reckoning already with it.
• 23:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that is what makes me not trusting of them, right?
• 24:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's what makes it really difficult for me to think like, Jake Sullivan thought that he had reckoned with all of this.
• 24:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he didn't, right?
• 24:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: You do actually need new people
• 24:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: have a more outside idea because otherwise you have this boy's club where you have this unwillingness, you know, because even these people, you know, there are people on that list on the like Drought the Genocide 20 list that have told me all about how they're critical of this or that.
• 24:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: off the record.
• 24:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: But then they're unwilling to say it even publicly.
• 24:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: And at that point, how do I trust you to say things consistently privately, right?
• 24:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, how do I trust you to go out and make the the forthright argument for a new policy on the inside if you're not even willing to criticize your friends?
• 24:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like I had a line in the piece of the effect of, you know, war crimes are bad, but bad math and your colleagues is worse in this environment.
• 24:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's a real problem.
• 24:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's the code of silence, which is like the over attack code, which is like a real kind of problem.
• 24:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's something that it seems like we have to break.
• 24:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then actually kind of brings to the like kind of the third level because we talk about like buy down his particular responsibility in this inner circle.
• 25:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: But then there's like a wider group of people who are like the sort of underlings in power.
• 25:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many of whom were like much more critical, who were like, were actually making the sort of human rights case who wanted policy to change and who were like being stone-walled.
• 25:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so it in some ways the inner circle closed in on itself to make sure that these voices within the administration were not heard.
• 25:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think, like, with that group, like, it's a more interesting question in terms of what accountability do they have or what roles that they should claim the future, but what are your thoughts on that?
• 25:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, maybe one question for these people is, maybe it's too much for you to resign, but can you be more forthright now in criticizing what the administration actually did?
• 25:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely, and that's something I've told people is like, you know, if you want to, like, one positive thing that happened recently again that I mentioned earlier is it was Phil Gordon criticizing Brett McGurrick for trying to rewrite history and I think we'd be a lot more of that.
• 25:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's obviously some of the more of the inner circle, but as you go down.
• 26:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: There are a lot of people who have done a service, obviously, by talking to journalists and by sharing some of the things that they heard and saw, and that's a big part of why we know so much about what was happening at the highest levels of government, but we need to see more of that.
• 26:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I do think that it's going to be a hard and messy sort of case by case.
• 26:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: thing, right?
• 26:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because there were people further down the food chain that were doing crazy things during this period, right?
• 26:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like one example is Mira Resnek, who was sort of in charge of the the arm sale bureau at the State Department.
• 26:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then by the end, she was the head of of a visual Palestine policy for the State Department.
• 26:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, she acted much more than
• 26:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: people at lots of levels of government to prevent accountability here.
• 26:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: She was someone who was consistently according to Akbar's reporting and just according to things that I've heard elsewhere.
• 26:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: She was just consistently not willing to hold the Israelis accountable for what they were doing, and she ended up being put in charge of actually dealing with individual allegations of Israeli violations of war crimes, of Israeli violations of international law.
• 27:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so,
• 27:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: These are people that we absolutely cannot have in a future government, right?
• 27:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, I don't even know if they would necessarily want to be.
• 27:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: But then, but other people, I think that there's a lot of room.
• 27:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think there's a lot of room.
• 27:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: And part of it is practical too, because if you want to create change in a bureaucracy, the size of the United States government, there is no way around having people that have actual experience on the inside.
• 27:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: No matter how much reporting we do, no matter how many conversations we have, it is very difficult to understand how you deal with the intelligence community, for example, or how you deal with the interagency process between, you know, how do you coordinate between the National Security Council with like the trade representative and state department and defense, like these are complicated questions and ones that you need real institutional knowledge.
• 27:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: to deal with, but you need to be careful that you're not just bringing in people who are going to be spoilers for what would hopefully be a more sort of anti-war set of policies, or at least at the very least a real-est and restraint centered set of policies that would allow us to get out of so many of these military adventures that we've got ourselves caught in.
• 28:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well, I mean, that actually doesn't raise an interesting question because as the, you know, what degree changes even possible, like, you know, within a kind of beast like the United States government, you know, which has the, I guess I sort of reminded of
• 28:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: figure like Tally Rand, you know, who like during the, you know, served the friend state under the old regime under the French Revolution and the closer Revolutionary regime because you needed someone with that kind of diplomatic experience.
• 28:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I
• 28:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I mean, I mean, I think a lot of Donald Trump's foreign policy has kind of suffered from the fact that like whatever changes he wanted to implement, he's had to work with the old Republican Party and bring in people like Marco Rubio who like, you know, don't necessarily share his point of view.
• 29:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so there's actually been a one more continuity
• 29:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: regrettably between 12th of the previous Republican administrations, then one would want, like it seems like it's very hard to change something as a vast and amorphous as this bureaucratic class.
• 29:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've done it.
• 29:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: What do you get thoughts on that?
• 29:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, it's extremely hard.
• 29:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's extremely hard.
