04/28/15 – Brad Hoff – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, guys, welcome back to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm him.
I guess, basically, I bring you white guys to talk about the Middle East.
Seems like I should interview more Middle Easterners, huh?
Well, anyway, this one is Brad Hoth.
He was a Marine from 2000 to 2004, and thankfully, I guess, didn't have to invade Iraq.
But then, after he got out of the military, he moved to Syria and lived there for quite some time.
I guess it says here, on and off from 2004 through 2010.
And he now keeps a website called LevantReport at LevantReport.com.
And he's a teacher here in Texas, up the road in Waco.
And this piece is called, A Marine in Syria, Silhouettes of Beauty and Coexistence Before the Devastation.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Brad?
Oh, great, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Well, you're welcome.
Thank you very much for joining us on the show.
Very happy to have you here.
So it's Medium.com slash at Brad R. Hoth.
That's how you guys can find it.
It will be tomorrow, I think it is, on AntiWar.com.
I'm pretty sure it's not running right now, but it will be tomorrow.
So anyway, yeah, very interesting story.
I guess, why don't you tell us, first of all, why it was that you decided to move to Syria after you got out of the Army?
Well, I certainly didn't plan on doing that.
In fact, when I got honorably discharged and I was still on the reserve list, summer of 2004, and talked to my family about doing some travels in the Middle East, they thought I was crazy, especially given the time period we're talking within the first couple of years after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
I read a few books, knew a little bit about Christian communities in the Middle East, and that sounded kind of exotic to me.
So I went over there initially to Egypt and then to Lebanon.
I had no idea I'd be crossing into the border into Syria.
I had family members that begged me not to go into Syria because Syria has always had a certain reputation.
But I met some college-age Syrians that had been also traveling through Lebanon and the region where I was staying at the time.
They invited me to go back to Damascus with them.
Initially, I was a bit scared.
Syria has a certain reputation, especially in the minds of Texas, Baptists.
When I was in the Marine Corps, they put a certain view of Syria and the Middle East in general in our heads.
For one, I just assumed that it was just a sea of radical Islam and terrorism.
But when I got to Damascus, I was shocked.
I was shocked at the relative secular culture that was all around me in public life, for one.
I was shocked at how many churches there were, how many churches there were sitting side-by-side with mosques.
I was shocked by the general social tolerance shown by the common people on the streets.
And, I mean, all around Damascus, and especially the major urban centers, you have liquor stores, you have dance halls, you have restaurants that have bars that sell alcohol.
It was just not the experience I was expecting.
In fact, most people I came across were obviously Sunni Muslims.
Syria is 70% Islam.
I met people of all different backgrounds and religions and sects.
The common thread was not, you know, what's your religion, what's my religion?
The common thread was, I'm Syrian.
I really had a wonderful experience, and it attracted me so much.
The life in Damascus, the life in the villages around Damascus, the countryside around Homs, it attracted me so much.
I got an apartment and maintained it off and on.
I ended up going back and forth between Texas and Syria about eight times, eight to ten times, sometimes staying as much as many, many months to a year.
And so, it's just such a beautiful culture, and it really breaks my heart what has happened over the past four or five years.
And it breaks my heart even more to see the media coverage, how the media presents what Syria is like.
Yeah, well, man, so there's a lot to go back over there.
But first of all, well, I'm just an ignorant Texan.
What the hell do I know?
But it sounds like – and I've never been in the Middle East or across an ocean at all.
But it sounds like L.A. to me, right, where you have all different – every kind of person you could possibly think of as far as all the ethnicities and nationalities and stereotypes go.
And they all more or less use the same currency and more or less speak the same language.
And they go back to their separate neighborhoods at night mostly.
But then they all completely intermingle and get along all day long.
And I don't know.
It's just proof to me of the melting pot in action is the best I've ever seen in my life anyway is in Los Angeles.
And it's true that the blacks are kept south of the 10.
But other than that, it's pretty melting potty.
And it sounds like you're saying this is working for a long time there.
So what happened then?
Oh, absolutely.
And I emphasize this in my article because this is just a story that is not told.
It is just not told in the media.
It's only a commonly shared understanding that I encounter with people who have also actually been there, seen it with their own eyes, lived there.
And I emphasize really what I would say is the nationalistic, nonsectarian nature of Syria before the conflict.
Because in the media painting its narrative of the whole Arab Spring, they've really chosen to overemphasize this whole sectarian narrative as if it all comes down to the Syrian army is all Alawites and the opposition is all Muslims.
And Christians are just these victimized persons in the middle.
When really I would see the conflict as fundamentally between nationalists, people that want a secularist, pluralistic order, and radical insurgents supported by Saudi Arabia, NATO, and unfortunately the United States.
And I would be completely in the dark like most of middle America on this whole issue if I hadn't seen it for myself.
A lot of people don't believe this story, but I once walked through a downtown city square in Syria sipping a Corona.
And no one bothered me about it, and it wasn't illegal.
And so there's just this, under the government, for all its flaws, for all the crimes that it has committed, the government is still very socially open.
And never emphasized the kind of sectarian narrative you see in the news.
