09/19/13 – Daniel Larison – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is the Scott Horton Show.
Next up is Daniel Larrison, blogger at the American Conservative Magazine.
That's theamericanconservative.com slash Larrison.
How's it going, Daniel?
How's it going, Scott?
Thanks for having me back.
Sure thing.
Good to have you here.
So let's talk about the Syria deal and the politics of the Syria deal.
I guess, first of all, can you just get us up to date on the status of the deal as worked out between the Security Council members, et cetera, as it stands at this point?
As I understand it, the framework that U.S. and Russia worked out was that Syria was supposed to declare all of its existing chemical weapons arsenal by the end of this week.
The administration is now saying that Syria may not meet that deadline, but that they're not going to make that a deal breaker.
So it looks like Syria will end up declaring its arsenal sometime later than the end of this week.
As far as the Security Council goes, my understanding is that there is still disagreement between some members of the Security Council and Russia over whether or not a resolution should include provisions for the use of force if there is noncompliance with the deal.
Of course, the Russians proposed the deal to prevent an attack on Syria.
They're not going to allow any resolution to go through that creates a pretext for that.
As far as I know, the current administration position is that they will accept a resolution that doesn't have that, but I think the French are not satisfied with that, and so the resolution that would actually allow for the U.N. implementation of the deal is still up in the air.
Well, and they would need the U.N. to be the guarantors of the weapons, so they can't just settle for a bilateral deal between, or a trilateral deal between the Americans, Russians, and Syrians.
They need the U.N. to do it, and the French are throwing a monkey wrench in the works.
Is that what you're telling me?
Well, the French are still looking for a way or an angle to keep the attack on Syria on track, so there will be a way for military action at some point in the future if Syria doesn't act quickly enough, in their view, to give up its weapons.
But Obama has dropped that part of his demand, correct?
They've dropped that demand for the Security Council, but my understanding is that the U.S. will still reserve the right to attack Syria on its own, outside the structures of the U.N., if they believe that Syria is not living up to its end of the deal.
So, this is one of the reasons that I've been a little less enthusiastic about the deal than many others, and of course we're all glad that the attack hasn't happened, but I'm a little more worried that the deal could become a sort of backdoor or another excuse for launching an attack, because then Syria will have been found to be in violation of the agreement, and then that will become a new justification for military action.
So, it hasn't really gotten off the ground yet, and it's a long way before anything really positive will come out of this, if anything can.
And I don't mean to be too down on it.
I am pleased that the attack was averted, at least for the time being, and we'll see what happens next.
Yeah, but it is a favorite talking point of the war party in any case, Iraq, Iran, Syria, or anything else, that, well, we've tried everything, and we tried negotiating and diplomacy, and that just didn't work.
So now, you know, these people only understand one thing, force, and et cetera, like that.
So, this could play right into their hands.
Well, that's the other worrisome side of this, which is that there seems to be an automatic consensus that is built up that it was a threat to attack, even though Congress seems set to overrule that, that caused the deal to come into existence.
And I'm not really persuaded that that's the case, but a lot of people are taking that away as the lesson, and so I fear that either in Syria or in future consultations with other countries, that's going to be the lesson that they take away, which is that you have to threaten to attack these states to get them to comply with whatever the demands happen to be.
Well, let me play devil's advocate on that.
What's your argument against that?
Because clearly we have a chronological, obvious cause and effect looking thing going on here, belligerent threats leading to compromised deal, right?
Well, it could be the case, but it seems to me that the Russians, like everyone else, must have been aware of what was going on in Washington.
They must have been aware of the extent of opposition to the attack in Congress and in the public, and so I'm skeptical that they assumed that the attack was inevitable.
So why they jumped in just as the deal was about to be, sorry, just as the attack was about to be derailed by Congress, it doesn't seem to me to make a lot of sense, since stopping the attack is all that the Russians care about.
They may not want Assad using chemical weapons, but they're much less concerned about that than they are about Western intervention.
Right.
And now, do you think, obviously there's a lot of pundit talk about, well, those sneaky Russians, they're never going to follow through, and now Obama, that damn Democrat, he's left us helpless in the hands of Vladimir Putin to decide all the next chess moves on the board, and yada, yada, yada.
Seems to me that all the incentives are for the Russians to live up to their end of the deal, if they can get all the chemical weapons out of Syria, they take away that, even the possibility of that red line being tripped again, seems like they're buying Assad a hell of a lot of time, if not a permanent seat on his throne, you know?
But what do you think about that?
Well, I mean, I think they are hoping that they're buying him a lot of time to stay in power.
