09/16/13 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, the Scott Horton Show.
And real quick before we get to our guest, I forgot to say, and I meant to say, I finally got it in the mail there, the Future Freedom, the Journal of the Future Freedom Foundation, the September issue has my article, U.S. Government to Blame for Somalia's Misery.
And other than a couple of things that the copy editor changed that aren't perfect, I like it.
And I think it's certainly from a libertarian perspective anyway, it's the best telling of what's happened to the poor people of Somalia at the hands of the U.S. Empire since right around 2001 or so, the dawn of the terror war.
So check that out.
You've got to subscribe to the Future Freedom.
It's just $25 a year for the print edition or $15 a year to read it online.
So do that.
It's fff.org slash subscribe.
All right, so our first guest on the show today is our good friend Ray McGovern.
He's from the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
And also he writes at ConsortiumNews.com.
And he is a former CIA analyst, was for 27 years there, worked at CIA, and was the briefer for Vice President Bush in the 1980s, in the Ronald Reagan years.
All right, welcome back to the show.
Ray, how the hell are you?
Thanks, Scott.
Doing well.
Okay, good deal.
So what do you have to say about this Syria thing?
Well, I guess I would just start by saying that never, never before in my 50 years in Washington have I witnessed such a roller coaster kind of deal here where it looked like war was inevitable one day, and a week later, war or peace is snapped out of the jaws of war.
It's an incredible story.
And the denouement, of course, came on Monday morning when John Kerry got up on Monday morning.
That's like just a week ago, right?
It was like a month ago.
John Kerry gets up at London, a press conference, and does his little thing, and then somebody asks him an unscripted question.
He says, now, Secretary Kerry, is there anything at all, is there anything all the Syrians can do to stop you guys from attacking them?
And in a very perfunctory, dismissive way, he said, well, I suppose they could destroy all their chemical weapons and, you know, account for them and, you know, have it under supervision, destroy all those weapons, but that's not going to happen.
That's never going to happen, okay?
A short while later, the State Department spokesperson says, oh, this was a rhetorical point he was making, and I just said, you know, don't take it seriously.
Two hours later, his counterpart in Russia, Lavrov, gets up before the cameras and the microphones and says, we have a really good proposal here that we think Syria will accept, and it involves destroying all of Syria's chemical weapons after accounting for them under this U.N. supervision, and to do that real quickly.
And we stand by, we think Syria is just about to accept, you know.
Two hours later, Syria accepts.
Wow.
Now, how do you explain that?
Well, one sort of micro way is that John Kerry had no interest in snatching peace out of the jaws of war.
He's in bed with Netanyahu.
He saw this as a way to get the U.S. involved in Syria so the turmoil could continue for 30 years, and while Sunni and Shia are killing each other off, Syria is relatively safe.
So Kerry was not interested in this.
To the degree he broached it at all, it's clear that he didn't broach it in a serious way because he had given up on it, even if it was just perfunctory.
So what happened, in my view, is that Obama had the good sense to go around Kerry to talk directly to Putin, as they did in St. Petersburg, and both of them admit that, and this thing was in the works before Kerry made his untoward remark, and the Russians went pretty easy on Kerry.
At least they waited two hours, you know, before they surfaced their proposal, and they didn't rub his face in it.
This is much too serious to rub anybody's face in.
So it looks like peace has been given a chance.
What really shocked me, after all this- Wait a minute.
Now, hold on one second now.
You're saying that Obama made this deal, and I think I agree with you, too.
You're saying Obama made this deal behind closed doors with Putin, and told Kerry to go out there and say that, and then so the Russians could take advantage of it.
Because it didn't seem like that much of a fraud, anyway, really, right?
No, no, I'm not saying that anybody told Kerry to say that.
Kerry said that because he wasn't clued in.
He wasn't aware.
Yeah, but, Ray, does he really have the authority as the Secretary of State to change policy like that, and you think he just came up with that off the cuff?
I mean, he must have talked about the conversation with the Russians with Obama at some point or something.
That came from somewhere, right?
Look, Obama knows Kerry to be the arch-pro-Israeli force in our government.
