Warning: This is a rush transcript generated automatically and may contain errors.
Asbed: Hello and welcome to this episode of Conversations on Groong. Today we’re diving into regional developments in the greater Middle East and beyond with intelligence expert, author and scholar, Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, retired. We’ll also explore the role of Turkey as a NATO member in the 44-day war.
Hovik: This promises to be a fascinating discussion, so stay tuned. But before we begin, a quick reminder for our listeners. If you enjoy deep dive coverage of Armenia, the South Caucasus and beyond, please hit the subscribe button. I don’t know if it’s over here or if it’s over here, but it’s somewhere over there.
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Karen Kwiatkowski, we’re really thrilled to have you on the show. Welcome to Groong.
Karen: Well, thank you for having me.
Asbed: Welcome.
Karen: Glad to be here.
Asbed: So Karen, although this is the first time on our podcast, your reputation certainly precedes you. You’re a widely respected expert on military intelligence and a vocal critic of flawed US foreign policies over the years. And as a founding member of VIPS, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, you work to expose the misuse of intelligence to justify war. During your distinguished Air Force career, you served as a Pentagon desk officer and you worked with the National Security Agency as well.
But it was your bold, I think, critiques, especially your essays exposing political corruption in the military intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq in 2003 that cemented your place. So we wanted to learn more about that. And just anything else you can say for those who may not be familiar with your story, please let us know your origin story, so to say.
Karen: OK, sure. Yeah, so I entered the Air Force in 1982, and I had a 20-year career. So the first 10 years in the Air Force was under the, it was Cold War time. So communism, the fight against, and things for people in the military, and really for Americans, when you think about security in the Cold War, it was very black and white for the most part.
People did not question that we were on the right side, that what we did was good, and the enemy was terrible. And then midway through that career, of course, the Soviet Union fell apart and the Cold War ended. In theory, the Cold War ended. And NATO, of course, which had been and the Warsaw Pact had dissolved.
And NATO, which had been put together as a counter to the Warsaw Pact, And my expectation was, as someone in the military and with a European, North African, Middle Eastern type focus, was where I was at that point, I figured that NATO would shrink or even… go away. Why would it be necessary when there wasn’t a Warsaw Pact? And of course, like many things that I thought would happen, the very opposite happened. NATO got bigger and immediately started to create missions for itself.
And of course, the first regarded Yugoslavia, which was pretty insane and hard to understand what was going on with that. But that was NATO’s first post-Soviet Union activity. And of course, it continued along those lines. In fact, what was done in Yugoslavia, led by the US, but a NATO operation is something it’s a pattern we see again and again to break up countries that might have certain nationalism, certain types of integrity. to countries that might be making their own path.
And so we don’t like that. We want them to, it’s part of the, unipolar world that I guess the United States and Europe to some extent believed that they had inherited after the Cold War ended. And so because I didn’t expect those things to happen, but they did happen, then I was confused and I wanted to learn more. So I started to pay closer attention to all that.
And then I continued on in the military. And then around 1998, I went to the Pentagon and I had a couple of tours there. The second tour in the Pentagon that I had was at the Office of Secretary of Defense in the planning for North Africa. Well, initially it was Sub-Saharan Africa.
And then about halfway through that tour, I was moved into North Africa and Middle East area. And the time that I was moved into that space of planning, working for Doug Feith and, of course, Don Rumsfeld and all these guys. It was a neocon hotbed. And I didn’t even know what a neocon was until about 1998 anyway.
But now I was working in the midst of them. And we were planning in 2000, well, really after 9-11, 2001, the target was on Iraq’s It was on Saddam Hussein. And it had been before, but it really stepped up after 9-11. And I can’t, anyone who, most Americans who followed the news after 9-11, of course, you know, Rumsfeld was trying to blame it on Saddam Hussein, but really they blamed it on another group.
You know, we don’t want to go into 9-11. There’s a lot of blame to go around lots of places. But the idea was that this 9-11, this new Pearl Harbor that many neocons had been writing about and hoping for would allow the U.S. to go in, and of course NATO with it, to go into Iraq and topple it. So I’m looking at, I’m doing my job writing policy papers, seeing intelligence.
And what’s weird is we’re also seeing newspaper clippings because when you’re in the Pentagon, they make sure you see a collection of media on a daily basis. And I love reading the newspaper, so to speak, although it was online. And I noticed that some of the things that were in our intelligence, our classified word for word, were showing up in the New York Times and the Washington Post. I’m like, my goodness, this is bad.
Why would they share that? And little by little, of course, it was all about shaping the American populace and shaping the Congress to support a war in Iraq, an invasion and second invasion of Iraq, of course, in 2003. And much of it was based on lies. Of course, the lie part I figured out also, but most of the people in the Pentagon knew what I knew.
It wasn’t like I was like a detective and suddenly I’m seeing lies that no one else is seeing. That’s not the case at all. They all knew it was lies. And what was interesting is they were, the Pentagon, its advisors, its neoconservative policy advisors and neoconservative politicians We’re all working to manipulate the intelligence system to really shape popular opinion so that we could happily, happily have our war in Iraq, which we did.
And I was I did retire as soon as I possibly could, which was that summer after we it was June after we invaded in March of 2003. And then. I had written anonymously about what I was seeing while I was still in uniform. And of course, I had to write anonymously because if I had not written anonymously, I wouldn’t have retired.
And so that was a choice that I made. And then after I retired, of course, I could write with my identity. And I did that. And there were some people that helped me to some extent. get this perspective of what had been done to our country through mismanagement and manipulation of intelligence by a very narrow political group to make war.
I had some help. People helped me get published in the right places. And that is why you probably would know of my name. And then I, of course, continued to be a critic of a lot of this stuff.
So anyway, long story short, I’ve been out for 20-something years now.
Asbed: Well… Do you believe, I mean just very quickly, that what you witnessed at the Pentagon was an isolated incident or is manufacturing consent for wars like a regular part for the course?
Karen: it’s par for the course. And I didn’t realize it was par for the course at the time. Um, I was in the midst of it and I was a little bit shocked by it, but then later, and of course I, I did some study, I have a PhD. So I was getting my PhD along around some of the same timeframe.
And, um, I had to look at history and I had to look at other things. And I read Smedley Butler’s War is a Racket and read a little bit more about his experience back in the turn of the century in Philippines. And very much he had the same perspective I did. That wars profited certain groups, and those groups had friends.
