02/26/14 – Alex Kane – 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 our next guest on the show today is Alex Kane.
He is Alternet's New York-based world editor and assistant editor for Phil Weiss's website, Mondo Weiss.
You can follow him on Twitter at AlexBKane.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Alex?
I'm good.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And I'm sorry, it's been quite a while since I interviewed you, two or three years anyway, and I had kind of forgotten whether I'd ever interviewed you before.
And then, so I went back and Googled it on my own site.
And I found where when I did Google you, at least one time before, I think it was just the one time, it was about these right-wing groups going around training the cops on these ridiculous anti-Muslim kind of protocols of the elders of Islam, sort of conspiracy theories about what Muslims in their communities are up to, and that kind of thing, which is a very important piece of work.
And I was glad just to be reminded of it when I Googled your name.
That's a very important subject, and I hope people read it.
In fact, I think I still have it, the name of the darn thing in front of me here, if I can get my mouse to work, how your tax dollars fuel the hatred of Muslims.
Very good work.
I'll probably put that in your favorite brand of search engine.
Okay, and now, so the one I wanted to talk to you about here today is four ways the U.S. is violently meddling in the Syrian civil war.
That's at alternet.org.
And you prefaced the four ways, first of all, with sort of a recounting about, well, before I tell you the truth, let me give you a summary of the current completely ridiculous, or at least, you know, full of holes, half-truth kind of a narrative on TV news and coming out of the mouths of our senators about what exactly is going on over there and what needs to be done.
So, if you could start off with that a little bit about, you know, what it is that they would have us believe before you set us straight.
Sure, sure.
Well, you know, the Syrian civil war is an extremely brutal conflict.
Nobody can deny that.
And so, you know, as various former officials and current elected officials are watching the brutality spiral out of control, they, I think, understandably want to do something.
Although, some of them, sort of more of the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party, they really want to depose Assad, not so much because they care about the Syrian people, but because they see it as, you know, a way to strike a blow at Iran, which is, of course, Syria's main ally.
But in recent weeks, we've seen an uptick in calls for more American intervention.
You know, this is something that, you know, John McCain, Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham have been pushing for a very long time, almost since the civil war started in Syria in 2011.
But we also have liberals and people on the left who also support American intervention in the Syrian civil war, which I think would be disastrous and would not force an end to what's a really catastrophic tragedy going on.
So there's been an uptick in recent calls.
Sandy Berger, a former Clinton national security advisor, said that, you know, now is the time to work with proxies in the region and to launch airstrikes to deter Assad from killing Syrian civilians.
And in The New York Times, we had two very intelligent academics, Danny Postel and Nader Hashemi, co-editors of the book called The Syria Dilemma.
And they argue that the same thing, you know, it's time for more American intervention and air cover to stop Assad and some rebel groups from using hunger as a weapon of war.
So that's kind of the spark for this article, all those calls for intervention.
And as you say here, they seem to always say, and for years on end now, they seem to they never really say this.
It's always sort of the unstated assumption of the argument is that America has not been intervening in any sense this whole time.
America's only sat back and done nothing.
When of course, Obama has outright called for the dictator to step down.
And you know, basically, at the time, that was widely interpreted as instructions to the rebellions that don't give up no matter what, you know, we got your back eventually here.
So keep fighting.
And, you know, they've been, you could say they've been trying to wage peace in Geneva, but it seems more like they're just trying to give cover to the rebellion to keep it going on.
In fact, they've admitted in a few places, right, that Israelis and Americans, that the best policy they see here is to let the Baathists and the jihadists continue to fight it out as long as possible, sort of Andrew Sullivan's older flypaper thesis for Iraq.
And just, you know, let the let the two sides fight it out.
Let the don't help the rebels so much they win.
But certainly they have been helping the rebels all along, right, for two and a half, three years now.
That is an interesting point.
I think that, you know, there are I think there are splits within both the Israeli government and U.S. government as to what to do about Syria.
But certainly a prevailing sentiment among many folks in both governments is that, you know, this is not we don't want to tip the balance of the battlefield too far.
You know, we have Hezbollah on one side, an ally, you know, Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that is now fighting in Syria because Assad has been a close ally of that group and has allowed them to stockpile weapons in Lebanon.