He knows that when Kerry was traipsing around the Middle East, pretending to do a deal with Palestine, he was really talking to Netanyahu about, guess what, Syria, okay?
Now, Obama's not strong enough to simply remove Kerry, but he can have the same effect by removing him from the discussion.
And so behind Kerry's back, and that's why Kerry's completely guilty of a terrible gaffe here of what he said, behind Kerry's back, Obama worked this thing out with Putin, and Monday morning they were ready to go.
It was a terrible coincidence that Kerry saw fit to dismiss it as unrealistic or inevitably a failed opportunity.
But the Russians rose to the occasion, they bailed Obama out, they didn't rub Kerry's nose in it.
This is a very serious thing.
Kerry was sent to Geneva in two and a half days, Scott, in two and a half days.
This agreement was hammered out with the Russians.
It's an agreement of the kind I have never seen worked out in less than two and a half months.
So what happened?
People were really serious about this.
The Russians had every reason to prevent a U.S. attack on their ally Syria.
The Russians feel real strongly about their soft underbelly, of course.
And they don't want to sit by idly, as they would have had to if the U.S. struck Syria.
And the U.S., of course, Obama needed a way out of this dilemma.
No support here, no support internationally, what was he going to do?
The Russians throw him a lifeline, here, we can achieve the same objective peacefully without you using those cruise missiles.
Was Kerry happy?
He was unhappy.
Look what he said yesterday in Tel Aviv.
He tootled right off to see Netanyahu, didn't he?
And try to reassure him, no, this doesn't mean anything about weakness here.
We're still ready to strike Iran if you want.
And even the president, and this is what really grabbed me in this morning's news.
I had not seen the TV shows there yesterday.
But the president said, and here, I quote him, so he's on, which one, this week, okay?
And he's talking about Iran.
Now, what does Iran have to do with Syria?
Well, it has a hell of a lot to do with Syria.
That's half of the motivation here.
You know, give Syria a bloody nose.
Syria has a mutual defense treaty with Iran.
And for Iran to have to sit by while we clobbered Syria would have been embarrassing and extreme.
And, of course, once Syria was clobbered, there would be free access to Iran.
So here's what the president said.
Iran should not draw the wrong conclusion from my decision to back off from a missile strike against Syria, quote.
My suspicion is that the Iranians recognize that they shouldn't draw a lesson, that we haven't struck Syria, to think that we won't strike Iran, end quote, Obama said.
Give me a break.
Is the president of the United States saying, well, no, just because we didn't strike Syria doesn't mean we can't strike Iran?
And for what?
Well, your listeners, I think, are learned enough or informed enough to know that Iran is not working on a nuclear weapon, no matter how many times the pundits in the New York Times, like David Sanger and this time Joby Warwick, had this thing saved.
August 29, here's what he says, Iran is expanding the country's nuclear capability while avoiding the provocative steps that might trigger an Israeli military strike.
Yawn, yawn, Israelis might make a military strike.
Here's two sentences.
The officials found that Iran's available stockpile of low-enriched fuel, okay, that's the low-enriched uranium, had grown 6%, okay, enough in theory for about nine nuclear bombs if the material is enriched to weapons grade.
If.
Now, there are UN inspectors crawling all over Iran, right?
Not only that, but Iran, as Joby Warwick concedes, was converting a lot of its uranium stockpile to metal form that cannot be used in a weapons program.
So what we have here is an attempt to turn the thing against Iran, to reassure the Israelis and to threaten the Iranians that, look, just because we didn't attack Syria, please, don't mistake this, we still can attack you guys.
I've never seen, I've never seen the kind of arrogance or chutzpah that has been demonstrated in this scenario here, with the president and Kerry both still paying obeisance to Israel, even though they've succeeded in eliminating Syria's, or will succeed, if things go right, will succeed in eliminating the chemical weapons in Syria, with no mention, no mention by the Russians or the Syrians about the chemical weapons in Israel, or the nuclear weapons in Israel, which, by the way, are the reason that the Syrians went for this poor man's WMD, chemical weapons.
So the good news is that the Russians bailed us out, that things look on track for the destruction of the Syrian chemical weapons under appropriate supervision, that there will be sanctions if they renege on that.