They had friends in Washington. They had friends in industry. And wars could be manufactured. And of course, Butler’s concern was that people who would be paying the price of those wars, which is the victims of the wars and the people our soldiers also that are fighting them, that these people had no benefit.
They were getting no benefit from any of it. But the people back in Washington, the banker class, if you want to call it that, that’s what he called it. They were benefiting. So it’s not a new concept.
You look through our history and we often use the word false flags. The human history is filled with false flags to enable a war to be justified in order for some party to gain. And so I’m pretty cynical about that. We think of the military as a defensive organization.
Well, certainly, and this is one of my current main criticisms, we have a big military in the United States. And it is not defensively oriented. It defends nothing. And if we had to take our military and defend our own country with it, we’re not even designed to do that.
Our capability is offensive. That’s where the money is. And that’s where we’ve shaped our military.
Asbed: For our listeners, we will put in the show notes your three-part article series that appeared in the American Conservative earlier this year, detailing some of your experiences in the DOD under Rumsfeld and gang. So feel free to go to our show notes and read those articles.
Hovik: Karen, it seems like the world is witnessing multiple conflicts that are reshaping regional and global dynamics. In Ukraine, for example, there’s a brutal war continuing as Russia and the West compete for influence. In the Middle East, the ongoing war in Gaza has brought immense devastation with over 45,000 Palestinians killed, the majority of them being women and children. Meanwhile, in Lebanon, we’ve just seen a ceasefire agreement after intense fighting between Hezbollah and Israel, albeit the ceasefire was violated over 52 times, according to the government of France.
And at the same time, and I mean really to the day, as the ceasefire was reached, in Syria, Turkish-backed forces have attacked major cities in the north, threatening total regional instability. Since you specialize in intelligence, can you tell us what is the role of the United States in shaping Ukraine’s and maybe other countries’ strategies, particularly in terms of intelligence sharing and sharing them with the forces of these countries that are, let’s say, proxy forces for the West?
Karen: Yeah. Well, you know, Ukraine is a great example of how the United States uses proxy warfare to achieve some sort of aims that they have. And the aims that we’re achieving in Ukraine, like all of these aims, are very poorly articulated to the American people. In fact, you know, if two or three years ago, I guess when the special military operation of Russia to protect the people in the Donbass, I mean, that’s what they said.
And that started this. This was presented to the American people as an unwarranted and out of control invasion by Russia into sovereign territory of Ukraine, which was entirely innocent. And Ukraine was in a complete defensive mode. And therefore, the West, NATO, the United States, EU, any sympathetic parties, we were doing the right thing to help.
That was the storyline. Now, of course, the truth of the matter and I’m sure your audience knows, and most people by this time, three years into this, have some awareness that the truth of the matter is very different. The United States has been fomenting a lot of, well, we’ve been fomenting instability in Ukraine in order to dominate its government, which we achieved in 2014. So from 2014 on, in Ukraine, the United States had pretty much holding the puppet strings on the government of Ukraine.
Why would we be interested in Ukraine? For the American perspective, obviously energy drives almost all of our foreign policies. And you’ll see that when we talk about these other areas, energy will come into it. Of course, it’s highly predictable that that’s a big driver.
The issue with Ukraine, of course, is minerals. And I don’t know if you saw Lindsey Graham. I saw that. That’s right.
Yeah. He’s big on his, I think it’s 17, 16 or 17 trillion dollars worth of underground minerals that are in the eastern part of Ukraine. And he wants those.
Hovik: And he was claiming it as it’s our thing to take back.
Karen: It’s ours. Yeah. And he thinks… You can’t fault him for thinking this because since 2014, at least, and maybe even prior, we have been manipulating the government of Ukraine.
So when Lindsey Graham says it’s ours, he might be including Ukraine, the people of Ukraine in that. Most likely he’s not. Clearly, he could care less about the people of Ukraine.
Asbed: What’s sad is it’s not just Lindsey Graham saying it, it’s Zelensky basically saying, you know, in exchange for your support in the war, we will give you preferential treatment on all these contracts. We have a lot of resources. And in fact, you know, being from the tech sector, I know that some of those minerals are really important. in terms of the U.S. future, let’s say, conflict with China because of this race towards, you know, more AI, more computing power, more energy. So anyway, that’s just my own perspective on this.
No, I mean,
Karen: it’s this all if you if you gather up enough information, you can see how it’s all pretty well connected. And it’s actually predictable. That’s the problem. Our foreign policy has become quite predictable.
And many Americans are getting even wise to it. But but so we have a proxy war situation in Ukraine. And the end result is much as we saw when they in Yugoslavia, you know, a lot of devastation, a lot of creation of environmental destruction and disaster, including things like, you know, mines in the ground and bomblets and things like that, that you know, these are not good things. We’re using them in Ukraine to do stuff to the Russians.
Now, the NATO aspect, of course, and we also fomented NATO expansion. Now, this is also something that some of the guys, Mearsheimer, of course, and many of the people that you may have interviewed already or seen, have made the point very clearly that When the Soviet Union collapsed and became smaller and you had one of the things Russia needed and got from us was a promise from Bill Clinton. Now, maybe a promise from Bill Clinton. They should have known that that wasn’t going to be a good promise.
But in any case, he was the president. He promised publicly that that NATO would not expand one inch to the east. And I’m. But of course, that wasn’t true.
And we’ve seen more recently that that was a big reason for what was happening in Ukraine. That’s a big reason for the SMO that the Russians launched was this movement to incorporate, to use or to bring in Ukraine to NATO. I think Ukraine also wants to come into the EU. And for both of those economic and military organizations, the Ukraine is not qualified in any way, shape or form to contribute.
But when you look at NATO, what does NATO need? Obviously, it needs members to pay in the thing. And the U.S. needs members because we’re trying to get it to buy as much American technology as possible to standardize. That’s that’s our you know, we want them to be standard and it has to be American standard for the most part.
So we’ve we’ve got what does NATO need? They want to grow, but they also need a place to exercise, to run large-scale military exercises. To justify their existence, they need airfields to practice in. They need bombing ranges.
Increasingly, and we saw this even 30 years ago, increasingly our ranges and our military exercise facilities and our airspace and all these things. Europe does not want us doing that. It’s a populated, settled, not very large geographic mass. So what do we need to do?
Well, we have to go to the edges. We have to go to North Africa. And we do that. And we have to go to Central Asia and the Caucasus.
And we do that. And we have to go to the Middle East. And we do that. But we need for Europeans to practice, where can they do it?