I think it's important, Brad, to make the point for people who might get it confused.
The point isn't that alcohol is the highest value, the point is that tolerance is.
And that the enemy in this case, in al-Nusra and ISIS, have no tolerance whatsoever for alcohol, or for anything else that they don't feel like liking at any given time.
That's the real point.
I mean, as you're saying, Assad ran a...
It's almost like Jean Kirkpatrick differentiating between authoritarianism and totalitarianism, you know?
Right, exactly right.
Exactly right.
I never thought she had a point until actually just now, I think.
Right, right.
But, yeah, I mean, and this, I think, it's always been my impression, that this is the only reason anyone really supports Assad, is because, help me keep these guys at bay, Jesus, they're...
The al-Nusra Front and even the FSA, they'll cut your head off.
They're supposedly the moderates, the FSA, and they're brutal as hell.
Right, exactly right.
Exactly right.
And, yes, exactly.
Really, my point is, legally, there's a lot of tolerance.
In Syrian public life, there's a lot of tolerance.
There still may be a social stigma, right?
Which is, I think, similar to how libertarianism kind of works.
Individual communities would certainly attach, let's say, a social stigma to drinking alcohol.
But, of course, my main point is just that I had a certain vision of what the Middle East would be like, or what Syria would be like, and I was just absolutely shocked to find something very different from those stereotypes.
Stereotypes really, I think...
Hold it right there, Brad.
We've got to take this break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Brad Hoff, author of this great article, A Marine in Syria.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Brad R. Hoff.
And he's the author of this article, A Marine in Syria, at Medium.com.
We'll be running it on AntiWar.com tomorrow.
And we're talking about the time that he spent in Syria and what he learned about the place before it all went to hell.
And then we're kind of getting to how it all went to hell.
One of the things that you mentioned in the article that I thought was really interesting, Brad, was about how when you were, I think, when you were staying near Homs there in this community, you said that all the different sects celebrated each other's religions or religious holidays to some degree.
On Christmas, the Jews and the Druze and the Shia would all come out, and I guess the Sunnis, too, would come out and help celebrate Christmas, and then vice versa and all the way around and that kind of thing.
Is that right?
Right.
Exactly right.
And again, that's just a story that hasn't been told.
Even currently, I keep in contact with a lot of Syrians back in especially Damascus and in areas a little bit south of Damascus and in the suburbs, and there's a lot of people that aren't necessarily hardcore pro-Assadists, right?
But as you said earlier, they definitely don't want any part of the so-called revolution or opposition, which has now been defined and has been for a long time by Al-Qaeda-linked groups like Jabhat al-Nusra or Daesh or ISIS.
This voice really, it's not a voice you tend to hear, especially not in the major media.
It's just a voice that's really been silenced as what are really just what I would call professional oppositionists who run savvy media platforms, hardcore government oppositionists who want to take up arms and go and liberate villages that don't want to be liberated many times.
I went to a lot of these villages.
This is a voice, a kind of middle path that just hasn't been covered.
In your article, you do a real good job of explaining a point of view that I guess maybe I remember from then, but I haven't really seen written up since then, four years ago, about how the so-called Arab Spring in Syria really got off to a pretty slow start.
The NGOs tried to stage some days of rage and this kind of thing, but it didn't really take.
So what was it that finally kicked the thing into gear?
Well, I mean, I can't know for sure, but my personal opinion, I fully acknowledge that the Syrian government has done some truly atrocious and horrendous things, but at the same time, the United States has done some atrocious and horrendous things in places like Iraq.
I mean, messy, urban-centered, grinding civil conflicts will result in no bad guys on either side, but my opinion is that the turning point was clandestine support.
I mean, the CIA itself fully acknowledged that its weapons programs to the rebels started in at least 2012.
We know also from news reports, many of which were not featured on Fox or CNN or NBC at the time, that there were assassinations of Syrian army colonels happening in northern Syria as early as spring of 2011 and into early summer.
And that's not to say that every protester in the streets was some kind of terrorist radical, but it is to say that, well, there's evidence coming out even now from opposition activists, opposition sources, saying that in the beginning, the cry of the protesters was not down with the government.
No one wants to see their government just collapse overnight.
And earlier you were comparing Damascus with Los Angeles, right?
The same could be said about, let's say, Tehran.
These are modern, bustling cities with institutions.
And I talk to Syrian Christians, too, that are extremely critical of the rebels, call them terrorists and things like that.
But at the same time, they're able to acknowledge that there are serious, significant shortcomings in their own government.
But the consistent voice that I tend to hear is that this is a decision for Syrians.
It's not a decision to be decided in Western capitals.
It's not a decision to be decided by Syrians who have been living in Dallas for the last 25 years.
It's not a decision for Qatar or Saudi Arabia.
I hear every day from Syrians who just want a semblance of normality, and what they see is that their country has been given over to this horrible proxy war, and simply no one wins by the various nations involved shipping in more weapons.
And that's also why I wrote the piece, just to detail the absolute beauty I experienced with the people in villages and cities.
There's really no sane, rational Syrian that wants to see this happen to their country.