Israel should be, you know, should be jumping up and down with delight, rather than forcing Kerry and the president to say these ridiculous things about, oh, don't mistake our, don't mistake our willingness not to attack Syria, we can still attack you guys in Iran.
I've never seen anything like that before.
Yeah, well, and, you know, I think it just goes to show where the domestic politics are, because that was kind of their excuse to not bomb Syria, under the criticism of the McCain's and Graham's, was because this is, we're going to lose our credibility, and what about our permanent threat to carpet bomb Iran, and maybe even nuke Iran?
How are they ever going to take our threat seriously again?
So then, what you're talking about is Obama reassuring them, really, and not, even more than he's threatening Iran, he's like, yeah, we threaten Iran all day, every day, but he's reassuring the Republicans that, like, no, no, our threat for Iran is still on, though.
But now, let me ask you this real quick, because they're making a big deal about this on, say, Fox News, for example, and I guess the Democrat, MSNBC News, too, but that sneaky old Putin, now we're helpless in his hands, and Obama's just ceded the whole thing to him, and he won the chess move, and so how can we even trust the Russians and the Syrians to even get rid of the chemicals at this point?
And so I wonder whether you think that Putin, I mean, where do the incentives lie?
Is Putin going to jerk us around on this, or is he going to go in there and get the chemical weapons out, just like in the deal, or what?
Well, you know, it's a little early to tell for sure, but it looks like Putin and Kerry have worked out a verifiable agreement.
There's experience with these things.
There are actual organizations that are adept and expert in removing and destroying chemical weapons.
Now, are there problems?
Of course there are problems.
I mean, there are the rebels there in Syria.
Hopefully they're not anywhere near where the chemical weapons are, but they could cause all kinds of havoc for any inspection team or any extraction team that came in, and there's all manner of other possibilities for difficulties here.
Will it take a long time?
It will take a long time.
Is it impossible?
No.
It's technically possible, but it takes a long time.
So Putin, well, they don't like Putin, you know?
I mean, he said the unfigurable thing in that New York Times op-ed.
I mean, let's face it, Scott.
I mean, Putin, now hold on to your hat here.
This is really kind of, you know, sacrilege.
Putin says that we're not exceptional.
As a matter of fact, he warns.
He says it's extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation is, because there are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still trying to find their way to democracy.
Their policies differ, but we're all different.
But we all ask for the Lord's blessing, and we must not forget that God created us equal.
Now here's the, well, maybe he's not an atheist anymore, but here he's saying, you know, if we do believe that all people are created equal and not just Americans are sort of exceptional, well, then get off this high horse, America.
You've fallen badly now, but we're going to bail you out.
We're going to remove this threat.
We're not even going to require that Israel acknowledge its chemical and nuclear weapons.
We're just going to get Assad to do this.
So pipe down about this being exceptional.
If anybody comes out of this, this little set to as exceptional, it's Vladimir Putin and Sergei Lavrov who acted like diplomats and not like big bullies around the block.
Well, and it seems to me that from Putin's point of view, if he goes ahead and follows through with it, like the media people are implying, you know, could not be the case for some reason, just because he's the bad guy, I guess.
But if he does that, then really what he's doing is he's buying immunity from any more intervention for Assad.
Basically, he's saying, okay, your red line is chemical weapons.
We'll get the chemical weapons out of there.
And then Assad can get back to winning this war.
And you've got no further right to intervene there, which has got to be, you know, I don't know, Barack Obama.
I don't like him.
I never did since I very first heard of him.
But he's not as stupid as George W. Bush, right?
He's got to be able to think at least a couple of steps down that like, well, wait a minute.
Do I want to be the president that won the war for jihad in, you know, for Zawahiri's men in Syria?
And he's going to leave office with a war raging there with the Baathist government having fallen and suicide bombers raining supremo around?
You know what I mean?
He can't have that.
He probably agrees with Putin that he wants Assad to win at the end of the day.
He just wants him weaker.
I think even that's probably what Netanyahu wants, too, unless he's, you know, shooting speedballs into his eyes over there.
He's got to know better than this.
Well, you know, it helps to just to retract our steps a little bit.