They’re not going to do it in Holland. They’re not going to do it over Germany. The people aren’t going to tolerate that. There’s no space for that.
So what do they need? They need ranges. You know, we have a large state of Nevada. It’s something like 72 or 80 percent owned by the federal government.
And much of that state is used to practice. Just bomb and to target and to run large scale army exercises. So anyway, there’s reasons why they want Ukraine, but none of those reasons are good for Ukraine, which is why you have to own Zelensky, because if he was a true Ukrainian patriot or a person who cared about his own country and the future of his country, he would not be advocating to be involved with NATO because NATO intends fully, as the US does, to use Ukraine’s territory. In fact, this sounds crazy, but the depopulation of much of Ukraine, in part due to the war, obviously they’ve lost over 10 million due to immigration.
Most of those people probably not coming back soon. They have lost a lot of their reproducing age men certainly and half a million men have been lost so it’s a it’s it is what we’re seeing and we’re not talking about it we should be talking about it in ukraine we it is a depopulation of that country but why why this fits in perfectly with american agenda not with the ukrainian agenda it is very helpful to ukraine what’s happening
Hovik: Karen, you mentioned that all of these conflicts have a certain interconnectedness. For example, I mean, I considered Nagorno-Garabakh, Armenia, Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria. I mean, the list goes on. There’s an interconnectedness to them.
What is the common theme here in American foreign policy or military policy? What’s connecting these things? Is it a resource grab? Resource grab away from China?
Is it anti-Russian? What’s the common theme here?
Karen: Well, it depends on who you’re talking to, but it seems like there are some parallel themes. One of them certainly is anti-Russia. There’s a great fear amongst our government leaders, the people that design our foreign policy. And I don’t know why it’s there, but it is.
And neoconservatives, some embrace this very strongly, that China is an enemy. And China is a populated country, a high-tech country at this point, a very economic engine of the world in many ways. But we don’t want to take on China and Russia at the same time. Now, of course, this sounds ludicrous.
Why are we as Americans talking about the next war? Why do we need to take on China? Most of our trade is with China. We love China.
All of the things you buy in America are made in China. Not all of them. But a great many of them are. And certainly the people, the working class people.
I mean, if you go into Walmart, that’s where the working class and the poor in this country shop. They’re everywhere. If you go into Walmart and buy something, I would say it’s probably made in China. That’s right.
And it’s made in China. They have lower cost of production. There’s so many. And some of those things aren’t consistent with our democratic values.
There’s no doubt about it. But. our way of life in America is enabled very much by China. Most Americans, if we said, we’re going to go to war with China and half the Walmarts will close down and the other half won’t have anything you can afford to buy. And if that was presented to the American people, they would say, why are we doing that?
That’s very stupid. But the people that make our foreign policy don’t shop at Walmart. And we know this. They probably have never even been in a Walmart.
So Their view is there’s an ego boost. There’s some sort of psychological boost that they get. So anti-Russia is a big thing in preparation for Dealing directly with China. I think that’s one big thing.
So if Russia has an ally, we don’t like that country. If Russia has an enemy, we kind of like that country, depending on what it is. So there’s that. But the other big aspect.
OK, energy. That’s the second one. Or maybe it’s the first one. But energy is a big one.
We. manipulate the world, we engage with the world in energy markets. And of course, we are producing, the United States is a producer of energy, but we’re also a great consumer of energy. And energy, when I say energy, I’m really talking gas and oil. I’m not talking green energy, you know, because you’ve got to put it on electrical wires and there’s a lot of dissipation.
So if you want to get energy from one half, from the other side of the world to where you are in a short amount of time, it’s going to be oil or gas. So Pipelines, permission for pipelines, security of pipelines. I mean, think about Afghanistan. This was another war that started really after 9-11, because I guess bin Laden was being harbored or protected by the Taliban.
But you know, three months before that in June, we were big friends with the Taliban. You know, we were going great with the Taliban. We just awarded them huge money because they had finally, after six years of effort, shut down the opium market in Afghanistan. And Polenpao went there and presented them a financial reward.
There was a big ceremony, all that good stuff. We were friends with them, but we were trying hard to be friends with them because we wanted a pipeline built. And that didn’t work out very well. They couldn’t provide the security that we wanted for that trans-Afghanistan pipeline.
And we asked them to do things that they couldn’t do because they didn’t really control the whole of Afghanistan. So when 9-11 came, I mean, we were at war within… Within less, I don’t know, maybe six weeks, we were at war with Afghanistan. And now the Taliban, who we had embraced, because they had done things like stop the drug flow and all this other stuff, now they were our enemy.
To me, that was a big oil play. That was a big energy play. Iraq is another one, but even Iraq back in 1991, you know, Kuwait is slant drilling Iraqis oil. And we said, oh, that’s crazy.
Kuwait would never do that. But what happened after it was all over with? What did we find out? Oh, my goodness.
Kuwait was slant drilling Iraq’s oil. So we were benefiting from that. We talk about Syria today. We see the U.S. involved in Iraq. well and in the northeast that’s right but no we’re not we’re more than involved in the northeast we are occupying part of syrian territory they want us to leave we have we are unlawfully there protecting conoco oil fields and we won’t leave um so and that’s just one of the number of things we’ve done against syria because of course the um the uh Isis and the various iterations of Isis, which, of course, they were our enemy when bin Laden was alive.
And now we say, oh, Isis is terrible, except when it’s working for us. And it has been working for us in other parts of Syria. We do a lot of stuff like this and it’s all on one level. You can connect it to energy advantages, energy flows and the advantages of energy flow.
And also the people that study Russia, of course, Russia is a big energy exporter and mineral, you know, it’s raw material, seen as a less industrialized country, more raw material export. Our view is we can pressure Russia if we can control oil prices, if we can bring them down, or we sell to their customers. I mean, this can be debated, but I would have a hard time being convinced that the US did not destroy the Nord Stream pipelines under the sea there a couple, what was it, two and a half years ago?
Hovik: Right.
Karen: I would it would take a lot of convincing. I thought that we did it from the beginning, even though I had no way of doing the research. Seymour Horsch has done a lot of research and he thinks they did it. But we said we were going to do it.
We did it. And then afterwards, the Polish guy, the helicopter Sikorsky, you know, our good friend.
Asbed: Yeah.
Karen: Yeah. He goes, great job. You know, so wait a minute. You’re going to deny this, but it’s understandable if we don’t believe your denials.
