06/11/15 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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All right.
Hey, I got Gareth Porter on the line.
Hey, Gareth, how are you doing?
I'm fine.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing good.
Very happy to have you back on the show here.
Everybody, you know Gareth Porter.
He wrote the book on Iran's nuclear program.
It's called A Manufactured Crisis, an apt title, quite apt.
It's about how they never were making nuclear weapons, man.
It's all a bunch of hype and boy, oh boy, every detail that's in there.
Manufactured crisis.
It's for Truthout and for Middle East Eye.
And yeah, he's good on a lot of stuff.
He's got a brand new one here called Sunni Alliance's Trump-Obama Administration Terrorism Concerns in Syria.
And by the way, this is live June 2015.
I know that headline could be from any time in the last four years, but anyway, welcome back.
Thanks very much.
What's your article about here, Gareth?
Well, Scott, this is another effort to try to understand clearly what's really going on here in U.S. policy in Syria.
And in the context of the skullduggery that has become increasingly clear, being carried out by the Saudis, the Qataris and the Turks to support al-Nusra Front, the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria.
And, you know, there's a long history here of contact, obviously, between the Turks as well as the other, the Gulf shakthans involved in this effort.
But this clearly turned a major corner late last year or last year.
And then again earlier this year, they were clearly preparing for a major campaign before the end of 2014.
There was something going on.
We don't have the details about this yet exactly, but there were contacts with the al-Nusra Front on the part of particularly the Qataris, and the Turks obviously have been dealing with them all along.
But they were preparing them to, you know, talking to them about a major offensive and what they could do to support them.
And then, of course, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia died and was replaced by King Salman, who immediately introduced a much more aggressive stance toward Syria, as well, of course, as well as a general impetus toward basically carrying out war to defeat what they regard as Iranian influence in the region.
And so all of this gelled very quickly in 2015 and produced a new command called the Army of Conquest, which was well endowed.
We have now more reporting that indicates that they not only got communications equipment to improve their command and control, which is a key factor here in success in the war against the Assad regime, but also more weapons and funding.
And so all of this has been happening since early 2015.
And then the question became, what is the U.S. role going to be in this?
And the Qataris, in particular, were the lead, it appears, in dealing with the Obama administration.
And so what we have seen happen since, let's say, April, when Obama invited the Gulf Cooperation Council states, meaning the Saudis, the Qataris, and three or four other Gulf sheikhs to come to Washington, actually to come to Camp David for a summit meeting, the GCC people, led by the Qataris and the Saudis, believed that this was their opportunity to get the Obama administration committed not just to supporting their offensive through the al-Nusra Front, but also doing the no-fly zone, which they've been calling for for years.
And the reason is because they said, well, he needs us now because he wants this agreement with Iran very badly, and so we'll put the heat on him and say, unless you go along with our demands on Syria, we're going to let you have it on Iran.
And we're in a strong bargaining position now.
That was being reported in the Arab press in Al-Hayat in the days before the summit meeting occurred in May.
And so then the summit occurs, and there's no reporting whatsoever.
Nothing comes out about what the discussions actually said with regard to Syria.
There was talk about generalities, but nothing specifically about Syria, except for David Ignatius.
And Ignatius, of course, as you know and your listeners will know from past experiences that have to do with him, is the court reporter.
He's the one who gets the inside dope from either the White House or the national security state institutions.
And he reported afterwards that essentially what the president had said was that you guys, meaning Saudis and Qataris, you have to keep control of your clients so that we don't have a situation with extremists coming to power in Syria.
Now that's very different from saying, you guys cut out this business of building up on this refront.
Essentially, he caved in and said, okay, you can go ahead and do it, but you better be careful.
Isn't that interesting that, hey, why not just lie and say, oh yeah, no, I told them you can support Ahrar al-Sham, who we all know are atheists or Methodists or something, but no al-Nusra.
Why not just say that?
Well, that's a very good question.
I mean, I think that it suggests that there is a very strong commitment to this line and that at some stage or at some level, you no longer feel comfortable just completely covering it up.
I think that's the explanation for why they didn't take that route.
Yeah.
Well, now, it's funny, Adam Johnson at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting had a piece about the six dozen times that America has begun to train and arm these guys over the last four years.
It's always reported as the beginning of a mission to go and do this, but something that I learned from Charles Lister and that I couldn't find my footnote and I was flipping out because I couldn't remember where the hell I read it, but then I was reminded by reading your piece here, because you refer to the very same thing.
Charles Lister, the Al-Qaeda expert at the Brookings Institution, center-left, Democratic-type think tank.
You mean center-right, of course.
Well, that's what they call it.
You know, the Democrats.
Yeah, center-right.
That's fair enough.
And especially, they're very Zionist now and they're very Qatari because they get a lot of money that way.
But he was saying, yeah, there's an American, a joint American-Saudi base, and your keyword for Google searching audience is room, an American-Saudi room in Turkey where they're coordinating this whole thing.
Well, I have to correct you on that.
It's not precisely what he said.
There's a nuance here.
It's more than nuance.