You know, the the Syrian Arab Spring did start as a sort of spontaneous uprising like the one in Tunisia and Cairo.
And it was quickly bent off track, particularly when Assad reacted with extreme violence.
I mean, the guy is a violent guy, let's face it.
OK, then the Sunnis saw a golden opportunity to appear.
The good guys, the Sunni rebels supported by Saudi Arabia and by Turkey and by the Qataris and a little bit by Egypt.
And so they jumped in and said, hey, this is a good idea.
This is a good opportunity to get rid of those Sunni, those Shia types like the yellow lights that Assad is part of.
And so they jumped in and the U.S. didn't know who to support.
And Hillary Clinton, in her great wisdom, said Assad's got to go.
Now, you know, statesmen don't say that kind of thing about another state's person ahead of another country unless they're prepared to find a way to make that happen.
And the last two years have been spent trying to figure out a way to get Assad out of there.
And he's become stronger rather than weaker.
Now, there was a proposal the U.S. and the Russians worked on to get these guys to Geneva.
Now, the myth in the U.S. press is that Assad wouldn't go.
The Russians delivered Assad.
OK, they said he would go and he indicated he was willing to go.
The fly in the ointment was there were rebels.
They had no incentive, particularly when they were losing the war.
So as the rebels started losing the war, and of course, it wasn't a definitive sort of thing would go on forever.
All of a sudden, there are these chemical attacks and everybody is assuming everyone is believing the White House when it says we have incontrovertible evidence that it was Assad who was responsible for that.
There is no incontrovertible evidence that I've seen.
And for them to ask us to trust them when the head of national intelligence is a self-admitted perjurer, lying under oath before Congress, telling the, quote, least untruthful thing, end quote, in his words.
And when John Brennan's running the CIA, that's too much.
I don't trust them.
I don't trust them as far as I could throw them.
If they have a message, if they have a message indicating that Assad knew about the attacks and ordered them, let them release that message.
I've seen this happen.
When you remember when the Libyans bombed that Berlin discotheque in 1986, we had Libyan intercepts.
We knew who did that.
We told President Reagan, we know who did it.
And what he did was waited 10 days and he sent 60 bombers to level the palace in Tripoli and Benghazi as well, killed Gaddafi's 15-month-old daughter and severely wounded his three-year-old son.
And the world was in high dungeon.
Here's Reagan shooting from his hip.
What evidence did he have that it was the Libyans that bombed that Berlin discotheque?
Reagan comes to us and he says, fellas, we have to release that intercept.
And of course, we said, no, no, no, we can't do that.
Sources and methods will lose this lucrative way to monitor conversations between Libyans.
And Cypher comes, they don't know that he said, release it.
And we released it.
And the message said, great success at 1.30 this morning.
And the best thing is, nobody will ever find out that we did it.
We found out, we released it.
Reagan was off.
Now, don't misunderstand.
I don't hold any briefs to bombing palaces and killing little children, okay?
But at least Reagan was seen to be not shooting from his hip, that there was a foundation for his, not a foundation, there was proof that the Libyans did that bombing in Berlin, which kills U.S. servicemen and 230 other people.
And so the world, he had, one might say he had a decent respect for the opinions of mankind.
Now, why doesn't Obama do the same thing with this celebrated intercept that he has, that he says shows that Assad ordered it?
You know why, Scott?
Guess why?
What do you think, why?
They're speaking in Hebrew?
No, because it doesn't prove anything.
And with each day that goes by, and they're reluctant to show any real evidence that could be checked.
Look at that statement.
It wasn't even called an intelligence statement.
It was called a government assessment.
We assess this, we assess this, and we assess that.
And you know what else they said here?
First page that I have in front of me.
Quote, we assess with high confidence that the Syrian government carry out the chemical weapons attack on August 21.
Next sentence.
Our high confidence, now listen to this here.
Our high confidence assessment is the strongest position that we can take short of confirmation.
Well, hello?
Yeah, you know, Donald Rumsfeld was on the news and said, well, you know, as we learned with Iraq, intelligence is not the same thing as a fact.
Don't make me agree with Donald Rumsfeld.