They certainly have an incentive for the deal to appear to be working, at least for a while.
I don't know that they really care whether the deal is implemented fully.
It might be, it might end up looking good for them as a diplomatic win in that way.
But I don't think, as long as the main goal is keeping Assad in power and preventing an attack or a match, they're not concerned about whether the deal works or not.
So it very well could be just a delaying tactic on their part.
But again, I don't see that as a problem for us, because I don't see any compelling reason for us to be in the middle of this in the first place.
People who are complaining that Russia has taken center stage or Russia has pushed us out of the limelight in this crisis seem to think that we should want to be in the limelight in this area, and we really don't need to be and we don't want to be.
Right.
Yeah, and you had a piece like that.
Here it is.
A case for attacking Syria won't get any stronger if the Russian deal collapses.
It never was a case for war in the first place.
No, I mean, they had one, I suppose, but it was so horribly weak.
And I think they knew it was weak, which is why they were larding it up with all of these absurd rhetorical exaggerations, talking about Munich, talking about with the constant Hitler references during the hearings.
There was this real need on their part to make this into a much bigger problem for the U.S. than it really is, which is why you have all of these spurious links to Iran with the Iranian nuclear issue and spurious connections to North Korea in order to try to scare people into thinking that this really matters for us when it doesn't.
So there's never been a very strong case for intervention, whether over this specific issue of chemical weapons or earlier.
And the public has seen that.
The public has been consistently opposed to any kind of intervention, be it direct or indirect, going back to when the war started.
So I don't see how there's going to be more political backing for military strikes in the future, regardless of what happens with the deal.
Everyone seems to agree to the deal with relief that we won't be getting into the war and there's not going to be an eagerness to get into it later on.
Right.
Well, and, you know, this whole thing has stayed pretty much on the background.
Unfortunately, it seems like what makes cable TV news is what actually matters as far as the debate goes.
And so even though those of us who've been paying attention, I've been watching as the CIA and the Saudis have been backing these rebels all along and that kind of thing.
It's only now really, you know, becoming a topic of public debate.
And as confusing as Middle Eastern politics can be, al-Qaeda is on the same side as us in this one or we're on the same side as them in this one.
That's a pretty easy narrative to remember.
And I think it's really sticking out like a sore thumb on this one.
Well, why is it that John McCain wants us to take the side and Obama want us to take the side of the guys that we just finished fighting a nine year war of occupation in Iraq against?
Right.
And that's something that they don't have a very good answer to, which is why they've been trying to minimize or deny the role of jihadists in the opposition.
And then, of course, being found out to be misleading the public on that score when, in fact, the majority or at least half of the opposition can be counted as jihadists or hardline Islamists, which is not surprising because a lot of the people or many of the communities that are backing the opposition in Syria were the same communities that were backing al-Qaeda and Mesopotamia and the Sunni insurgency in Iraq against U.S. soldiers.
So you do have the absurdity of even many of the same Iraq war hawks that were very insistent on staying in Iraq forever backing many of the people that were shooting at U.S. soldiers just a few years ago.
Yeah, it's amazing.
Well, and, of course, it's Kerry and McCain.
These are the guys who got us into this thing in the first place over there.
And, of course, you know, if you just rerun this conversation quite a few years back, you'd have you, me, and whoever talking about how, of course, the repercussions of this Iraq invasion are going to spread to Syria, Libya, and all over the freaking place.
And now we're just living out all those predictions, you know?
Well, that's right.
And the Iraq war really was the detonation that set off a lot of the destabilizing forces in the region and will continue to have those effects as Iraq itself continues to be unstable and wracked by violence as a consequence of the invasion and occupation.
So it's very unfortunate for the region that they're going to continue paying the price for that long after we've moved on past it.
All right.
Now, I know you're familiar with the former CIA analyst Michael Shoyer, former chief of the bin Laden unit, right?
Well, he's known for being very outspoken, and I don't think anybody agrees with him on everything, but he sure does say a lot of intriguing stuff and certainly calls a lot of things right, if you go back and look at the history of what he's been saying since he came out publicly.
Well, and his history of trying to get Bill Clinton to kill bin Laden back in the 90s, for that matter.
But, you know, he can be, well, he speaks very plainly.
He still calls everyone sir, as though he's still a CIA analyst, and he's still speaking as a professional national security bureaucrat about what needs to be done concerning America's national interest.
And the rest of the world can really go to hell as far as he's concerned, other than the degree to which their world happens to coincide with what's our national interest.
And so he'll say things like, Saddam Hussein could have, should have been our best ally in the war on terrorism.
