June 14 - A Region in Flames as the Iran-Saudi Arabia Proxy War Escalates; "Washington's Great Game and Why It's Failing

We be begin with the addition of 450 more “trainers” and “advisers” to be deployed in Iraq to augment the 3550, mostly contractors, already there that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said would be establishing small bases or “lily” pads to fight the self-declared Islamic State which so far the Iraqi government, Iran and U.S. airpower has not been able to degrade and destroy. Veteran CIA officer Robert Baer, who ran operations in northern Iraq between the first and second Iraq wars, joins us to discuss why the U.S. sticks to the fiction that Iraq is still a country. And, as Saudi Arabia and Turkey pour sophisticated weapons into the hands of jihadis in Syria, while Iran takes over the Assad regime’s losing war with Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah now holding the front line against al Nusra and the Islamic State, we examine a region in flames as the Iran/Saudi Arabia proxy war in Iraq, Syria and now Yemen, escalates.

Part 2

Then we speak with Alfred McCoy, the Chair of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and author of “Policing Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State”. We discuss his article at Tom Dispatch, “Washington’s Great Game and Why It’s Failing” and analyze the change in global hegemony underway as China makes massive investment in infrastructure and education while the political class in the United States, dominated by anti-government ideologues and funded by myopic billionaires, ignores and starves its human capital and infrastructure, while hollowing out the state, devaluing education and impoverishing the majority of its population.