It's a distinction between the U.S.-Turkish coordination spot in Turkey near the border, obviously, somewhere close to the border, and what they do, I mean, they're not actually coordinating the army of conquest.
What they're doing is coordinating an approach to the arming and training of the people in Syria.
Now, obviously, the Turks and the Americans don't agree on what needs to be done about that, so exactly how that works out is a very interesting question that nobody has ever really discussed.
Yeah, well, and the line between the people they're training and the army of conquest is something that, you know, I'm not sure what that line is.
We'll come back to this in a moment, but I'll just explain what I think specifically happened in that case.
All right.
Good deal.
Hang tight, everybody.
We'll be right back with the great Gareth Porter, author of Manufacture Crisis and 10 Million Awesome Articles, right after this.
Hey, Al.
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All right, guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show, talking with the great Gareth Porter right here at Truthout, Sunni Alliance's Trump-Obama administration terrorism concerns in Syria.
Back to their concerns in a minute, but so, I'm sorry, where we left off at the break was about the base.
Just what exactly is this base in Turkey where the Americans and the Saudis are working together and who exactly are they working with and who not or whatever?
Well, I'm not clear on exactly what role the Saudis are playing in this base in Turkey, but what I am clear on is what Lister said about the move that was made in April after the triumph of the Army of Conquest in Idlib, in capturing the province capital of Idlib.
The very important change that took place here at the working level, obviously this is a CIA base in Turkey, and the CIA, the people who were in liaison with some of the Syrian groups, small groups, presumably not very big ones, who were trying to figure out what they were going to do at that point, were being encouraged by their CIA handlers to join in the Army of Conquest, to participate in the after-action, that is the next phase of the Al-Nusra Front and the Army of Conquest offensive in Idlib.
So that indicated very clearly that there had been a Rubicon crossed of some sort at some level where the U.S. was no longer resisting the strategy of the Saudis, the Qataris and the Turks, and in fact was not cooperating with.
And presumably, the timing of that indicates or suggests very strongly that the CIA was convinced that now these people are such a strong force, it looks like they're going to be successful, so we better get on the bandwagon.
Yeah, they kind of floated some trial balloons about, yeah, we're going to rebrand them and we're going to have the Syrian Al-Qaeda, if not denounce Zawahiri, announce that they no longer work with him, something like that.
That didn't really work, so no big deal, this is just plan B, we'll just create a new umbrella group and it'll be the guys that we're directly supporting fighting side-by-side with these guys and our allies are supporting these guys.
The rebranding had not ended at that point, it was still underway, that was still part of the strategy that the Saudis and Qataris took to the Camp David summit.
That was precisely that they would argue that you don't have to be embracing Al-Qaeda, we'll dig up something so that there'll be at least an apparent divorce between Al-Nusra Front and Al-Qaeda, make it easier for you.
And in fact, as I pointed out in at least the previous article I did on this, Ignatius actually referred to that, yeah, I reported it in both these stories, that Ignatius referred to the fact that there was a fix for this, what he called a tricky problem, that it was Al-Nusra Front that was being supported in this new command, this new military command that was on the move, and that that was what was apparently going to be happening, going to be discussed in the Camp David summit.
And afterwards, of course, he didn't mention that, but then there was an actual denial by the head of Al-Nusra Front, Abu, it split my mind, but anyway, he gave an interview with Reuters, in which he basically said, no, we're still part of Al-Qaeda, we deny that there's anything going on with regard to divorce from Al-Qaeda.
So then the rebranding took a different form, as it ultimately turned out, when he gave the Al-Jazeera interview.
He basically said, look, we are Al-Qaeda, but we've been given our instructions from Al-Qaeda that say, no, we're not going to do global jihadism, we're not going to attack the West, we're here to win the war against the Assad regime.
So I'm living in a comic book here or something.
You know, if only these guys would say that they don't love Ayman al-Zawahiri, the butcher of New York City, anymore.
Yesterday they did, but now they don't.
Then it would be fine, right?
Then we could get them all brand new machetes for cutting people's heads off with.
We could get them a whole new fleet of Saudi bought Toyota trucks to do suicide attacks.
It'd be great, it'd be moderate.
As it turns out, it's not necessary.
Nobody's raising any problem in Washington, DC.
There's not a single voice being raised about this.
We've been covering this for years now.
It's 2015 and a half right now.
I don't know, it was two or three years ago.
I said to Flint Leverett, the former high-level CIA analyst and National Security Council and State Department official on this show, I said, look, if Saudi is giving all this money to the suicide bombers and or their very best friends who fight right next to them and whatever, isn't that just like when Ronald Reagan had the Israelis sell missiles to Iran for him?
It's just plausible deniability and it's not very plausible.
Nobody blames Israel for Iran-Contra.
They just played one small role in it.
It was Ronald Reagan's thing.
Just like this entire time Barack Hussein Obama has been fighting for Osama bin Laden's men basically from the time, from the day after he killed Osama on, he's been backing Osama's men in Libya and in Syria and he keeps on.
Well, I would put it differently.