We're crazy for overthrowing this guy that bin Laden called a socialist infidel.
You're damn right he's a socialist infidel.
That was the best thing about him.
And what George W. Bush should have said was, listen, pal, bygones, bygones.
We're going back to the Reagan years, and you're going to be our friend, and we'll give you this much length on your leash, and that's it, and you're going to be a good boy and whatever.
And all you've got to do is help us keep Zarqawi down, right?
Instead, the exact opposite.
And I don't know if Shoyer said the exact same thing about Syria, but I'm sure he would say that, listen, if anything, we should be allies.
In fact, I'm sure Shoyer was involved in renditioning people to Syria.
This guy would be our ally in the war against America's actual enemies, al-Qaeda.
Instead, in a war between Israel's enemies and America's enemies, we're backing America's enemies.
Daniel, what do you think about all that?
Well, I mean, the problem that we keep running into is that we don't really set priorities very well.
We don't want to have to make a choice between, let's say, a bad actor such as Assad or Hussein and then the even worse actors in the case of jihadists and al-Qaeda.
It's possible that working with any of these governments is also ultimately self-defeating because it's going to end up breeding more anti-American sentiment and opposition than any benefits we would get from working with them.
But certainly, if you're going to make fighting al-Qaeda and like-minded groups your top priority for your national security policy, then that has certain implications for the way you handle everything else.
You can't fight everyone all the time.
And it seemed to me that that was one of the many flaws in what was the so-called Bush doctrine, which sought to not only take on terrorism worldwide, at least rhetorically, but wanted to take on practically every despotic government imaginable.
And then there's simply the U.S. can't afford to take on all those adversaries at once, especially when you can divide them and set them against one another.
So it doesn't make a lot of sense to do it that way.
To that extent, I think Scheuer was making sense.
Of course, I'm not for our government backing anybody in any war anywhere in the world, but just for argument's sake, I guess I would prefer an America first to an Israel first foreign policy.
You refer to the American establishment's hatred of despotism or something because I don't know if there's any other reason that anybody can think of why they're really doing this because this is what Benjamin Netanyahu wants, right?
Well, and I think ultimately this is about the obsession with Iran and the political class.
This is something I keep coming back to, which is that a lot of Syria hawks, not all of them, but most of them are preoccupied with countering Iranian influence, hurting Iran, demonstrating to Iran that we're going to come after them next.
The way to do that is by going after one of their allies and using a military force to do that.
So I think because the obsession with Iran is driven to a large extent by the one-sided or lopsided relationship with Israel, then yes, I think you're seeing the Syria debate being driven by the same Romania that drives our Iran debate.
Which is that we have to be hostile to this government because of its relationship or because of its lack of a relationship with Israel.
And, you know, I know that the American government, the national security state, they have their own obsession with Iran, but it seems like those differences could be ironed out if it wasn't for the Israeli wrinkle in there.
Well, yeah, there's that.
And then there seems to be the increasingly baleful influence of the Gulf states on the way that our foreign policy is shaped.
But between the two of them, you have U.S. clients that are constantly agitating for us to have a bad and hostile relationship with Iran, which may serve their interest.
I'm not sure that it really does, but at least they think that it does.
But it definitely does not serve ours because we really don't need to have a hostile relationship with Iran.
We may not always have a particularly good one either, but we don't need to be at daggers drawn with them.
And it's evidently in the interest of the Gulf states and Israel that we be so.
And it keeps dragging us into these sorts of commitments that we don't want to have.
Right.
Well, and of course, and this goes unsaid by virtually all sides in this debate for the most part, and that is that the reason that the Gulf states and the Israelis and whatever, at least a leading reason, I guess, that they would be worried about Iran these days is because of the gigantic favor that America did for them in overthrowing Saddam and really fighting that whole civil war for the Shiite parties to take over Iraq.
And so the Iran of 2013 is, you know, I don't know how you measure it in percentages or anything like that, but they have gained a major strategic ally directly to their west now.
And so, you know, no wonder the kings of Saudi Arabia are nervous.
You know, in fact, they warned us.
Right.
This is in the Manning's WikiLeaks is I don't understand.
It used to be you and us and Saddam against Iran.
And now you're handing them Iraq on a golden platter.
That was the king said.
Sure.
And that would be that was one of the many downsides or consequences of the Iraq war that the Iraq war hawks were oblivious to before the invasion and continue to be oblivious to throughout most of the war.
And only after the U.S. finally withdrew did they suddenly realize that, oh, look, Iran has this influence in Iraq.
