Talk Radio – Republic Broadcasting Network
Dr. Kevin Barrett: …regardless of what Elliot Abrams (Deputy National Security Advisor) might think, I think it’s frightening.
Grant Smith: Well, it is frightening…when you look at someone like Elliot Abrams, and this deadly alliance that he is embracing, again, he wrote a book called “Faith or Fear” before going into the Bush Administration, and this is the key guy, the guy who is negotiating Middle East “peace”, but this is a man who writes about missing anti-Semitism as a cohesive force for his movement, he talks about how, absent military calamity, there’s no cement anymore for holding Israel together, he lays all of this out in his book Faith or Fear. In other words, this is a guy who at the core of his policy approves of conflict and embraces all of this hateful ideology as a pillar of his own power base…when you have someone who is thinking in this way at the pinnacle of power in the US, and this man is, more than anyone, part of the Israel lobby family, part of the AIPAC family, the epitome of AIPAC. It just shows you how twisted and corrupt US policymaking has become.
Dr. Kevin Barrett: ..{nuclear weapons are] an outrageous double standard it seems to me. Grant, you didn’t really discuss very much about this ridiculous double standard regarding the weapons of mass destruction in your books, what is your opinion on that?
Grant Smith: I think Seymour Hersh wrote the last (best) book on the subject when he discussed it, I think his book came out in 1982…he not only talks about it from the fact that Israel had to do a lot of undercover things to get the nuclear weapons that it had, but he mentions that, just like having a stealth lobby in the United States, having nuclear weapons gives it veto power, and it gives [Israel] the ability to say to the United States constantly, “look, we really don’t want to have to unleash these weapons, but I tell you, Iraq’s giving us a lot of problems, Egypt is giving us a lot of problems….” So, basically, having nuclear weapons gives Israel more leverage over the United States, though ostensibly we’re not the target…
Dr. Kevin Barrett: Well hopefully not. During the Cold War apparently the Russians smuggled some suitcase nukes into some cities…
Grant Smith: ..in the (book) “The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy”…you can talk about suitcase bombs and other tactical positioning of nuclear weapons. But the fact that there really is this hammer over the United State’s head, which is that if we don’t use our own resources, military might, financial and political influence, to follow policy mandates from Israel, they can always say “hey, we might be forced to actually use these…”
That’s probably one of the most important developments on a regional level since the whole concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) back in the Cold War: the fact that a smaller country has effective veto power over the military actions of a larger country, and can even motivate it, to some extent by possessing nuclear weapons and the threat that it might use them against conventional foes.
Audio File (MP3)