So, in fact, there’s a saying somewhere and I’m sure people use it all the time, but you don’t believe anything until the government denies it. And our government has denied being involved in the Syria thing, which confirms that they are involved. I mean, to me, it confirms it. But anyway, the third thing, of course, some people would say it’s the first or the second, and that is our relationship with Israel.
And Israel, as a country, pretty much, you know, a home for the Jewish people. We have a great Jewish diaspora in the United States. They are politically influential. But Israel’s interests and our interests in the Middle East, whether it’s energy, pressuring great powers that might be aligned with Russia, any of those things, it is very hard oftentimes to distinguish between an Israeli mission and agenda and the U.S. mission and agenda in the region.
So, you know, some people say, well, tail wagging the dog, dog wagging the tail. It depends on the day. Sometimes we’re using Israel. A lot of times they’re using us.
But when it comes to… particularly when we talk about Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh and who’s on whose side, very complicated sometimes. But if you look at what Israel is interested in doing, both historically and right now, right now what they’re doing, because obviously they’re engaging on five fronts in a battle with all their neighbors to expand their territory, which they may or may not be able to do. It’s not clear yet. But Israel’s interest is, and Israel’s enemies and those that Israel doesn’t count as friends, that’s very important to US foreign policy.
Now, an average American, it may not make a lot of sense because we’re not familiar with what Israel’s government cares about and values, what’s important to them, what’s not. We don’t follow that on a day-to-day basis. But if you start looking at it, then you can understand a little bit more.
Asbed: So- Karen, if I just may, in the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh, Israel provided a significant, if not most, of the weapons to Azerbaijan. And currently in this war in Gaza and Lebanon and et cetera, Azerbaijan is providing oil for Israel. I think it’s up to 40% of Israel’s consumption of oil comes from Azerbaijan via Turkey.
Karen: I did not know that.
Asbed: Israel in our region, I think is very much interested in constraining Iran and it’s a very symbiotic relationship. Yeah. Turkey is all talk about, you know, supporting Palestinians, but even then, like it never touched the oil. It never touched the iron and all of those raw materials that Israel needs for, to execute this war.
And our region is, turns out, we’re on the way. So we are involved in one way or another.
Karen: Yeah.
Hovik: Yeah. And I have to say that, you know, there used to be a huge amount of sympathy for Israel as the children of the Holocaust and we Armenians as the children of genocide. Do you see the empathy and the solidarity that that created? But after the last four or five years where Israel has absolutely essentially fueled all of Azerbaijan’s fascism, that goodwill has completely disappeared.
Nobody really thinks that Israel is a friend of Armenia anymore. And that’s capital that’s been wasted, in my opinion.
Karen: Yeah, it probably it probably is capital that they’ve wasted. And they’re wasting more than just that capital, too, because the way that Israel is progressing with their the way they’re proceeding with what they’re doing. It is beyond the pale in Gaza. I mean, there is no doubt what’s happening in Gaza is a not just a genocide, but a planned genocide. a planned genocide in men, women, and children.
They want it depopulated. They want it depopulated. And I mean, in a sense, for Nagorno-Karabakh, when, you know, just more recently, as they, you know, the Armenians.
Hovik: One year ago.
Karen: Yes, one year ago. That is a depopulation of Armenians from a place, from a territory.
Hovik: Native lands, yeah.
Karen: That’s right. So… I think the relationship with Azerbaijan goes much deeper than that. But you can see how, and if Israel makes a lot of American foreign policy, which it does, it shapes it very, very, very distinctly, and not just in the Middle East, but elsewhere, but heavily in the Middle East, they are not opposed to taking land and they are not opposed to depopulating land.
And we aren’t either, because as we talked about in Ukraine, we were very interested in depopulating a good much of Ukraine. I think we want to use it to practice our bombs in NATO if we can ever get a peace agreement. And certainly when people talk about Ukraine as… having some sort of demilitarized zone or a neutral zone in between that’s accessed by NATO, that that will be a testing and training ground. That will be an active military site, which serves a purpose in NATO’s mind and serves a purpose in the American mind.
So American government and absolutely the Israeli government, left and right, I don’t care which it is, they all support Only the far, far left in Israel does not support the genocide. The argument is, is it going fast enough or not fast enough? This is the debate. So this is a very terrible thing.
And this is, when you say wasting capital, obviously the Armenian example is a very specific example, but I think in general, Israel is really wasting much of its international capital. Right, I agree with that. And they’re not hiding… in any way, shape or form their intention. They’re not hiding really what they’re doing other than by shooting.
Obviously, they are targeting journalists and they’re trying to control the media. And that in itself is, I think, a war crime, I’m sure. But anyway, they want the land. They want it depopulated of people that they don’t want there and they don’t care how they’re doing it.
And so what Azerbaijan is doing did and what Israel is doing and has done in the past, but is doing again now, those are the same thing. So they are compatriots in many ways.
Asbed: Yeah, I mean, outwardly, it’s not apparent, but I was just reading, I just quickly searched it up. There is a WikiLeaks cable from 2009. That was leaked from the U.S. State Department that said basically Azerbaijan’s relations with Israel are like an iceberg.
And what you see is like 10 percent. So there is a because Azerbaijan is a Muslim country, there needs to be some discretion on how much Azerbaijan cooperates with Israel. But definitely the partnership is much closer than we I think all could imagine, in my opinion.
Karen: Well, you know, one of the things with Azerbaijan also with the Shia population and there’s a lot of Azeris in Iran or people that have some family links or whatever. It’s a segment of the Iranian population. And, you know, Israel and the Mossad and their other intelligence agencies are very much into, you know, obviously they’re very capable and they’re very much into infiltrating all of Iran’s weak points. And using Azerbaijan as a way to gather intelligence, as a way to cultivate people that can do your bidding and to pay them.
I’m not saying these people are traitors to Azerbaijan, but it is in Israel’s interest to be able to move freely and to leverage the geography, the religion, the culture against Iran. And they can do that in Azerbaijan. In Armenia, unfortunately, I think when many Israelis think of Armenia, they probably think of the Armenian center in Jerusalem that they don’t want there, that they are also trying to get rid of.
Hovik: Right.
Karen: It’s not they want to take over and have you work there or have anybody work. They want to take it over and have you gone. They don’t care where you go, whoever it is, whether it’s if they want the land and somebody else is on it and they decide they want it. They don’t want to integrate.