There is intelligence, and then there's bogus intelligence, and there's bent intelligence, and there's fraudulent intelligence.
And I wouldn't put it past the neocons in our government, including John Kerry, to have bent this intelligence way out of shape.
You know, when you protest too much, Scott, on the 30th of August, during that masterful speech with lots of vitriol at the State Department, John Kerry used the word, we know, 35 times.
Talk about protesting too much?
That was when he released this anemic statement with no checkable detail.
Simply, we assess.
Not even the intelligence community assesses.
No, we assess.
We put this thing out in the White House.
But remember, folks, even high confidence, it's the best we can do, quote, short of confirmation, end quote.
Well, now let me make sure that I understand something correctly here.
Gareth Porter reported that this really was a White House product, not an intelligence community thing, and that basically they were plagiarizing the CIA language, saying high confidence this and that, and they got, as you mentioned, Clapper to sign off on it or something like that.
But Gareth said they didn't even post it on his website, and that some of the intelligence sources around were saying that the CIA didn't even write this thing, and they don't agree with it.
Can you confirm that, and what can you tell us about that?
Well, there's a lot of speculation about that.
We know from some of our own sources, some people who were around before Iraq can have guilty consciences because they didn't speak out then, all right?
We know from those sources.
We, in this case, is the veteran intelligence professionals for sanity you're referring to, is that correct?
We, right.
People come to us, okay?
They know that we'll protect them, and they know we'll get the story out to the degree that mainstream media will let us.
So we know that there are very serious people with access to this information that say both the U.S. government and the British government know that there is no hard evidence that Assad ordered those attacks, okay?
That's big, okay?
What do we have?
We have a bunch of mush from, as Gareth points out correctly, not from the intelligence community, but from the White House.
It's White House letterhead.
It's not the letterhead of the Director of National Intelligence, and somebody, some honest soul, insisted on including short of confirmation.
Well, you know, are you going to go to war short on confirmation?
I don't think so, and we almost did.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, it's funny that the way Putin intervened and gave Obama the lifeline, what he did was he saved him from the Congress and the American people.
We were going to go ahead and put a stop to this thing anyway.
When you say we, who do you mean?
I mean the American people.
Well, we tried to, you know?
We tried to.
Everyone knew that 90% of us were against it, but most of the time it was...
Yeah, I mean, they called off the Senate vote because they couldn't even get the Senate.
They didn't have the votes even in the Senate.
Yeah, that's true, and so you're quite right.
Putin bailed us out, but now, you know, have to look at Putin's vote here.
Bailed Obama out.
Although, hey, let me try this one on you real quick here, Ray.
I think that Obama didn't really want to do this.
I believe the New York Times story from the spring that said that, man, he never meant to say red line, and as soon as he said red line, all of his little smitherses off stage went, oh, man, he wasn't supposed to say red line, and they couldn't really figure out a way to take it back, and he was trying to find a way to climb down from it, and he never did tell Pelosi and Boehner and Reid and the rest that you've got to get me these votes.
You know, he wasn't really trying.
Well...
I mean, I don't want to give the guy credit, but it's just the way it seems to me.
Call it cowardice.
I think, Scott, that the more interesting question is what changed his mind?
Now, August 30, Kerry clearly has presidential assurance that they're going to send the cruise missiles off the next day so that there'd be two more days before Barack Obama shows up in St. Petersburg for the G20, okay?
So Kerry's really sure of that, and all of a sudden, overnight, and in the morning of Saturday, the 31st of August, Obama changes his mind.
Now, why did he change his mind?
I know, because I'm an analyst.
What did Obama say in his speech?
He said, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has advised me that there's no particular rush here, there's no great urgency, we can do this tomorrow, we can do this next week, we can do this next month, and so our troops are ready, but we're going to go to Congress for authorization.
Now, General Dempsey is known to have been against stupid wars, okay?
He's spoken out against the war against Iran.
As a matter of fact, and this is more than a passing coincidence, remember last year, Scott, when we were all on tenterhooks that Netanyahu might try to get us involved in a war with Iran before the election, you know, that he'd scoop Obama?
And remember how Obama sent Panetta and his national security advisor and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he sent everybody and his brother over to say, please, BB, please, Netanyahu, please don't do this, and Netanyahu, you know, gave them the equivalent of the proverbial finger.
