09/11/14 – Eric Garris – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
Online I got Eric Gares, he's the founder and managing director of antiwar.com.
Write about everything for 19 years and counting now.
Welcome back to the show.
Eric, how are you doing?
Great, how are you doing, Scott?
I'm doing pretty good.
Well, so the president declared war again.
He keeps doing this every couple of weeks.
We're going to war with Iraq again, everybody.
Okay, but now, so I guess last night supposedly was the big one.
What did we learn?
Any different than what we already knew about what America's doing over there?
Well, we didn't really learn anything from Obama's speech.
It was, he had a lot of wiggle room, and he's basically asking for, or declaring that he has the right to do whatever he wants in Iraq, Syria, and anywhere else that he sees ISIS.
So was he, it's interesting, I don't know if this has been made clear in the journalism yet, was he referring back to the original AUMF after September 11th at that point?
Or he's just saying, I don't need any authorization to use force, I can kill anybody that I say is a terrorist, or what?
Well, maybe I missed it, but I didn't really hear any legal justification for how he's declaring that he has this power, other than it is to protect America.
Right, yeah.
Sounds like he's just saying he has that authority.
He doesn't need any other authority at all.
Even the one passed after September 11th with all the, they've rewritten it to include associated forces and all this other stuff, but I guess he's not even invoking that.
Just like Dick Cheney, exactly 13 years ago, he's decided the unitary executive is all.
Not too big of a surprise, I guess.
Well, and regarding Syria specifically, he did not announce what he's going to do, but he essentially is saying he reserves the right to go into Syria and do whatever he wants without anybody's consent.
Now, what's Congress saying about that?
Is there much pushback at all?
Well, I've heard a little bit.
There are several members of Congress who are demanding that Congress be consulted, at the very least.
Unfortunately, people are ignoring what the Constitution says, which is that Congress has the power to declare war, and nobody is asking for a declaration of war other than some of the more constitutionalist fringe of Congress.
Yeah, exactly.
At best, it'll be an authorization if they even vote on it, but at least- What he's proposing is to ask permission to arm the Syria rebels, which he's already been doing for quite a while now, and if he gets that, assuming that they just give it to him as he asks for, he's then going to use that as a slippery slope to support the Syria rebels with airstrikes to help them use those weapons.
But keep in mind that when he says the Syria rebels, as I know you've been talking about already on the show, he is talking about people who are an ISIS light.
Yeah, I mean, you know, Patrick Coburn has said on this show, and it's in his new book too, that when he goes and talks with the FSA guys, there's no difference between them, al-Nusra, and ISIS, other than maybe these guys have decided they don't mind cozying up to America for some money and weapons a little bit more.
But otherwise, they'll have the exact same agenda.
The only differences between them are, you know, really, you know, who's who, who gets to call the shots and who has to follow the orders.
Right, they have to.
Right, they have some minor strategical and tactical differences, but their ideologies are very similar.
You know, the pre-Syrian army, one of their factions is the group that sold Sotloff to ISIS.
Right.
Yeah, and of course, you know, the Farouk Brigade, I don't know if they're even around anymore, but they had been cited for a long time as being one of the moderate groups because they were for elections and for, you know, some kind of, some form of secularism.
And, you know, you know, they fell short of calling for the complete annihilation of everybody who's not Sunni Arab in Syria, which has been the ISIS and al-Nusra, you know, tactic, basically.
But then, so, oh good, they're moderate and secular and won elections, but it was their commander was the cannibal eating the dead soldier's heart on video that went viral around the world.
These are our moderates.
Right, and Obama, a few weeks ago in his interview with Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, said that the idea of finding moderate rebels to arm in Syria was a fantasy.
Yet, almost the very next day, he called for more arms to them.
And I don't understand exactly what he thinks he is going to do.
He's going to be arming ISIS and bombing them at the same time.
Yeah, it's really crazy.
And I understand that he's in a weird predicament where here he's been guilty of high treason for three years straight now directly, well, barely indirectly.
I say, you know, it's a gray area, but pretty much directly supporting this Mujahideen war against Assad this whole time.
And now he's got a pivot.
And so now it's just a question of language, right?
He needs every O'Brien in the entire Ministry of Truth to try to figure out a way to spin the pivot back to Assad, or at least against the rebels he's been supporting all along.
And he doesn't quite know how to do it.
I mean, if he was going to be honest at all, he would just say, all right, fine, we're going to do like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and we're going to pay Assad to kill these guys and to reestablish his army's monopoly on force in the land known as Syria.
But that's not the policy.
And apparently it can't be.
Well, not only that, OK, taking a step back, not as a non-interventionist, but just looking at what he is trying to do.
He should, from his point of view, make up with Assad.
Assad really has no problems with the U.S.
Assad participated in rendition and torture with the United States for 15 years, and he would be perfectly happy to join up with the U.S. to fight against ISIS.