They’re not into integration. They’re not into, you know, I mean, like you think about America. You think about some of our border states, Texas comes to mind. You know, in Texas, we have a large Hispanic population.
We don’t call them. They’re Texans. They’re Texans. They, you know, they and there are two languages in Texas, at least two big languages that are spoken frequently.
And people accept that we work together. There are Mexican business owners. There are none. Hispanic business owners.
There are workers that aren’t Hispanic. There are workers who are Hispanic. There’s integration. There isn’t this kind of, their, their, their identity is Texan.
Well, Israel, they have, they’re not interested in a common identity. They want Jewish control, Zionist control over territory that they have decided to claim. And, um, You know, the small amount that the Armenians have in Jerusalem is on that list. I’m sorry.
It’s on that list. It is.
Hovik: We’ve seen it actively over the past year that there’s been a company that’s owned by, you know, some shady entities, let’s say, have tried to set up a 99-year lease and take over. And there’s just the battle goes on. So I don’t know exactly where we are. But right now, I think a group of our friends are on nightly vigil. to make sure that there are not Jewish settlers who are just going to come and create a de facto situation on the ground by camping there and saying, this is ours now.
So yeah, it’s a battle to survive in Jerusalem.
Asbed: I want to bring this back to the U.S. foreign policy. And during the time that you were there, that was the unipolar moment when the U.S. was the sole police officer in the world. And many scholars are now predicting the rise of a multipolar world. As a former soldier, as a military expert, as an intelligence expert, how do you think this new, what will be the U.S. role in this new multipolar world?
Do you expect there to be more conflict, less conflict? And, you know, what is the role of the military in that? You know, how do you think it will change?
Karen: Yeah, well, it definitely has to change because the unipolar military that we have developed over the last, I don’t know, 40 years, it can’t do its job. It can’t function very well. It is not effective and it is very expensive. And then you have our country, which is a big country, a wealthy country, but we have massive, massive debt.
So we can’t handle our budget. The military has to be paid somehow. Already it’s a trillion dollar a year military. And it’s not producing.
It’s not able to do what the unipolar guys wanted it to do. So now we have to shift. So how do we shift? Well, first off, who wants to shift?
The American people want to shift. And I don’t know if you watched our, you followed our election. You know, they voted for Trump. Now, Trump’s a, you know, he’s a crazy guy.
He has people that really, really hate him. But he also has people that really, really love him. But he’s smart politically. And Always in our elections, the candidate, it doesn’t matter about the party, the candidate that says, I am for non-intervention abroad.
I will put America first. They don’t have to say America first. But, you know, if you think about George W. Bush’s election, what a pathetic president he was.
But in his election, and really up until 9-11, but his campaign… story was I’m a non-interventionist and this other guy I’m running against Gore oh he’s going to intervene he’s going to be involved in many global organizations and whatever whatever so the people always choose the peaceful candidate when when Goldwater ran against LBJ LBJ is the most incredible warmonger we had He could care less about any of that. But his campaign was not about I’m a warmonger. His campaign was Goldwater is going to allow nuclear war to happen. And I’m going to make sure it doesn’t happen.
I’m the peace candidate. And he won that. He won that election. All of these guys, Americans vote for non-intervention.
They vote for peace. So they don’t, if Americans don’t care if we’re the world’s policeman, we don’t want, no one ever asked Americans, do you want to be the world’s policeman? We don’t want that. We don’t support that.
I don’t care what party you’re in. We don’t support it. It is the problem is the policymakers. It’s the neoconservatives who have a global agenda.
It is the military industrial complex because it makes tons of money and garners even more influence when it’s engaging globally and doing proxy wars and maybe even big wars so that push for the unipolar and and we’re going to run the world uh we’re writing checks we can’t cash so that’s going to come to an end it’s going to come to an end with or without a multipolar world movement it’s going to come to an end with or without bricks with or without the rise of decentralization we cannot be a unipolar so so The policymakers probably don’t want that to happen. So they’re going to resist it. So we have big problems there.
I can’t predict how it’s going to come out to play. But as the rest of the world asserts itself and becomes less linked politically, economically, militarily, to the United States, which they’re already doing. I mean, we see the movement away from the dollar. People like the dollar.
But when you have so much debt and you make war and you treat everybody like crap and you can’t be trusted, then the dollar is hurt by that. So it’s smart to not want to be totally invested in the dollar. Well, so that trend is going to continue to happen. But I think all these countries that are moving away from the American trajectory, What can they do?
They can almost have to just watch. They almost have to just watch and wait to see how we are going to handle what’s coming. And what’s coming, of course, is major change. It has to.
Whether it’s under the Trump administration or not, we cannot afford to be the world’s policemen and we cannot afford to sanction everybody we don’t like and not trade with them. That is not good for Americans and we are killing ourselves, much as Israel is doing to themselves with the way they’re conducting their war. I mean, you know, they’ve lost a number, I think 3 million people have left the country. not permanently, but to get out of the war zone and with them businesses. And of course, Palestinians are not as many Palestinians are working.
Certainly no Gazans are employed now. So they don’t have their economic life is very much in some ways collapsing. It’s certainly being degraded by what they’re doing.
Asbed: We try to cover essentially a more global perspective and U.S. role in that global conflict. But I want to bring us to our region that we’re concerned about, which is Armenia. And essentially, Azerbaijan’s 44-day war in 2020 over Nagorno-Karabakh. reshaped the south caucasus and i say reshaped i think that’s an understatement because prior to that armenia used to be a player armenia used to have a say so the role of armenians as a subject in international relations was taken into into account and considered that flipped upside down very quickly after the war.
And we are now seeing a government that is making concession after concession and begging Azerbaijan not to take anything more. The argument is, if we give them more land, if we give them this, if we give them that, then we’ll have peace. that only fuels the appetite, I believe, of the aggressors. And I think that this war was unique over the past history of Armenia in terms of the impact of foreign involvement, whereas previously most foreign actors tried to stay away, with mainly Russia playing on both sides during the early 90s. I want to explore a little bit about the role of some other regional actors in this war.
I should also say that after the war in 2020, there was still a population of 120,000 Armenians were left in Nagorno-Karabakh out of the original 150,000. 30,000 fled during the war. And then last year, a year ago, for those who are not familiar, the remaining 120,000 were ethnically cleansed out of their centuries-old homeland.