And then on the other side you have both the Free Syrian Army, but also more radical jihadist rebel groups, some of them quite brutal, and there's been inciting between these rebel groups over the harsh rule that some of the Islamic fundamentalists involved have imposed on areas of Syria that they control.
So you know, what is happening right now is that it's essentially a stalemate, although Assad in recent months has gained the upper hand in Syria.
But, you know, the carnage continues.
Nobody's going to win in the short term.
It's unclear what will happen in the long term.
And the carnage continues to mount, and Syria continues to splinter with really catastrophic effects for the people of Syria.
So you know, and you're right, and of course the U.S. has been intervening for many months now, or over a year now.
You know, they've been arming the rebels, they've been training the rebels, you have sanctions on Assad, and so on.
So but I don't want to give the impression that the Americans are bent on overthrowing Assad at the moment.
Yes, the rebel groups that we're arming are bent on overthrowing Assad, but you know, if we, if the U.S. was, if that was a political of the U.S. then we would be doing much more than we are doing.
You know, it's kind of a quite a complicated situation, but you have the U.S. intervening in these ways, but also the intervention is not enough to tip the balance in any way.
Right.
Well, I mean, it's interesting, you know, the enmity against the Assad regime goes way back and the strategy for regime change there goes way back.
But Hillary Clinton, when she was still the Secretary of State, I believe, well, I guess it was a year after this really all broke out.
It would have been in the spring of 2012.
She told CBS News that under, you know, kind of pressure under the question, why aren't you doing more to help the rebels?
Come on, because it's the dictatorship versus the people.
Everybody knows that.
That was certainly the more simple narrative then.
It's kind of become more complicated now, finally.
But she answered that, well, you know, actually, I'm in Al Zawahiri and the leadership of Hamas have endorsed the rebellion there.
So and we don't really know who any good guys might be to arm over there.
And so we don't really want to help Zawahiri, right?
We've got to tread very carefully here.
And of course, the history says, according to, I believe, leaks from her camp to The New York Times and others, that she then went on to push for more and more intervention there, along with Panetta and Petraeus, that Obama actually refused to take their bad advice and support the rebels even more.
But she seemed to be, I mean, this has to be a conversation taking place in the Oval Office, right, is that as much as we hate Assad, the other guys are the suicide bombers from the last war.
And we're not really, you don't really want to be the president who helped them outright win a war against the government in Damascus, do you, Mr. Obama, right?
I mean, so no wonder that they backed down after it wasn't so easy in the first place.
And now they seem to have settled for more of this stalemate, right?
Right.
Right.
I mean, that is the fear that I think I think it's a legitimate fear to have, you know, say, you know, when these you know, when Obama threatened to bomb Syria back in August, when when Assad used chemical weapons, and I think it's clear that Assad did use chemical weapons.
I think Human Rights Watch conclusively determined that.
I don't buy any, I think, conspiracy theories that the rebels did it themselves.
I don't buy that.
But when Obama was threatening that, you know, people were saying, look, this intervention may get America drawn further into the Syrian civil war, will, you know, fuel the desire to overthrow Assad and tip the balance to the rebels.
But then what happens?
Say Assad's government is overthrown, is the civil war over?
Many people say probably not.
There would be more violent power struggles within the rebel groups because you have more Western allied groups like the Free Syrian Army, which is a loosely organized sort of coalition of rebel groups that have got the backing of the West.
Then you also have groups like Jabhat al-Nusra, which is an al-Qaida affiliate.
They've declared their allegiance to al-Qaida.
And they're actually the most effective fighting force on the ground in Syria.
And then you have even the more extreme group, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which is, you know, a transnational jihadist group that has actually broken off from al-Qaida because, and Jabhat al-Nusra, because they don't think al-Qaida is extreme enough.
So you really have a messy situation on the ground.
And, you know, I don't know what the solution is, but, you know, if you overthrow the Assad government, if you, you know, intervene forcefully, would that spark more violent power struggles within Syria?
You already see violence within the rebel groups.
You have over the past couple months, the Islamists fighting the Islamic fundamentalists.
And so you have already this infighting.
Yeah.
Well, really bad.
It was Zawahiri's messenger was suicide bombed by the ISIS guys just day before yesterday or something.
All these ultimatums.
And it seems like a really big fight among al-Qaida's over there.
And by the way, let me ask you this.
Oh, geez.
You know what?
I don't have enough time to ask you this.
We're about to have to go out to this break.