But the only thing holding Obama back there is Israel's insistence that we have to be for regime change in Syria.
Right.
Absolutely.
Although, you know, at this point now, I mean, really, if they had just stayed out of the war altogether in 2011 and 12, Assad would have been finished winning by then.
It would have all been over.
But, you know, I took it real seriously when I saw Michael Shoyer on TV.
And for those not familiar, Michael Shoyer, former chief of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, no love for Israel and their policy against Assad whatsoever.
He would be, all things being equal, he would be all for having Assad kill each and every last one of these guys and anybody nearby him.
Anybody who's ever heard Shoyer talk about this kind of stuff knows that.
And yet he told Fox News, Lou Dobbs on Fox News, he said, we know we should not back Assad now because that just reinforces the entire narrative of our enemies, that we are on the side of the Iranian Shia and their proxies.
They're trying to make this a massive regional sectarian civil war.
We've already really made it that way with our invasion of Iraq back in 2003.
And to side with the Shia now is just as counterproductive as, you know, just going in there and carpet bombing.
Well, this is this is what's crazy, because the analysts, his own people are telling him the truth about what's going on in Syria.
And then they ignore that and turn around and they want they pretend that they can arm some group, some non-existent group of people that have the ability to win in Syria and who are not Islamists and who are not Assad.
They don't exist.
There is nobody like that in Syria.
Syria has over 1,500 different Islamist groups.
And the only fight, if Assad goes, the only fighting that's going to be going on is between these 1,500, among these 1,500 groups.
Yeah, well, now and, you know, Roy Gutman from McClatchy, he did a report last week about how he talked with all the FSA leaders, the Free Syrian Army.
They're not moderates, but those are the the American backed guys and how they've been completely cut out of the loop.
And the CIA is now directly working with the FSA groups on the ground, which are these, again, tiny little militia groups.
Militia groups.
And there are, you know, whatever, a dozen or so working directly for the CIA.
But that amounts to nothing.
As Landay says, they amount to basically the border guards keeping these guys out of Jordan and Israel.
We'll be right back with Eric Harrison.
Just a sec.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
It's libertarian foreign policy, mostly.
Talking with Eric Gares, founder and director of antiwar.com.
And we're talking about Obama's big speech last night and the announcement of the same damn policy here of, well, seemingly just making matters worse and worse.
I wonder about, Eric, when you think about the last Iraq war, which was fought de facto de facto for Iran in the sense of putting their favored groups among the Shiite majority in power in Baghdad and kicking all the Sunnis out of Baghdad for them at power drill point and all of that.
In this case, because we don't have all the army and Marine Corps on the ground, the Iranians can't use our army and Marine Corps on the ground.
So instead, it's their guys on the ground.
The Quds Force is already there leading and helped with the America and Iran really work together with the so-called liberation of that town and Millery or however you say it there where the Turkmen were.
And it seems like just like insurers warning about Syria there that by really doing anything here at all, we are outright aligning with Iran in such a way as to really probably energize many, many more people to ISIS's cause.
And of course, you and me and antiwar.com and everything, we're 100% good on the getting along with Iran issue.
But that doesn't mean we want to have a military alliance with them.
And especially when it's a revolutionary Shiite government that rules the country, a theocracy that rules the country.
It's not like they're just the Shiites next door.
They are a Shiite government revolutionary movement in charge over there.
And we are outright more than ever aligning with them against the Sunnis of Iraq.
And that, to me, just seems like a recipe for total catastrophe here.
There's no one good to align with.
Well, that's true.
Congressman Jim Moran said, yes, last night after the speech that Obama is turning us into the Shiite air force and that that is just going to make Sunnis more and more angry with us.
And it's not just a question of building ISIS.
It's also a question of uniting the other Sunni tribes and the Sunni militias with ISIS to fight against us and the Shiites and just create a much worse situation.
You know, I wanted to mention Libya, because Libya is a really good example of what is going to happen to Syria.
Although Syria is going to be much worse if Assad falls.
In Libya now, you have essentially three countries developing.
You have two different governments, both of them elected in the West, that are competing with each other.
And then you have a more extreme al-Qaeda type Islamist group controlling the east in Benghazi.
And then you have this General Hifter, who has clearly been a CIA asset for many, many years.
He lived in D.C. for 20 years.
He's got the Libyan air force and he is bombing the more radical Islamists.
But what he wants, neither of the governments really want him, because what he wants is the military coup.
We've just, we left Libya in a situation where it's worse than a failed state.
Yeah, it's just tearing itself apart.
And of course, it's another one of these fake countries that was being held together by the dictator.
But of course, what was his his only virtue, really, Gaddafi was killing al-Qaeda guys, keeping them at least from doing exactly what Obama helped them do.