Nagorno-Garabakh for Armenians is sacred land, and it’s the most ancient piece of land that Armenians maintained a contiguous existence on so it is uh it is particularly i mean i don’t want to you know be emotional but it’s particularly devastating time for armenians to be an armenian and unfortunately we’re our our grief is overshadowed by more global things like ukraine gaza and everything not that we uh not that western media cared about us at all like in the past but anyway so when we were talking with Glenn Diesen, episode 359 of our podcast, we asked him whether the war in 2020 was a trap set up for Russia because we knew that the wheels for the Ukraine war were already in motion.
There was a RAND, 2019 RAND Corporation report titled Extending Russia that cynically, almost like Machiavelli wrote it, it was talking about how the US and how the West could exploit various conflicts in the region, including the South Caucasus, to strain Russia’s resources to occupy it and to… divert its attention. So Glenn Diesen, in that discussion, he said that if Russia intervened on the side of Armenians, it would have a huge problem with Turkey and Azerbaijan right now. As we know, Russia is providing gas to Azerbaijan, and Azerbaijan is rebranding that gas as Azeri and selling it to Europe.
It’s a very critical piece of resources for Europe itself. And that’s why we’re seeing European diplomats and politicians kneeling in front of the dictator in Azerbaijan for anything for that gas and for that energy. And if Russia didn’t intervene in that war, then it would risk alienating Armenians, which it did. And another point in that Grant Corporation report, we will link it in our documents, in our show notes, but it actually talks about Azerbaijan being a very attractive geographic position for intelligence gathering against Iran and Russia.
So I don’t know if you read the report, but you… Yeah, I did read some of it, yes. But you were essentially like, the report was echoing what you said. So post 2020, post 2023, Russia’s influence in Armenia has declined sharply.
Armenia’s government partly blames Russia for the loss, despite its own, you can say treachery, you can say idiocy, but Armenia is now pivoting towards West. And that basically is exactly what was predicted in the Iran Corporation report, which said that if we can resolve the conflict, and by resolve, I guess ethnic cleansing of Karabakh would also be considered resolution. If we can consider that conflict result, then we are able to flip Armenia towards the West. And that is what’s happening right now.
We’re witnessing it live. In your opinion, was the US and Western role here, and as alluded to in the Rand Report, a simple innocent bystander that was powerless to prevent the war if it really wanted to, and a subsequent ethnic cleansing, or an unwilling beneficiary, or potentially worse? What are your thoughts?
Karen: Yeah. Well, I think you’re right. I think if you look at the larger strategy that the U.S. has towards Russia, it has been… This is a neoconservative strategy.
This is very much how do we weaken Russia? How do we get Russia to overextend itself? Once that ethnic cleansing happened in Nagorno-Karabakh, then they could more clearly take a side. And also, like you said, Russia isn’t the…
There’s airspace now between Russia and Armenia. There’s a problem now because Russia didn’t help it when really it should have. In many ways, with the agreements that they had, you would have expected that. And also the Christian thing because Russia is very much becoming a conservative, orthodox state And kind of restoring, wanting to restore religious tradition, the Christian religious tradition, which would have made it a natural linkage with Armenia.
But that’s kind of been, it’s farther away rather than closer to. At what level does the U.S. make this happen? This is what it’s hard to say. Because if you look at all of our diplomats and all of our embassies, and all of our CIA operations around the world that manage our foreign policy, that try to set up the stage for anything that will help the people in power in America, certainly in Washington.
They are setting a stage for what they did works for them because now you have Armenia possibly, maybe potentially being brought into the EU or the European Union circle of influence. And this is another battleground, much like other former Soviet Union states. I mean, we have gone after almost everyone. In fact, and when they don’t vote the right way, like in Hungary, in Romania, in Georgia, when they don’t vote correctly, we then interfere on the ground with whether it’s a color revolution or some other type of on the ground operation to shape it.
So now Armenia can become a state, another state to be used by the United States, not to be helped because we don’t care about helping any of them. Again, the energy thing seems to be dominant here. with Azerbaijan. By being friends with Azerbaijan, by supporting them, by ensuring we have contacts there and intelligence and economic relationships, we are in a better position to deal with the country we’re really trying to go after, which is Russia. And for Armenia, we can use it again now.
Now we can use both countries. With that problem solved, which is the ethnic cleansing resolved, now the US can use both of those countries. It fits in more nicely with our foreign policy. But that foreign policy is the foreign policy of a unipolar power.
I don’t think the American leadership gets that. That’s not going to last forever. It’s already in decline. It’s in big decline. the American people can’t afford to pay for a continuation of some sort of global dominance, whether it’s military or economic.
We just, that’s not happening. So to me as an American, I’m curious as to how and when our foreign policy will actually shift into one that’s far more constitutional and far more in line with what the voters in this country have been asking for again and again and again and never receive.
Asbed: Let me just add to what you said in that it is insane to think about Armenia, which is landlocked. Most of its major neighbors, not even Turkey, is very thrilled about having an EU-friendly Armenia. Russia and Iran are inimical against that idea. Azerbaijan is definitely inimical.
It is dumbfounding to think that Armenians can see themselves in the EU, and even Georgia is now backtracking. But that is being used as a candy, I think, or carrot to sway Armenia. As you’re saying, if this unipolar world order is receding, the U.S. will have less and less resources. And one way to sway Armenia would be to provide resources.
But it’s not even doing that. I mean, they’re sending billions, hundreds of billions of dollars to Ukraine. And I think the order of magnitude in terms of aid to Armenia is in the tens of millions. And the Armenian government is dangling that in front of the Armenian people saying that, oh, see, the West is supporting us.
And it’s just ridiculous. But I just wanted to make that comment because I think that definitely the capability of the United States to be the sole superpower and the decision maker relies heavily on funding client states, including what appears to be Armenia right now. And it’s not even natural. I think in our region, it’s not like, you know, maybe Georgia with its access to the sea, you still have a sea access to the European Union.
Armenia doesn’t even have that. Armenia is completely in luck.
Karen: Yeah. The aid, the money, and again, follow the money. That is actually really the best way, I think, to understand American foreign policy is to see where the money goes. And so it goes to Israel, it goes to Ukraine.
Some of it goes to Taiwan, but And then you can pick your other countries around the world that we subsidize heavily. And that’s what our real interests, that’s where our real interests are. And who’s making the money? Where, you know, the money is created.
I mean, the money, much of it’s just printed or created electronically. You know, debt is created so the government can have money to spend. And it spends it on wars and it spends it on, you know, arming. Some of it’s spent on American companies.