When we get back, I want to ask you a little bit more about the Free Syrian Army and the Islamic Front and things like that so much, as you know.
And actually, I think we're going to start, though, again with the chemical weapons thing there because I don't want to get too far into it.
But there's something to be said.
It's Alex Kane from Alternet and from Mondo Weiss.
We'll be right back after this.
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All right, everybody, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
We're talking about civil war.
No, not Ukraine.
That's next week.
Syria.
It's the one that's been raging here.
I just want to say real quick, Alex, regardless of what anybody's opinion is about exactly what happened with that chemical weapons attack, I don't think it's quite right to reduce dissent from the Human Rights Watch report to being just merely conspiracy theories.
After all, the CIA analysts refused to sign off on the official report, and that was why they had to put out a government report instead of an intelligence report about what happened there.
And the New York Times even had to admit that there was no nine kilometers here.
At best, these rockets could have gone three, et cetera, and Seymour Hersh and others have disputed the concreteness of the conclusion, et cetera.
So it's not quite, you know, 9-11 truthery to think that Human Rights Watch and the Obama administration were going off a bit half-cocked there on that one, correct?
No?
No, you're right about that.
I mean, I certainly don't want to cast any questioning of the official narrative about chemical weapons as automatically a conspiracy theory.
But forgive me if I was a bit too sweeping in that.
My sort of...
The reason why I said that is because I do think that there are some conspiracy theorists out there that believe that the rebels did this all themselves, and that they did it to spark an American intervention, and that they concocted it, and they killed 1,400 of their own and the civilians in the suburbs of Damascus that it happened.
But on the other hand, yes, you know, Sy Hersh, quite a venerable investigative journalist, and others have cast doubt on the narrative, although, you know, on the other hand, I don't think casting doubt on the Obama administration's narrative necessarily leads to the conclusion that the actual story about the chemical weapons attack and who perpetrated it was totally wrong.
You know, I think that enough evidence has emerged that points to the Assad government as carrying out the attack.
That's fair enough, and you may very well be right that people who are leaping to opposite conclusions are baseless in doing so, but certainly, I don't think it was that simple because, you know, I was talking to a lot of people, including former CIA officers and whoever saying that it just still was not altogether clear exactly what happened there.
Anybody who was going off any level of cocked about what happened there was going off half cocked because nobody really knew about what had happened.
It was all about, you know, going back and looking at circumstantial evidence and trying to figure out, you know, the crime scene after the fact and all of that, so nobody watched it happen in real time and recorded it in real time.
All right, anyway, so I didn't want to get too far off onto that, but it seemed like an important point, and especially when it's the kind of thing that they're invoking as a costus belli and they're just saying, hey, listen, trust us.
It's beyond a reasonable doubt.
Not that we have the case beyond a reasonable doubt for you here today, but we are satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt.
And that's all you need to know, which was what our Secretary of State was claiming at the time.
And, you know, if there's any doubt whatsoever, we need to go real slow about things like that.
I'm sure we're agreed.
Yes, absolutely.
All right.
All right.
So now, anyway, let me ask you about this.
And just because I don't really understand.
It seemed to me like right around the turn of the new year, the Free Syrian Army pretty much ceased to exist.
And Idris has been banished now, the former leader.
As far as I could tell, those guys weren't really doing much of the fighting anyway.
It always was al-Nusra and then ISIS that were doing most of the fighting.
But then there's this new group that they call the Islamic Front.
And it seemed to me like, well, I was wondering, is that what they're trying to rename al-Nusra and say, well, these are now good al-Qaeda versus ISIS, bad al-Qaeda or good, meaning the ones more loyal to Zawahiri for some reason?
Or is it that they're trying to reconstitute the Free Syrian Army of CIA expats and Jordanian trainees and whatever that they're trying to put in there, the minimal force from before with a new name?
Or do you know?
Does anyone know?
Well, you know, those are all good questions.
And, you know, I mean, I'm looking at this from the U.S., you know, I have not been on the ground in Syria.
And, you know, even the journalists that have been on the ground in Syria, you know, they do, they're courageous and they're doing a great job.
But the battlefield shifts so fast that it's really tough to get a great sense of what's, you know, going on.
Now there's a significant difference between the Islamic Front and the Free Syrian Army.
Yet there's been, you know, there's been upheaval within the leadership of the Free Syrian Army.
