09/25/13 – Brendan O’Neill – The Scott Horton Show

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Welcome back to the show.
Boy, that was not the Operation Ivy clip I thought it was.
Oh, well.
You guys like the germs too, right?
All right, well, anyway.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
On the line, we got Brendan O'Neill from Spiked Online.
And I forget now, I'm sorry, I don't have it in front of me.
Is it .co.uk or .com or what the hell is it?
Welcome back to the show, Brendan.
Hi there.
It's .com.
.com.
There you go.
That's what I thought.
SpikedOnline.com over there in the United Kingdom.
And yes, here's the article in question.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I meant to say this to you off the air.
I didn't have time to go back and see what all you've written since then.
I only now, only this morning, I'm realizing that this article is a couple of weeks old.
But anyway, it's really great and you're really smart and I was hoping that you would tell everybody the out loud version of this thing.
Stop gloating, Britain.
You helped to destroy Syria.
And this is about not ancient history, but just in the last few years since the Arab Spring broke out, America and the United Kingdom, synonyms for each other in this instance, and the French too, I guess, their role in turning what was a genuine popular protest movement along the lines of the regime change by the people of Egypt against their American and Western-backed dictator Mubarak in 2011 and the turning of that into this horrible bloodletting that has evolved over the last two years.
And so how's that?
Could you please tell us, sir?
Yeah.
Well, what happened a few weeks ago, the British Parliament voted against an immediate military strike against Syria.
And there was all this kind of self-congratulation in Britain, particularly amongst the kind of Labour MPs, left-wing MPs, amongst certain kind of commentators.
So I wrote that piece just to say, you know, can we stop all this patting on the back?
Because actually, if you look at Britain's record in relation to Syria over the past two years, it's been a really dangerous, destructive one.
And I think people often think that Western intervention only takes the form of military strikes.
But there are many forms of Western intervention from sanctions, political blackmail, diplomatic intervention, all sorts of intervention, which can be very destabilizing.
And that has proven to be the case in Syria, where our Foreign Secretary, William Hague, and your former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, both of those two in particular played a very important role in shifting the Arab Spring from Syria towards being a civil war.
And they did that by very self-consciously declaring that Assad had no more legitimacy and effectively encouraging certain sections of the Syrian officials to break away and to set up their own forces.
So I think the West was quite key in pushing this over the edge.
And then, can you be a little bit more specific?
Because you really do a great job of it in the article of going through kind of date by date.
I mean, you don't have to give us exact dates, but just sort of, it was in the summer of 2011, they said this, and then the winter of 2012, they did that.
And it really goes to show the stepping up of, and how it is that it's the foreign intervention that has ruined everything for everybody over there.
Yeah, one of the key moments is in around July 2011, because at the beginning of 2011, people tend to forget this now, but Syria was actually quite similar to the other Arab countries in the sense that there was a popular uprising, and Assad was trying to deal with it by brutal repression, but also by making concessions.
So it was a similar situation, as you saw, in Egypt and in Libya and in other countries.
But then what happens in July 2011 is that very in quick succession, first William Hague and then Hillary Clinton openly declare on the world stage that Assad is no longer legitimate, that he has lost the legitimacy to rule Syria.
And Hillary Clinton in particular said something like, America no longer has any moral investment in him remaining in power.
And I think these declarations, which happened very quickly in a space of a few days, what they did is they sent a green light to sections of Assad's own regime to effectively break away.
So within a few days of those statements, we saw various soldiers and military commanders in Assad's camp breaking away and setting up the Free Syrian Army.
So it was a really key turning point in sending a sign that Assad was not going to survive this.
And now, your best understanding here, was the MI6 and the CIA, were they telling the politicians that, oh yeah, this will be easy, don't worry about it, it'll be over in a few weeks or what?
Well, it's hard to know what they were saying behind the scenes, but what we do know is that when the Free Syrian Army set itself up, when it broke away from Assad after these announcements from the West, we know that the West then did as much as it could to support and to arm the Free Syrian Army.
We know that there were CIA officials in Turkey who were operating along the Turkish-Syrian border where they were helping the Muslim Brotherhood and other forces to send rifles, grenades, ammunition, all sorts of things to the Free Syrian Army.
We also know that Obama gave permission to an NGO in Washington to raise money for the Free Syrian Army.
We know that Britain and America both sent funds to them.
So what happened is that Britain and America helped the Free Syrian Army to come into existence, and then it also helped to fund it and to boost its moral authority.
And it's precisely at that time that the war really deepens and it becomes far more entrenched and the possibility of a negotiated settlement becomes more and more distant.
And you can really see that in late 2011 and early 2012, when the war spikes upwards, it becomes extremely bloody.