But if you follow all that money, you can see where our priorities are. And in Ukraine, that money is running out. Well, specifically in Ukraine. Look what Biden is doing in his last month and a half.
And Jake Sullivan, our national security director, I guess, we’re going to push everything that’s been authorized. Billions of dollars. There’s a couple billions that they’re going to go and try to dump onto a broken, a very broken and a very corrupt Ukrainian government. None of that’s going to make a difference on the battlefield because most of that money is going to be, it’ll be banked.
It’ll be banked by the politicians. It’s not going to be used for a war effort. It’ll be used to position the people that are going to stay there and be lackeys or whatever it is that our agenda is. But this flow of money to Ukraine is ending.
It is ending. That’s one thing that Trump as a so-called, well, he is a businessman. He’s not a so-called businessman. He is a businessman.
And his perspective is we don’t throw good money after bad. And if
Hovik: Without results, of course.
Karen: Without results, yes. He wants to see results and there aren’t any results there. So we know that’s changing. In theory, Trump ran on America first, so that we wouldn’t print more money or create more debt for the government to go into new wars and new war fronts.
But the people in Washington don’t believe that Trump will change that. They’re scared that he might, but truly the deep state is far more powerful. It beat Trump the first four years very easily, and they expect that it will continue and beat him. So they expect more wars and that the savings from not funding Ukraine and getting some sort of settlement there, will actually be used in new warfare.
So this is what is worrisome. And also Trump himself is not a foreign policy expert. He’s not a historical expert. He listens to people that he trusts.
He’s got his Lebanese son-in-law. billionaire he’s got two billionaire son-in-laws one jewish one lebanese and he’s got both of them uh advising him on middle eastern type issues uh is that good or bad i mean it’s better than what who’s inviting advising biden but we don’t know you know we don’t really have a sense that is any of this in america’s best interest um or is it part of a cohesive foreign policy but again If I was any country, that includes Armenia, a small country or a large country, I would be very hands-off with the United States. I would not want to engage closely with the United States.
Our country, our government is not to be trusted. We know this historically, but in particular, because we’re under such financial duress in this country. We have a debt crisis that… I really don’t think people understand how massive the impacts will be of that.
Hovik: Let me make a quick note here that Jeffrey Sachs was in Armenia only about two weeks ago. Was he really? Yes. And he said absolutely exactly the same thing.
He said, do not trust the United States.
Karen: I mean, your words just echo in my ear. Oh, my gosh. Wow. Okay.
Asbed: So Karen, I’m hoping to gain a little bit more insight and from your experience as an intelligence analyst in this next section that we want to talk about. Look, Armenians lost terribly, but… That war was going on for 30 years. And during that time, during those previous three decades, there have been various attempts to test the strength of Garabakh’s defenses by Azerbaijan, including a smaller war in 2016.
Yet Azerbaijan was not able to achieve success at that time. And many analysts that we talked to argue that Turkey’s involvement in this war as opposed to previous cases where it was mostly hands-off or declarative, was the key determinant of the outcome. Basically, 95% of the analysts believed that Turkey’s involvement was the number one determining factor. And while Turkey didn’t commit huge troops to the war, it sent Syrian mercenaries.
The same ones that are in Idlib today were in Azerbaijan in 2020. And then they invaded Karabakh. There were reports that Turkish special forces were taking part in that war. In fact, they participated in the military parade after the war in Baku, where both Erdogan and Aliyev were present.
Four or more Turkish generals were incorporated directly under the Azerbaijani military command. The drone war was reportedly being controlled from AWACS aircraft on Turkish airspace, but with full view of the battlefields and everything. And Erdogan, lastly, just like last year when the Israel thing was heating up, Erdogan boasted that just like we entered Karabakh, we can enter Israel too. So Turkish denials that it was not involved, you know, against all this evidence that I pointed, just like they’re saying they’re not involved in Idlib today.
Karen: But they are. And they have the images in the picture. We have the license plates.
Asbed: They put their flags, I mean, on the occupied areas. Anyway, so one aspect of Turkey’s involvement in the 44-day war remains particularly opaque to us. It’s the role of the initial operational success achieved by Azerbaijan. And by that, I mean a massive attack with precise long-range weaponry from drones, from aircraft against Armenian air defense targets and other critical targets.
Analysts say that in the first hour of the war essentially like I don’t want to put exact numbers but like roughly 75% of Armenia’s All of Armenia’s air defense. I mean it’s already a small country but all of Armenia’s air defense targets were eliminated and Military analysts suggest that essentially Turkey’s contribution in terms of ISR which is intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance were as vital as to the war as the other forms of support it provided, such as the terrorists.
Karen: I think, no, I mean, I did not realize it was as a comprehensive of a military success. That reeks, that reeks of ISR Total battle space vision coordination, which you wouldn’t have expected from Azerbaijan. They didn’t have it before. And Turkey’s involvement would have brought that with their AWACS capability or with their NATO capability.
And… like we see with Ukraine. You can have standoff capability far, far away, nowhere near the airspace, and still monitor and control and direct targeting in the airspace. So we know it’s certainly possible. Turkey as a NATO member is kind of the bad boy.
They don’t like Turkey, but Turkey is the only NATO member that has a big army. Nobody else has anything remotely approaching the men on the ground potential that Turkey brings to it. So I think Erdogan is able to leverage all that to get what he wants. And also, of course, he works with israel this this thing that he uh you know he broke he stopped exporting certain things to israel but not the important things right not the over gossip so he says well i stand with i stand with my brethren um against what israel is doing but really he speaks out of two sides of his mouth.
He’s looking after himself, which is understandable. But it looks like from what you’re saying, and I haven’t researched it, and I should have, and it isn’t something that it’s a very interesting thing what you’re saying, because you’re saying NATO effectively used its capability, which is international across multiple countries, multiple airspace. And assisted in a war that Washington and I’m sure many NATO countries were publicly protesting. Because I remember that there were concerns about this.
Asbed: Yeah, they expressed. I mean, I don’t know if expression of concern is protest, but they were they were very concerned.
Karen: Yes. And with the air quotes, you have to keep the air quotes. But yes. So.
Hovik: Sometimes it bordered on deep concern.
Karen: Now Azerbaijan has it coming. Yeah, well, I’ll tell you, the Ukraine model that we’ve seen and gotten more reporting on, the use of NATO and the United States are targeting inside of Russia. None of the strikes inside of Russia would be possible without U.S. men in airplanes, men on computer screens doing the targeting, NATO and the United States. So that is clear.