• 29:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: And a lot of, you know, I do a lot of reporting on both sides of the aisle.
• 29:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so I do a lot of, I have a lot of conversations with people in the Trump administration now too.
• 29:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And there is a deep desire in the Trump administration to tame the bureaucracy.
• 29:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they have to some extent broken, you know, a lot of things that the state department.
• 29:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: They've broken a lot of things while they blew up USA entirely.
• 29:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: But, you know, the really only the state department in the national security council,
• 29:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: control and a profound way like the intelligence community to see a as far as I can tell is untouched.
• 29:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right?
• 30:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Vanagan more or less untouched.
• 30:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: No matter how many whatever push-ups, how excited wants to do with people.
• 30:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right?
• 30:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's these are not institutions that are easily changed in it.
• 30:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's nothing really short of a crisis that allows you historically in U.S. foreign policy to make really significant institutional or ideological changes, right?
• 30:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: There was a good report from the Carnegie Endowment actually a few years ago led by Stephen Warthiam and Chris Chavez and some other people whose name's been forgetting, but it looked at this question of
• 30:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: when have we actually seen significant change in the US foreign policy, and it's basically just when there's a giant war or crisis or something that shakes the country to its core in a very acute way, right?
• 30:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, not just that we're having it's obviously very difficult for a lot of us to be living through a Trump administration that's ripping apart a lot of the institutions and things like that, but we need something like
• 30:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Historically, even bigger than that to cause the type of change that we're talking about.
• 30:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And maybe it's the Iran War, maybe the Iran War goes for several years and that does it, but in order to say in these institutions, you're going to need to get a really free hand.
• 31:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's going to require working in lockstep with the Congress to pass laws that give you the ability to restructure things that give you the ability to
• 31:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: to take a hammer to some of these agencies and the executive and fix them up.
• 31:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it'll be a long process, but in the short term step one, it's just getting the right people in the right places.
• 31:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: And those right people are not breadmaker and they're probably not chicks all of any.
• 31:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're not, it's a new set of people that we need.
• 31:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, no, I think that's right.
• 31:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: As you mentioned, some of these people already have signatures in places that I think can be fairly described as sort of like being in the government but out of office.
• 31:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I feel like a lot of these people expect to get back into office.
• 31:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what do you think are the prospects of like a real political fight over this to really make this an issue?
• 32:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it will be an issue.
• 32:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: It'll definitely be an issue here in DC.
• 32:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: I know that we'll be fighting over it here in the trenches as it were, but you've even seen members make statements about this, right?
• 32:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: You had Senator Brian Schatz from YU is like the third ranking Democrat in the Senate, say that we need a new generation of voices.
• 32:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: You've seen similar statements from Senator Chris Van Hollen, who is a very prominent sort of progressive, I would say, at this point, voice in the Senate,
• 32:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so you have political interest in this question, and it will be very difficult.
• 32:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that when we're looking 28 and realistically, even like late 27 because of how these things work now, the early days of the presidential primaries for 2020-28, we're going to see a lot of
• 32:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Decisions around who people are willing to associate themselves with, and there's just going to be a lot of debate that's not going to go away.
• 32:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, one of the interesting things is that, frankly, a lot of these members of Congress and a lot of these people who are future presidential candidates know doubt on the democratic side are still to a certain extent consulting.
• 33:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: people like Jake Sullivan.
• 33:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: He is still having conversations with them.
• 33:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's not necessarily a bad thing, right?
• 33:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like he was in an administration there, things to learn from him.
• 33:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: But there is going to be a process whereby some people in the established manner are going to become more comfortable with some of these people again.
• 33:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm sure Sullivan would like, I mean, I've heard different things about whether he wants to go back in.
• 33:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's a pretty young guy though.
• 33:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's in his early fifties.
• 33:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, there's not a lot higher.
• 33:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can go with a national security advisor.
• 33:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: But, you know, in theory, he could be a secretary of state.
• 33:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: He could be a secretary of the fence.
• 33:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think he'd like to be president one day probably, but I don't know if that's going to happen.
• 33:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: But, you know, like, these are real things they're thinking about.
• 33:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think my Greek is going to try to come back.
• 33:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: I definitely think John Finer is going to try to come back.
• 33:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: I definitely think,
• 33:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think you're going to see some of these other ones.
• 33:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Blankin probably, my guess would be that he won't, but that's just because his whole career was sort of tied to Biden.
• 34:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I might imagine that he's sort of ready to be done at this point with the actual government aspects.
• 34:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, there's going to be a real fight.
• 34:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And these are going to be some of the people advising campaigns.
• 34:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think
• 34:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I know for a fact that people like me are going to make it an issue, right?
• 34:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're going to be as loud as we can because I do think it matters for us to bring a new generation of people in.
• 34:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, I think it's like tremendously both like sort of looking backwards, but also looking forwards.
• 34:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I would encourage listeners to read Conner's article which I'll link to in the show notes.
• 34:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I want to thank him for this very enlightening discussion.
• 34:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, thanks so much, Jade.
• 34:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's been a pleasure.