And that happens at precisely the time that various Western governments recognize the Syrian National Council as the legitimate ruler of Syria.
And it has an immediate impact.
It immediately intensifies the conflict because the opposition forces know that they have the support of the West, and Assad knows that he doesn't and that he has nothing to lose.
So instantly you see this spike in the conflict and it becomes much bloodier.
So I think again and again, you can see how Western maneuvering on Syria, Western grandstanding on Syria contributes to the explosion of conflict.
Right.
Yeah, absolutely.
And of course, we've seen this even up to this week, right?
One of the rebel council, whatever they call them, they've come up with new ones over and over again since they don't have any legitimacy at all.
So it's kind of a thing.
But anyway, they were saying just this week that whatever degree of authority they have to deal on behalf of the rebels doing the actual fighting there, they were saying, yeah, we'll deal with the Assad regime as soon as Assad is gone.
That's their first step, sort of like George Bush dealing with Iran, like Oligary was just describing.
Yeah, as soon as you do everything we say, then we'll begin negotiations with you.
That's the position of the rebels, because why not?
Britain and America said so.
Exactly.
And I think you're absolutely right that these forces don't have any real legitimacy apart from the legitimacy that was given to them by Clinton or Haig or the French or whoever else, as if the West has some kind of authority to decide who is the democratic representative of Syrian people.
I mean, if you look at the Syrian National Council, for example, it's made up of a lot of very elite Syrian exiles, some of whom haven't been back to Syria in years.
It's made up of academics.
It's made up of various people who have no real connection with ordinary Syrians, but they've been handpicked by Western officials to represent the Syrian population.
And I think what happens is that the more the West says, you are the legitimate government, we are going to give you money, we are going to give you arms, it constantly encourages them to push further and further and further.
And at the same time, Assad knows that if he loses, he will be dragged to the Hague.
If he loses, he will be hammered by all these Western officials who have denounced him as completely illegitimate.
So he hunkers down.
He knows that he's got nothing to lose.
So what happens is, through internationalizing the conflict, the West has really kind of taken it to another level.
And I think people overlook the role of the West in turning this Arab uprising into a bloody civil war.
Yeah.
Well, and the Hague, if he's lucky, might just get capped in the back of the head on the side of the road like Qaddafi.
Well, I think it's very important to look at the role that, you know, threats from the Hague, the role that they play in conflict, because you have lots of even Western leftists and Western radicals, people who say they are anti-war.
They will often say, oh, let's not bomb them.
Let's just bring these people to the Hague.
And I think they don't understand how much of an impact that has and how much of a weapon the ICC is, the International Criminal Court, in the armory of the West.
Because what the ICC does when it makes these statements that we're going to bring you to court, we're going to try you for crimes against humanity, it directly contributes to a conflict situation by saying one side is legitimate, one side is illegitimate.
It moralizes the conflict.
It moralizes the conflict.
And it really alienates certain parts of the conflict, which has the effect of intensifying it.
Right.
It's sort of like the Rambouillet Accord, the offer you can't possibly accept, that you'll have to refuse.
Yeah.
And we saw it in relation to Sudan as well, where, you know, when the ICC said that it wanted the leaders in Khartoum to be arrested and tried for crimes against humanity, there was an immediate spike in conflict, both from southern Sudan, who launched more attacks on the Khartoum government, and also in Darfur as well a few years back.
So when Western lawyers and judges and these people who presume to have the authority to judge every conflict in the world, when they make those judgments, it has a real impact on the ground.
So I think people of an anti-war persuasion need to be careful, not just to say we don't want strikes, but also to say, well, we don't accept the authority of these Western courts to say this conflict is right and this conflict is wrong.
Right.
You know, some people, Brendan, dispute that it's even a civil war at this point.
They say there's so many Saudi-backed mercenaries running around from as far as Chechnya and even Afghanistan, where we still fight against them, that really this is the whole thing is just a giant foreign intelligence agency, kind of a screwjob now, and the poor Syrians are all just stuck in the middle.
Yeah, I think I think it's a complete mess.
And I think what's happened is that the conflict has been massively internationalized.
So on one side, you have the West backing all these forces, some of which are very, very dodgy.
As you say, jihadists, including jihadists from the West as well.
You know, there's a lot of discussion about British people going over to Syria to kind of get their jihad on and to launch attacks against Assad.
So on one side, you have the West backing all these kind of strange forces against Assad.
And on the other side, you have Putin and Iran backing Assad up.
And I think it's quite self-consciously become an international conflict.
It's become an arena for the West to kind of posture against the East and for Putin to try to score some points against the West.
And the problem with that is that it just ups the stakes enormously in the conflict, and it makes it less likely that it will ever come to an end because it's been so injected with external agendas and external forces and external money that the whole thing has the potential to spin out of control.