Now, General Dempsey was very upset about all this because he thought there was a pretty good chance they would do something.
So he went to the president, he said, look, Mr. President, I know you got political problems here, you can't say we're not going to go to defend the Israelis, but I can, let me say it.
On August 30th, so almost exactly a year ago, he appears at a press conference in London, and he says, quote, I don't want to be complicit if the Israelis attack Iran, period, end quote.
End of story.
The Israelis got the message, the pressure was off, nobody was really very afraid they would try something before the election.
It's this same Dempsey who came to the president and said, look, I've already gone on record as saying this would be an act of war, okay?
I've testified before Congress saying that.
I happen to believe in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution of the United States, which reserves that power to declare war to the elected representatives of the people in the House of Representatives and the Senate.
So I'm going to be in real bind, Mr. President, if you order me or if you order my forces to do this without congressional authorization.
Besides, I'll give you an out, and here's the out.
You can tell the American people tomorrow, that is Saturday afternoon, that we don't have to do this now, we can do it tomorrow, we can do it next week, we can do it this month.
And if you don't tell them that, when the press comes to me and asks me, General Dempsey, why do we have to do this now?
I'm going to say, beats the hell out of me, go ask the president.
Now, Dempsey is a straight shooter, okay?
If the president ordered him to do that, he would either quit or he would follow the orders, I don't know which one he'd choose.
But to the extent he had an end, to the extent he had a chance to have an effect on the president's decision, he did.
And so you saw the president got up and he said, and I'll quote, I have the thing right here.
He said, we're prepared to strike whenever we choose.
Moreover, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has indicated to me that our capacity to exercise this mission is not time sensitive.
It will be effective tomorrow, or next week, or a month from now.
Okay, now, what's the cream on the pudding here?
The next day, McCain and Lindsey Graham descend on the White House in high dungeon.
They have a session with the president, they come out and they're before the cameras in the driveway there.
And what do they say?
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has screwed this whole thing up.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has screwed it up, okay?
So, you know, this is still circumstantial, but it's a safe bet, in my view, that the president not only listened to Dempsey, but was afraid of how he would explain why he couldn't wait for the U.N. inspectors to report, for example, why he had to do this.
Was it just because he wanted it done three days before he went to the G20 summit in St. Petersburg?
That wouldn't look very good.
So we were spared this bullet by, some people have principles, and Dempsey not only knows about war, thank God he knows about the U.S. Constitution as well.
And I think we came out of this in a surprisingly good shape because of these good players.
Isn't that funny?
Thank goodness for the job holders and the permanent standing army for restraining the goofballs in the pinstripe suits from getting us into another one of these things, you know?
And the pinstripe dresses, too.
I mean, we got some really tough ladies here around, you know?
Yeah, I didn't want to acquit Samantha Power and Susan Rice.
They're up to their eyeballs in this thing, obviously.
Because, you know, blowing people up is how you set them free.
Everybody knows that.
Well, it's our responsibility to defend them by blowing them up.
I mean, if they blow them up, well, it's like having to destroy villages in Vietnam in order to save them.
I mean, the logic is unassailable.
Yeah.
Well, it all depends on who's who and whose side you're taking, really.
And they like to talk about the people of Syria, but it's a lot more complicated than that, obviously.
And now here's the thing is that, well, I wonder what you think of all of the different leaks out of the seemingly out of the top levels of the military saying that, yeah, if we do this, we're going to have to blow up a lot more than just a couple of pinpricks and incredibly small whatever John Kerry's talking about.
It seemed like it was sort of like the poison pill.
Yeah, we'll go to war, but we got to bring our whole army with us if we're going to do it, you know, kind of thing in order to to make it more difficult.
And then also 60 Minutes had a thing last night with Morel, the former number two guy at the CIA, who I don't know anything about.
Maybe you can tell us about him.
But his thing was and he they talked he talked to, I think, The Wall Street Journal about this, too, was the worst thing that could happen here if the American government is going to be honest for a minute would be for the Baathist secularist fascist dictatorship of Syria to fall, because if it does, then it's going to be full on, you know, and it already is in in a major way, but it'll be just nothing but warring ethnic and tribal militias from here on out.