And yes, for many of them, if that means the current government and its leader is the lesser evil, then the external powers should respect that.
So you mentioned, I mean obviously the overly simplified frame for all of this is sectarianism and that kind of thing.
But you did mention how 70-something percent, I guess low 70s percent of the population, which that's still I guess somewhere around a super majority, right, are Sunni Arabs.
And you mentioned in your article how not all Sunni Arabs were behind the uprising, for sure.
Now it seems like only Sunni Arabs were, but certainly not all of them, and not, as you say, the middle class and upper middle class ones.
They tended to just side with the regime and the status quo.
But then so I wonder, what percentage of the poorer Sunnis from the countryside and the east and that kind of thing really were the constituency for the rise of al-Nusra and then eventually ISIS?
Or should we just see these guys as mostly a bunch of Iraqi al-Qaeda guys and a bunch of Saudi money and basically foreign mercs coming in and doing this thing?
Because, as you said, Assad certainly had his problems, and one of his problems was he's from a 10% or less minority dictatorship that rules over everyone, including a 70% majority of Sunni Arabs.
So there's got to be plenty of decent people who wanted to go to war with this guy and kill him.
It seems like they maybe had the right to, too, you know?
Right.
I mean, there were significant economic issues, and that's something that's also not often covered.
But this is something I tend to emphasize when I talk to people, truly the non-sectarian basis of Arab nationalism and Syrian Ba'ath nationalism in the modern Syrian state, because in creating this very simplistic sectarian framework of it's Alawites against Sunnis and it's that simple, it just doesn't explain how Damascus never fell.
The government is still over the majority of the population.
It doesn't explain how the Syrian army is still composed, to my knowledge, of a majority of Sunnis, which just goes to show that there is still a robust nationalist politics in Syria.
And it's not that anyone should necessarily back a single ruler, or it's not that Western capitals and leaders should back a single person, but Arab nationalism is something that's certainly a much lesser evil than the Wahhabism of the Gulf, or what the leadership of Nusra or ISIS or Islamic Front or any of the many dozens of groups represent.
All right now, but you look at the map, and it looks like there ain't much left of Syria, and you got ISIS and Nusra in Idlib now, their recent biggest success.
The American-backed FSA and Nusra fighting side by side, as reported by Roy Gutman in McClatchy Newspapers and others.
And then you got ISIS and Nusra in the Yarmouk camp right on the outskirts of Damascus.
What are the chances that there will ever be Syria again to the old Sykes-Picot line?
I'm not certain that's anybody's real goal anyway, but it seems like those days are over.
We're looking at what's left of Assadistan now or something, right?
Right.
Again, it seems to me most of the urban centers have stuck with the government because, well, they just see it as a saner alternative.
Yes, it seems like the insurgents are taking over territory piecemeal, but I suppose my main point that I try to tell people is that there would be no, as you say, al-Nusra, there would be no ISIS if we hadn't poured weapons into the rebel opposition, which obviously we romanticized from the beginning.
And what this whole process did was it sidelined truly moderate voices, right?
Moderates become this very politicized word just applied willy-nilly to whatever group John Kerry wants to support yesterday, right?
But I would contend that the true moderates and the true moderate areas of the population, many of which are sadly now under the thumb of horrible, brutal governance of Nusra and ISIS and other groups, these people, the truly moderate voices, those that want a pluralist future for Syria, those that want a place for Sunnis, Shia, Druze, Christians, Ismailis, whatever it may be, those people have been sidelined and they've just not been given a voice.
And so the whole thing from the beginning was so overly romanticized and politicized, according to NATO and the United States and the Gulf States' will, that sadly it really just breaks my heart that just common everyday Syrians who make a lot of sense when they talk about their criticisms of both the government and the rebels, you will never see them interviewed by Anderson Cooper on CNN.
You will almost never see them on the major networks or with opinion pieces in the Washington Post or New York Times.
I mean, former ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, he's still writing editorials in the New York Times and Washington Post.
He helps create this problem.
He helps people that I know, he helps Christians that I know get kidnapped, beheaded, tortured by so-called freedom fighters that he himself, according to his own confession and admission, supported and funded and supported politically.
And he recently waffled on that, right, and said, geez, I guess there just are no moderates anymore.
I wonder who put him up to that.
Oh, exactly right.
He made some amazing, astoundingly honest statements, and I was really surprised they didn't get picked up more other than the excellent McClatchy Bureau in Washington, D.C.
But he said in front of a packed lecture hall, I believe it was in D.C. for a big think tank conference, he said, quote, the days of looking the other way are over.
And he was specifically responding to this whole phenomenon of ISIS and the strengthening and expansion of al-Qaeda and radical Wahhabi groups in the region.
He said the days of looking the other way are over.
All right.
Well, I've already kept you over time.
There's obviously much more to talk about, so I hope we get a chance to talk again soon.
I got your website, Levant Report, nice and bookmarked here, that's for sure.
Well, I appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
Thanks for coming on.
That's Brad Hoff, everybody, from LevantReport.com.
And you can find this article, A Marine in Syria, at Medium.com slash at Brad R. Hoff.
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