So I think there's no question in my mind that the West and other outside forces are now helping to sustain this terrible conflict.
Yeah, well, and now all this is really in the context of the Arab Spring and America's counterrevolution really against it, right?
Co-op or America backs and Britain, for that matter, back every dictator in the region, less Assad and Ayatollah Khamenei, right?
And so if we can hijack and I guess Qaddafi was just expendable.
He was one of ours, but expendable.
But but if they can hijack a revolution in Syria, great.
At the same time that they're making sure that the kings and emirs and dictators of Arabia, you know, Bahrain and Yemen and whatever, are able to crack down and save their skins no matter what.
Yeah, I mean, it's just extraordinary that anyone takes America or Britain seriously when they talk about Assad's terrible repression, when you consider that they support it in so many other parts of the Arab world.
And if you just look at the West's attitude to Egypt at the moment, I mean, in Egypt, what's happening in Egypt is just extraordinary, where an elected leader was overthrown by a military coup.
His supporters were massacred in their thousands on the streets, you know, unlike in Beijing, for example, where at least people stood in front of tanks and weren't immediately mown down.
In Egypt, there is footage of people standing in front of tanks and being killed instantly.
And these kind of actions have been implicitly supported by the West.
In fact, John Kerry referred to the military coup as an attempt to restore democracy, which suggests that he doesn't have the first clue what democracy means.
So and now in Egypt, just this week, we've had the banning of the Muslim Brotherhood, a huge, massive organization which helped to bring Mohammed Morsi to power before he was thrown out, has now been banned and its finances have been frozen.
So we are seeing in Egypt the severe repression of a democratic instinct.
And it's explicitly backed by Tony Blair.
It's implicitly backed by the European Union and Britain and America.
And then they have the gall to talk about repression in Syria.
So the double standards are just quite amazing.
Yeah, really, and especially when the well, as far as I can tell from Texas, anyway, the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt are basically kind of some right wing Republicans, conservatives.
And and here in Syria, we back to suicide bombers, the the most radical Islamist bin Laden night, you know, prisoner beheaders you could find.
Yeah, I think that's another interesting thing about the West's attitude to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
They talk about it as if it's some kind of demonic, terrible bin Laden style force, when in fact, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is increasingly pragmatic and interested in conserving its own influence more than anything else.
But as you say, in Syria, far more extreme Islamic forces are being supported by the West or are finding themselves the beneficiaries of Western funding and Western arms.
And it's a repeat of history.
You know, we've seen this before.
We saw in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
We've seen it in other parts of the world.
We've seen it.
In fact, one of the great ironies, of course, is that the Muslim Brotherhood in its earliest incarnations in Egypt in the 1920s and the 1930s was it came into existence largely as a result of Western sponsorship, you know, particularly when the West was worried about secular, radical secular forces rising up in the Arab world and threatening to take power.
The Muslim Brotherhood was supported as a kind of counter block to that.
So again and again throughout history, over the past 80 or 90 years in Israel, in Egypt, across the Middle East, we have seen the West supporting extremist Islamic forces as a block against Russian forces or Soviet forces or secular forces.
And so for them now to complain about this is bizarre.
And they're doing the same thing again in Syria.
Yeah.
And now, you know, when you mentioned what could happen here, I mean, that's unique and special about you, Brendan, that you're thinking more than one week ahead here about, say, for example, what Syria might look like after the fall of the Baathist regime and the execution of Bashar al-Assad.
Patrick Coburn told me a year ago or something that he was afraid that we were just at the dawn of a 15 year Lebanon style civil war of all militias against all.
Yeah, I think it could be even worse than that, amazingly, because I think at least if it were a Lebanon style conflict, it would be contained within the borders.
I mean, you know, of course, the Lebanon conflict spilt out in various ways, particularly in relation to Israel and other countries.
But the key thing with Syria is that it's so intimately tied to other parts of the region, the Lebanon for a start-up, also Iran.
Various parts of that region are bound up with Syria in different ways.
And I think for the West to quite casually oversee the unraveling of this country is really crazy because they don't seem to understand what the consequences could potentially be, which could be serious regional destabilization.
And it reminds me in some ways of the kind of blundering of the First World War, where you have Western forces kind of blundering about in the Middle East and redrawing maps or saying this force is legitimate and this force is illegitimate and not giving a second thought to what the consequences might be.
And this is a very dangerous process.
Yeah, well, and that's the far thing from a cry for support for Assad.
But certainly you could not back the jihadists fighting him, you know?
Yeah.
Refrain from that intervention.
All right.
Anyway, we're out of time.
I'm sorry to say, but good to talk to you again, Brendan.
Really appreciate it.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
All right.
That is the great Brendan O'Neill, SpikedOnline.com, Spiked-Online.
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