And the our actual enemies, the guys that knock the towers down will be the ones who benefit the most, the Al Qaeda type jihadists.
And Obama was reduced in his speech the other day, the vaunted speech last week to this kind of complete non sequitur where he kind of just said, if we don't strike Assad, that's what will empower Al Qaeda.
And he didn't really explain how that made any sense.
But yeah, there isn't a lot of logic being applied here.
And I mean, but in other words, so does that mean that there are people in the government like Dempsey and others who they really are digging in their heels on this?
And is that why?
Because of all those Zawahiriites on the field out there?
Well, it's frightfully complicated.
And it's hard to know, you know, who's responsible for what kinds of leaks now McCain and Graham, of course, succeeded in including in the in the language of the resolution passed by the House Foreign Affairs Committee, I'm sorry, Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, 10 to seven, that it was not only to remove the or destroy the weapons, but it was to degrade the capability of the Syrian military.
And it was also to, quote, reverse the momentum, and quote, of the war.
Now, Kerry said the momentum was in favor of the rebels.
So they don't even have their own act together.
So if they're going to reverse the momentum, it's going to take more than just a couple of cruise missile strikes.
And I think the military is pointing that out in their own, in their own way with their own leaks.
And so I think you're exactly right.
The real question here is Cui Bono, you mentioned who profits to whose advantage all this is.
And again, American people need to know that there's only one country or maybe three, if you count Saudi Arabia and Turkey, there are only three countries that profit from eternal, we'll say a 30 years war in Syria.
And that is the people who want the Shia and Sunni to be at each other's throats, who would like, at least Saudi Arabia and Turkey would like the Sunni to win and remove the Alawite, the Shia sect.
And so the turmoil is not only in Syria, but in the whole region.
And for the nonce, Israel has been able to sit back and say, well, as long as nobody's winning, that's to our advantage.
And don't take my word for it.
The New York Times journalist in Jerusalem consulted all manner of senior Israeli officials.
They said, what's the best outcome from Israel's point of view?
And they said, well, it's easy.
The best outcome is no outcome.
And she said, I beg your pardon?
So yeah, no outcome.
It's just fine the way it's going.
As long as they're at each other's throats, they're Sunni against Shia.
They're not going to have much potential to damage or threaten us.
So just keep it going.
We have to make sure that the rebels don't win.
That's why we want the U.S. involved.
Okay.
And, you know, Assad, well, he's a good bétanoir out there to the degree he hangs around.
Well, the pot will keep boiling.
So it's sort of complicated, but not that very complicated if you look at it and boil it down to its ingredients.
The main ingredient is Israel's wish to have Assad and the turmoil continue going.
And of course, Iran is an ally, a military ally.
There's a mutual defense treaty between Iran and Syria to the degree you can bloody Syria's nose by extension, you're embarrassing at the very least its ally, Iran.
Now, when I talk about mutual defense treaties, I like to emphasize the fact that nobody knows this, but there is no military treaty.
There is no mutual defense treaty between the United States of America and Israel.
So when America goes to war for Israel over there, we have to beg them to stay out of it or else it'll make us look bad like what we're doing is for them.
Well, yeah, I'd say, well, you know, the thing that I object to is the very loose talk about an ally.
If you look in Webster's, an ally is a country with whom your country has a mutual defense treaty.
So in a juridical sense, Israel is not our ally.
And what's important to emphasize here is that we offered we're celebrating the 40th anniversary of the time that the Arabs did attack Israel.
Seventy three.
OK, now what happened then?
Well, the Israelis beat them back, of course, but we didn't want that to happen again.
And the Israelis didn't want to.
So we said, hey, you know what?
Here's an idea.
Let's do a mutual defense treaty.
And that way, you know, people are going to think twice before they attack a treaty participant with the United States of America.
So what do you think?
It's really good.
Oh, it's really sweet.
But thanks.
Thanks.
But no, thanks.
Now, why?
Mutual defense treaties require internationally recognized boundaries.
Enough said about that with the occupied territories.