The leadership, at least the Western-backed leadership, is sort of operating in Turkey and Jordan and under the banner of the Syrian Military Council, and they have ties to the Free Syrian Army, which I believe is doing fighting on the ground in Syria as well.
But your question about the Islamic Front points to the sort of incredibly complex and disparate nature of the Syrian opposition.
So the Islamic Front, you know, they're Islamist fighters in Syria, and, you know, they are sort of backed by Saudi Arabia.
At the same time, they're not al-Qaida, and they're not affiliated with Jabhat al-Nusra or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
So, you know, they're just another sort of Islamist coalition on the ground in Syria that has actually been fighting with the al-Qaida and the more extreme groups on the ground in Syria.
And it's the Islamic Front that has attacked the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
So all those questions point to just the sort of mind-boggling and complex nature of the Syrian opposition.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm working on trying to get Mitchell Prothero from McClatchy Newspapers back on the show.
David Enders, thankfully, is on vacation from the war zone for now, at least.
But, you know, when I talked with him, I asked him about this, and he was saying the one thing that he could assure me was the only differences in the leadership between the al-Nusra Front and ISIS, and for that matter, even I think he was saying even the Free Syrian Army then, was who's who and who takes orders from who.
None of it was ideological.
All of them are basically what we would call hardcore bin Ladenite Sunni Islamist radicals.
You know, they're not even, you know, the conservative old men of the former Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
These guys are bin Ladenites.
They're the prisoner beheaders, suicide bomber berserkers, basically.
And so who to side with, you know?
If they really wanted a peace deal, who do they bring to Geneva to represent these guys?
Right, right.
Well, the, the, the, the, the fighters at the West are certainly backing of the Free Syrian Army, and they, and sort of those fighters affiliated with them and sort of the political forces more affiliated with the FSA were brought to Geneva.
But then that question becomes, well, how much control do they have on the actual battlefield?
I think that's, that's a really interesting question.
Now so talk to us a little bit, and I'm sorry that it gets such short shrift, it shouldn't at all, regardless of who all is responsible for it, in any degree, the American government, the one I'm presumably somewhat responsible for or not, I want to know as much as you can tell us about the humanitarian situation there, of course, there are camps of Iraqis and Palestinian refugees from their wars in Syria.
I mean, what, what about them?
What about all the, all the refugees and all the dead?
Well, it's, it's just simply awful.
You know, and, and, you know, I think the, the bulk of the blame has to fall on the Assad government.
You know, as much as I'm against forceful American intervention, I also recognize that the Assad government is doing some heinous things on the ground.
That's not to say that there aren't Islamic fundamentalist groups that have also done heinous things, they just don't control enough territory to impose their actions throughout the country.
Assad has that power, you know.
He has used helicopters and jets to kill civilians, and I, you know, I think this is, this is, none of this is really in doubt.
You know, Syrian government seizures have led to starvation.
You know, the Syrian government has cut off parts of cities from aid and from food supplies.
And so, you know, starvation and hunger have become a weapon of war.
And in some cases, the rebels have also done this, but on a much larger scale, the Assad government has done this, according to sort of respected, incredible sources.
You know, in Yarmouk, and this gets to your question about the Palestinian refugees in Syria, of course, the Palestinian refugees in Syria are there because they were expelled in 1948, or the descendants of those who were expelled in 1948 during what Palestinians call al-Nakba, the catastrophe, which is Israel's founding, which of course led to the expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinians, you know, hundreds of thousands of them went to Syria.
Many of them, about 150,000 of them, have gone to this place, a suburb of Damascus called Yarmouk, and there's the Yarmouk refugee camp in Yarmouk, and Palestinians live there, right?
And now, so the Palestinians were expelled from historic Palestine, and now they are caught in the middle of the Syrian civil war, and the refugee camp and the actual whole suburb has been under siege during the war, and, you know, malnutrition has become a real big problem.
People, actually, an imam in Damascus has allowed the folks caught in this to eat cats and dogs.
This is how bad.
I'm sorry, we've got to stop there, Alex, we're all out of time.
It's Alex Kane, everybody, from Alternet.
Thank you very much for your time today, appreciate it.
Thank you.
He's also at Mondoweiss.
Four ways the U.S. is violently meddling in the Syrian civil war is at Alternet.
See you tomorrow.
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