How could that have happened?
They're not willing to take responsibility for it.
But even they have now realized what the Iraq war ended up doing, or at least tacitly recognizing what the Iraq war did to the regional balance of power, which is also why I think the the argument that you often hear from Syria hawks that taking Assad out of the picture, overthrowing Assad and his regime would deal such a terrible blow to Iran, overlooks the fact that Iran has now gained a new friendly Iraqi government on its borders, which will certainly cushion any blow that they suffer should Assad ever lose power.
Right.
Yeah.
From the Americans' point of view, it's a pretty lame consolation prize after fighting a war for them and for their power and influence in Iraq to have to settle for a regime change against Syria.
You know, I guess that's maybe what they meant by the road to Damascus runs through Baghdad.
Probably not.
I know.
Yeah.
That comes from a really, excuse me, that was their delusion of how easily, well, of course, how easily Iraq could be handled and then how easily everything else could be done in the rest of that region.
And that should be the biggest warning sign for everyone on the side of opposing these military actions, that the people who advocate for them not only have failed to take account of what the Iraq war did fully, but they have a very bad grasp of the difficulties involved in these sorts of conflicts and they seem to have no concept of what the consequences will be.
And that should be the strongest argument, it seems to me, against listening to anything they have to say about these things.
Yeah.
Well, and now it sure does seem like a lot of people on the American right have finally learned that lesson.
But then I wonder if that's just because it's Barack Obama and John Kerry in charge of implementing the thing.
What do you make of the rise of the new anti-war right?
Do you think it could survive a Jeb Bush presidency, for example?
Is it here to stay?
Has something really changed in America?
I mean, what just happened?
I'm sorry I asked so many questions at once.
What just happened with the basically unanimous opinion of the Americans, at least the ones willing to contact Congress about it, on both sides of the aisle was absolutely not stop this war, we don't even need Putin, we will stop this war ourselves kind of attitude.
It seems pretty powerful, but dare I hope that it's more than an illusion or a temporary thing?
I'm very encouraged by what we saw over the last few weeks in terms of the public outcry against the attack on Syria.
I think you did see a lot of that coming from conservatives from within the Republican Party.
And I think that experience is going to have a salutary effect on the way that a lot of Republicans think about these issues going forward.
Because even though I think partisanship is an important factor driving some of these considerations, there really is a new group of Republicans that are taking an anti-war message to the people and finding that the people are responding well to it.
And for no other reason than the people, regardless of party, understand that the U.S. has many other more pressing concerns than getting involved in civil wars on the other side of the planet.
And I think as long as that's the message that people keep delivering, that we have things that are more important for us to take care of here at home or even somewhere else in the world that doesn't involve getting involved in new conflicts, then that's going to make an anti-war message much more powerful and enduring, I think, in both parties.
What you see in the Syria debate is the total divorce of the people at the top on both parties from their constituents.
And that can't be sustained forever.
Eventually something's going to give, and we're seeing some healthy signs in the Republican Party with the leadership of people like Justin Amash and Rand Paul who are encouraging that development.
Yeah, it's nice to see bipartisanship in opposition to horrible things instead of, you know, you'll get paid off and you'll get paid off, and so let's go ahead that way.
It's a new realignment, the one I've been hoping for.
I hope it can really last.
I hope so.
Obviously we'll have to wait and see how Republicans react in the event that a future Republican president tries to do something similar.
But I think the experience of these last ten years has had a real awakening effect on a lot of people on the right, and they are going to approach all of these things much more skeptically and much more soberly, I hope, in the future.
All right.
Well, one thing is for sure, for people on the right who are newly anti-war, there's a great resource for you over there at the American Conservative magazine.
That's the AmericanConservative.com, and of course you can subscribe to the paper issue as well.
You might should.
And you'll find they were founded in opposition, really, to the invasion of Iraq, and they've run a hell of a lot of great anti-imperialism type of articles here for the last decade and more in opposition to this insane policy.
So you do not have to be Michael Moore to oppose American militarism, not at all.
And you can follow the lead of the great Daniel Larison and all the other great writers there at the American Conservative magazine, again, the AmericanConservative.com.
Thanks very much for your time on the show again, Daniel.
Thanks, Scott.
All right.
And also, oh, I meant to mention, you can follow him on Twitter, too.
Oh, there he is.
He's just Daniel Larison on Twitter, spelled just like it sounds, too.
All right.
That's the AmericanConservativeMagazine.com.
That's it for the show today.
See you all back here tomorrow, 11 to 1, Eastern Time, for The Scott Horton Show.
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