And, you know, this has actually always been puzzling to me, because if you remember back when we talked in 2011 about this, I was always scaremongering about how this means we are going to have to occupy Libya and we're going to have to create a new democracy.
We're going to have to train up their army.
We're going to hold purple fingered elections, which they actually did the purple fingered elections.
But this is going to be another break it, you own it kind of thing, because once they overthrow Gaddafi, there will be nothing left of his state, which hardly existed at all in the first place.
It was just him and his Gestapo.
So once we got rid of it, then what?
And so I just assume that it'll mean total occupation.
But apparently the plan was no plan, right?
I mean, in Iraq, they occupied the place with no real plan about the hell they were trying to do in Libya.
They got rid of Gaddafi.
We came.
We saw he died.
And then it was like it didn't exist.
And I'm not complaining that they didn't invade the place, but it's kind of strange to me.
It was like they never had another meeting about Libya in the White House again after that or something.
I don't know how they decided to do that or how they decided to just let it be.
They have the same plan for Syria.
I mean, they do not.
Nation building in Syria would be would make Libya look like a cakewalk.
I mean, there's no way that with Assad gone that we are going to be able to do anything but bomb various factions and arm various factions, which are just going to make turn it more and more into a chaotic situation.
Right.
Which is the same thing that we've been saying about Syria since Libya, which is, hey, in Libya, at least it's a pretty simple east to west direction.
Sparsely populated territory, special forces on the ground, NATO in the air.
You help these guys sack that city and you're done.
And so it'll happen eventually.
It took them nine months to do it, but we never doubted that eventually they'll sack Tripoli.
But in Syria from 2011 on, we said it's going to be an entirely different process.
They're way more complicated situation.
You don't have the simple geographic move from one side of the country to the other kind of a situation at all.
And they're not going to be able to put a bunch of special forces on the ground and NATO planes in the air because Assad has Russian air defenses.
And so they can't do, you know, the no fly zone trick and all of that.
And so, you know, they were basically embarking on the same policy only without any of the things that made Libya doable, even in that narrow sense, you know.
Right.
Well, we have what's happening now.
We are looking at a speed change for the Middle East.
We're not just talking about changing borders.
The whole idea of what makes up a country in the Middle East is going to be thrown out the window.
It's going we are turning it back pre-World War I into warring tribes and empires.
And it's just going to be it's going to be insane.
It's going to be we're not even going to be able to predict what what the results of what we're doing are.
We're we're probably going to see is a World War three, not necessarily a nuclear World War three, but an extremely chaotic world situation that could go on for decades and decades.
Yep.
Yeah, there's just no doubt about it.
And, you know, even if you argued all things being equal and Obama never did back the rebellions in Libya and Syria, still just the fact that George Bush fought to give Baghdad to the Shia means that X number of Sunnis will never accept that and will will fight till one day they have it back.
And that's that could be decades and decades or longer.
But that's a lot of blood to be spilled.
And and and what you have is you have the Israelis who want this to be simply about Shia versus Sunni, and they want to be pro Sunni.
Michael Oren, the former U.S.-Israeli ambassador to the U.S., said a few weeks ago that that's what this is about.
Sunni versus Shia.
And Israel is on the side of the Sunnis over Shia.
Right.
And even though the Sunnis are Al-Qaeda, the suicide bombers, the berserkers, the lunatics and the Shia are Hezbollah, who are like tame pets compared to Al-Qaeda, who don't do a thing except sit on the northern side of the line all day up there.
So not only do you say that, but he and Netanyahu, his service must be absolutely out of their minds.
They are.
It makes no sense.
They are so arrogant that they cannot see the reality of what's in front of them.
Yeah.
And by the way, the Google keywords for that are Michael Oren, Sunnis, Aspen.
And I'll be playing that clip.
I have a clip of Hillary Clinton.
I want to play on the other side of this break for you guys, too.
But that is absolutely the Israeli thinking.
And that's why, in fact, I've been kind of joking darkly, Eric, that it's actually kind of a silver lining that are that Washington, D.C. is so caught up in their treason for Israel and doing what Israel wants in opposing Assad.
It's taken them that much longer to turn their ship around and redirect back toward the Shia and against the Sunnis again.
We could have had a full scale, hardcore blitzkrieg type of war against the Islamic State going on for the last two months.
They're still trying to work out their narrative to explain their treason the last three years, thanks to Israel.
So it's going to slow things down.
I don't know.
Anyway, man, I wanted to ask you about the politics in Baghdad, too, but that one I'll have to wait.
I talk too much.
Thanks so much for talking.
All right.
Well, I'd love to come back on soon and talk about the politics of Baghdad.
We will.
They'll probably change it by the next time I'm on.
Yeah, it could be tomorrow.
All right.
Thanks.
That's Eric Garris, Antiwar.com.
We'll be right back, y'all.
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