So would we also do that in Azerbaijan on behalf to solve a problem? Yes, we would. There’s no doubt we would do that. Now, proving it exactly, I mean, it seems it’s something that I think is probably going to come out.
If it hasn’t already, in terms of actual data, it seems very possible.
Asbed: And that’s the worst case scenario. But let’s exclude that scenario. But let’s say that could Turkey as a NATO… And I’m sure that when we say Turkey, we should understand NATO.
But let’s say that Turkey… was a recalcitrant member that acted outside of NATO permission.
What I really want to understand is as a member of NATO, what information does Turkey have by default that it could use For instance like just Turkey and Azerbaijan together like have a couple of satellites and I mean Azerbaijan has a couple Turkey maybe has tens but NATO has 300 satellites NATO has much more aircraft surveilling the area NATO has much more drones surveilling the area so If my logic is correct, then could Turkey have actually sort of used the power of NATO, maybe with tasted approval, maybe with like, you know, NATO turning its eyes, you know, in another direction, could Turkey have used that information and pro shared that with Azerbaijan.
Are you aware of how a NATO countries share ISR with each other? How does that, how does that work?
Karen: You know, I can’t, I don’t know the specifics. I know when I was stationed in Italy, so I worked in, I worked with NATO, worked with NATO people. And at one point I had a three month tour where we worked with NATO and all of the, important stuff whether it was doing something testing something or operating something tended to be done by americans okay so this is not a good sign if that’s the way it still is now of course um part of what the nato countries do with all of their training is they learn how to um And they are trained and they operate our equipment. They operate these NATO equipment.
So it’s so what I’m saying is Turkey has people that could have been that could have operated NATO equipment totally capable of doing that. Could they have done it without American knowledge or without NATO knowledge? Probably not. But If you think about how the rules are written among NATO, they have some leeway in a national thing.
They have the ability to test. I mean, there are probably five different ways, legally, Turkey could have brought to bear intelligence to help or to assist in what Azerbaijan was prosecuting. Did they? Probably so.
Did we know about it? I would say yes, because, see, the reason, you know, we call Turkey the recalcitrant or the non-favored member of NATO. But why don’t we kick it out of NATO? Because we need, NATO needs Turkey.
They need it for the location, not just for its military, not just for its standing army. But we need Turkey for many things. Strategy, intelligence, Turkey often will proxy war for us. And we also proxy war against Turkey.
I mean, we support the Kurds, right? I mean, we do this. But certainly when it comes to Syria, you know, the Americans are totally happy that Turkey Turkey is harassing Syria, that Turkey is backing some of these guys that have actually invaded Syria. periodically attack syrian installations so this is something we support um turkey does it we know it it’s it’s almost like um you know very it’s a tacit from a tacit permission to proceed so they probably had tacit permission to proceed and if they didn’t The ability, the NATO rules, you know, Turkish guys can operate those systems. Well, are they running an exercise?
Are they training? I mean, there’s five, there’s ways that they can operate these systems and we can just turn the other, we can say, oh, we don’t, you’re training. We’re not worried about it because you’re training. And it happens to be over Armenian airspace and Azerbaijan battle space.
You’re, you’re, They could have easily done it. But technology-wise, you can’t really have too many barriers on these systems. We want to. Obviously, we have the same problem with classification levels.
We have so many things that are classified. How do we keep it compartmentalized? How come we have people that are able to steal it? There’s been five scandals in the United States just recently.
Military people or connected people in the State Department who have had access to information that they leaked or sold or something that they shouldn’t have had access to. So it’s very difficult to limit it. So when operationally speaking, what you’re looking for is interoperability. That means everybody can operate it.
That means Turkey can have access. Yes. I think your suspicions are on target.
Asbed: There have been a lot of attempted investigations, but Armenia, as I said, is a very small country, so many of the people who are interested in this are Armenian journalists who don’t have as much resources as, let’s say, the New York Times would have to investigate what happened in this war. Some Russian reports were prepared about the war. But yeah, I mean, all these things are obviously, we are talking without being able to prove directly, but I do hope that one day when the maybe secret records are unsealed, at least we will see what happened. But there is no smoke without a fire, as they say.
Karen: That’s right. That’s exactly right. And I think we will find out more things because, of course, the world continues to change. Erdogan is not going to be the ruler.
I say ruler. I guess he’s an elected president. But he will not be in charge of Turkey forever, just like Netanyahu will not be in charge of Israel forever. Although the people coming behind Netanyahu are very much like him.
That’s fine.
Hovik: And the same with Erdogan, by the way.
Karen: That’s right. That’s what I’m saying. So with Erdogan, even though they may be similar to him, oftentimes you want to throw your predecessor under the bus. And this may be information that comes out because honestly…
I don’t know how much power the Turkish people have. Obviously, they do have elections. They do riot and protest periodically. But I’m not sure their opinion is that they want Turkey engaging in wars everywhere and being perceived as the U.S. lackey, as they are often perceived as.
Asbed: One of the former foreign ministers of Turkey authored a book called Zero Problems with Neighbors. And now it has turned into Zero Neighbors Without Problems. Oh my goodness.
Karen: Okay.
Hovik: All right. This is a good note to finish on. On that note, let’s be done for today. This has been a fascinating conversation.
We expected that, so it’s not a surprise. Karen, thank you so much for coming on our show. We hope to keep in touch with you.
Karen: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for having me. I’ve had a lot of fun and learned some things too. So thank you.
Hovik: Wonderful.
Asbed: Thank you, Karen.
Hovik: That’s our show today. This episode was recorded on December 2nd, 2024. We’ve been talking with Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who is a retired U.S. Air Force officer who served at the Pentagon and the NSA.
She is known for her critiques of U.S. military intelligence and its political influences, particularly leading up to the Iraq War. Kwiatkowski has authored books on African military operations and contributed to works on liberty and foreign policy. She holds advanced degrees from Harvard, the University of Alaska, and the Catholic University of America, where her PhD focused on Angola and the Reagan doctrine. She’s also a founding member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity organization.
I’m Aspet Bedrosyan.
Asbed: And I’m Hovig Manucharyan.
Hovik: Please find us on social media and follow us everywhere you get your Armenian news. The links are in the show notes.
Asbed: And don’t forget to comment on this episode. Let us know what you think.
Hovik: And support us. Go to podcasts.groong.org slash donate and help us out. Thanks for listening. We’ll talk to you soon.