They also require each party to be kind enough or polite enough to warn the other, say, a week's time before they're going to hit out against another country like Syria or Lebanon or whatever.
OK, Israelis don't want to have to come to the Americans and say, oh, by the way, we're going to we're going to zap Syria or Gaza or you next week.
And we just want to let you know, no, they'd much prefer to ask for forgiveness or understanding, not permission.
And so this thing is very complicated, but not so.
And and so what it ended up is there is no mutual defense treaty.
And it's for those reasons.
And, you know, the wags, the humorous say, well, we also offered Israel to become the 51st state.
And Netanyahu turned that down cold.
And when they asked him why, he said, well, that would mean we'd only have two senators.
Yeah.
That's funny.
All right.
Now.
So what about the CIA escalation?
Because, of course, the CIA has been helping the Qataris and the Saudis run the jihad all along, and now they admit it.
So I guess that means they're doubling down and they're talking about putting the Special Operations Command instead of the CIA in charge of it, which I guess would signal an escalation in the number of jihadi death squad agent guys that they would be churning through there.
But so I mean, what do you make of all that?
That seems like I mean, are they rescuing the the so-called rebels from certain defeat and still keeping it at a stalemate here?
Or is this an actual push to try to really affect the regime change one way or the other in Damascus there?
And and I guess if you have a comment about moderates versus suicide bomber types or something.
Yeah, right.
Well, the momentum, of course, is what's key here.
Oh, and you only have about three minutes.
So talk real fast.
If the momentum is in favor of the government, then you're going to stoke up the try to help the rebels.
And if the government is taking it on the chin, well, the Russians will help them.
The big hope here, Scott, is that we have a new situation.
We have the Russians.
Now, bear in mind, the Russians are not a disinterested party here.
Besides the terrorists, the very real terrorist threat that they face in their southern frontier, they've always been highly neuralgic, highly sensitive to their soft underbelly.
OK, since the mid 18th century, when Catherine the Great extended Moscow's risk down to the southern borders, they've always feared for the southern underbelly.
So what what Putin is, is heir to a whole strategic look that says, look, we don't want we don't want hostilities that we can't control to happen right in our backyard, not to speak of the alliance that he has with Syria and the privileges he has in that in those naval bases and all the money he makes from selling the Syrians weapons.
So the the the Russians and we stand at a historic divide here.
We've cooperated on this thing.
It was a biggie.
It was done in two and a half days.
I've never seen the like of it.
The possibility that this opens that we could drag these guys to Geneva.
Assad has already said that you go.
We've got to drag these rebels by the scruff of their neck, get them to Geneva, get other people involved, including Iran, and work this thing out, because that's the way we used to do these things.
We didn't used to use cruise missiles to work them out.
Well, that's a big, you know, wrinkle in the whole thing is can even Prince Bandar or anybody put the leash on these guys once they've sent them out there to fight?
Who can who can call them to Geneva?
Yeah, but who cares?
Herding cats proverbially kind of a thing, you know, at least the Taliban, everybody's loyal to Mullah Omar and that kind of crap.
So I see, you know, there are certain occasions when you can rejoice, Scott, and, you know, all my professional colleagues at Montgomery County, it's not it's inappropriate for intelligence officers to rejoice.
But I am rejoicing and you're retired.
It's all right.
You can indulge a little bit.
Well, it's been an incredible week and people should just face up to the fact that we dodged the bullet.
We we snatched with the good help of the Russians a victory out of defeat.
And things are looking up and the possibilities for further progress.
Once Kerry gets harnessed behind behind what Obama and some other sensible people want to do, the possibilities are that we could get these people to Geneva, work the thing out and stop the killing.
Yeah.
I wonder if we could pick up this momentum and go ahead and abolish NATO.
And for that matter, the CIA and the Pentagon have a limited temporary constitutional republic and a rule of law and silly stuff.
Now, come on.
I know it's silly.
Seems like it's conceivable.
So it's possible.
All right.
Thanks, Ray.
I sure appreciate it.
You're most welcome, Scott.
Bye now.
All right.
That's the great Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and now veteran intelligence professional for sanity.
And check him out at Consortium News dot com.
How war on Syria lost its way.
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