He said, yeah, you're right.
That is not, I mean, I'm sorry, I'm paraphrasing my own and mixing up what Leverett said.
I asked Leverett, isn't this just not very plausible deniability for an American policy?
And he said, yes, that's exactly what it is.
For Saudi to give all this money to these guys and for America to not even try to stop Saudi basically reveals all you need to know about what's going on here.
And so then my question for you is, assuming that's true and you can dispute whatever you want there, isn't this all about David Womser and the clean break and the coping with crumbling states?
We need to expedite the chaotic collapse and redirect and turn the Middle East into a boiling cauldron and all this crap like Michael Ledeen says?
Well, certainly from the Israeli point of view, it's about setting up a situation where Iran, you know, where you can carry out regime change in Iran more easily.
I mean, that's clearly the long term interest that was put into play by the neocons in the 1990s.
And the Israeli government has wanted to do that and they got support for that in the Bush administration, for sure.
But, you know, I think there's a couple of different phases that things have gone through here.
I mean, you know, it may well be that there was a very weak degree of resistance put up by the Obama administration as far as Syria is concerned.
But there is a pretty strong record here that the Obama administration did not want to be involved in arming moderates, except in very, very limited quantities and very limited circumstances, because they were afraid that the arms were going to fall into the hands of al-Nusra and, you know, what ultimately became the Islamic State.
And so, you know, I don't agree that they were deliberately egging the or saying yes to the Saudis going ahead and giving arms to al-Nusra front in 2012, 2013.
I think that that's an earlier stage when the Saudis were, in fact, giving arms to other groups who then, you know, became part of al-Nusra front or, you know, we broke up and essentially the arms ended up with al-Nusra front.
And so, I mean, I think you have to basically look at this in a more historical evolutionary way that the policy of the Obama administration has indeed changed.
I mean, it has changed substantially.
And it's changed because for a complex of reasons, this administration no longer has the will to stand up to its Sunni allies.
It's now decided that what's important is that we show that we're lined up with the Sunni allies and basically, you know, nothing else matters.
I mean, they've decided to sacrifice everything else.
And I don't think that was the situation in 2012.
Or 2013.
I think it's a different situation now.
Yeah.
Well, and you're saying all to get that nuclear deal.
If they would just shut up about the nuclear deal and let us get it, we'll go ahead.
I think that that's the immediate circumstance.
That's true.
But I think there's a deeper level of a deeper interest that is at stake here.
And that is the whole national security state commitment to these alliances.
I mean, you know, we've talked about this before, but it has to be repeated many times that that the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA all have extremely important interests in, you know, at stake with the alliance with the Saudi Arabia and the Pentagon more than anybody else.
I mean, you know, they have they have their bases in Saudi.
They have their base, the naval base in Bahrain, which is, after all, an extension of Saudi Arabia.
And the other allies of the Saudis, UAE, Qatar, they have bases.
They're all, you know, part of this orientation of the national security state towards having this overseas permanent overseas presence, which the Saudis and the Qataris are giving them.
So, I mean, I think that's what's really at stake here, ultimately, that they're just there.
They it's unthinkable that they could risk actually a rupture in relations with the Saudis over this issue or the Qataris for that matter.
Hey, let me I'm keeping you just one minute here.
In 2002 and three, when, as the WikiLeaks revealed, the Saudis were saying that they didn't understand why we were choosing to hand Iraq to Iran on a golden platter, not just a silver platter, but a golden one.
And I don't know if he was improving upon the idiom or if he just got confused.
But anyway, point being, that's one hell of a nice platter to turn Iraq over to Iran on when, as he complained, I thought the policy was you, me and Saddam against Iran to keep them hemmed in here.
Was there nobody listening to that?
Wolfowitz just had an argument that put that to to bed and to shame and no one brought it up again or it because it seems pretty stupid, right, to accidentally fight a war for Iran.
Well, I mean, of course, the assumption was that that they were going to take over these bases.
They'd have a friendly government, a Shia government, to be sure, but one that was not controlled by Iran.
Remember, this was this was the completely unrealistic fantasy world that the neocons inhabited that.
But I mean, they were being told better by the neighbors, by their best friends, the Saudi neighbors.
But, you know, who are they going to who are they going to believe the Saudis or their or their Shia friends who've been whispering in their ear, oh, you know, you just help us get in power and we'll make peace with Israel.
Right.
Here we go.
Yeah.
How Chalabi con the neocons.
That's such a great art.
You read that one?
Exactly.
Yeah, that guy.
Boy, there's some quotes in there that you can only read them.
You can't repeat them out loud or else someone will call you a bad name or something.
But yeah, people should really read that thing.
It's hilarious and horrible.
Anyway, I'm sorry I've kept you too long.
Thanks very much for coming back on my show, Gareth.
I like talking to you.
My pleasure as always.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, so that's the great Gareth Porter.
He's writing at Truthout and Middle East Eye.
This one's at Truthout, Sunni Alliance's Trump Obama administration terrorism concerns in Syria.
It's really kind of funny when you stop and think about it.
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