10/27/15 – Jonathan Marshall – 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.
Our guest today is Jonathan Marshall.
He is an independent researcher living in California.
And he writes at consortiumnews.com.
I think we're running this one today at antiwar.com, right?
Or maybe tomorrow.
Or maybe yesterday.
Yeah, I think it was yesterday we ran this at antiwar.com.
Rebuffing Peace Chances in Syria.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Hi.
Fine, thanks.
Good, good.
Happy to have you on the show here.
A very good piece, very important piece.
And, you know, I guess if we want to tell the whole story of this sort of pseudo half-assed regime change in Syria, we could go back even to the Iraq War days, 2006 and 2007 and the redirection and all that, if you want to.
But this article starts off at least with post-Arab Spring Syria policy.
Hey, here's a protest movement.
Let's hijack it and see what we can do with it.
So you can start your story wherever you want.
But I love the way you go through here and, you know, fail to forget any of the chances that America and its allies have had to end the conflict with a resolution that actually could have been satisfactory to at least the claimed aims and goals of all sides.
Sure.
Scott, this is actually kind of my third big historical survey.
And I did it partly because I was so dissatisfied with the general media coverage I was seeing out there.
And I knew that the kind of pronouncements we get from the White House and State Department were not trustworthy.
So I figured I need to find out what really happened.
And the first piece I looked at well before this whole civil war started, how the Assad regime had tried strenuously to make a deal with the United States, even with Israel, a peace agreement.
And unfortunately, under the Bush-Cheney government, they were so intent on regime change all through the Middle East.
They had this idea which went back to some plans from even the 1990s about how Arab governments all over the Middle East would be overthrown to help Israel come out supreme in the region.
And so Assad's peace efforts were continuously rebuffed.
Even the Israeli government was open to negotiating and Cheney called a halt to it.
It's really quite amazing.
That was under Ehud Olmert and his government, right?
Yes, Olmert was trying.
And then when Netanyahu got in, I think around 2009, then, of course, all the peace chances just evaporated.
He had zero interest in peace.
Then Obama was engaged in some negotiations.
But in early 2011, as I think your audience knows, as part of the Arab Spring, protests started forming.
And Syria was quite weak at the time because of extraordinary multi-year famine that had driven hundreds of thousands of people off the farms and into cities.
And because of the U.S. economic embargo and other things, it was very tough for the Syrian government to manage.
On top of which, they faced the extraordinary economic burden created by the United States with the war in Iraq, which had sent one or two million Iraqis abroad as refugees.
Many of them had gone to Syria.
So they were just staggering under the weight of the Iraqi refugees, the rural refugees who were fleeing famine.
When the Arab Spring started, it's kind of widely assumed that Assad just began mass murder of his citizens.
And that simply isn't the case.
As I showed in a previous article, he made extensive overtures, and the opposition turned violent very quickly.
They started shooting and killing police and other security officials in large numbers.
So almost from the beginning, this was a genuine two-sided armed conflict, not a one-sided government mass murder.
By August, literally just a few months after the conflict started, President Obama made one of his classic foreign policy mistakes, and he insisted that the Assad regime must go.
Well, that in this day and age is essentially for any leader to go, that's signing their death warrant.
We saw that happen with Qaddafi.
Leaders like that who are authoritarian have no place to go.
The International Criminal Court will hunt them down.
So we gave Assad no reason to end the conflict.
And what I show in this new piece is that because of the insistence on regime change, the United States from the beginning has refused to engage in international negotiation that might have brought this conflict to an end.
And some of those negotiations started under United Nations auspices in 2012.
And Russia was all involved.
And again, the United States simply, with Secretary of State Clinton leading the way, said no negotiations with Assad.
Well, you know, we would all love to negotiate just with ourselves and our friends.
Wouldn't that be a great world if that's all we had to do?
Imagine if you could negotiate a pay increase on your job just by talking to your spouse.
Well, that would be great too.
That's not the way the world works.
And so as I show in the piece, we systematically lost opportunities for peace.
Now that the United States finally appears to be willing to negotiate with Assad, the opposition is overwhelmingly turned into a hardline extremist Islamist opposition that has no interest in peace.
So we may have.
I hope not.
But we may have lost for good the opportunity to bring the settlement to a peaceful conclusion.
All right.
Well, now, so this is goes right to one of the things I really liked about.
This is the way that you go through and talk about the different leaders that were created, basically the friends of Syria, governments in exile and all of this and the different ones that were tried.
But to my recollection, each time they did create one of those, the first thing they did was turn around and endorse the Al-Nusra Front, because that was the which is al-Qaeda in Syria, sworn loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the butcher of New York.
And it was their only desperate stab at credibility that they have.
Yes, we're the sock puppets of Hillary Clinton, but we love you real front line fighters out there getting the work done.
We're with you kind of thing.
And they were rejected anyway.
But that was the best chance they had at credibility.
So I wonder who, you know, which mythical moderates were there ever to negotiate with on the jihadi side, the Saudi American, Turkish backed bin Laden side.
Not many.
I mean, I think in fairness, there were in 2011 a fair number of non-Islamist opponents of the government.
But those groups typically are the least effective.
Often they have people who are in exile abroad.
They're just not the kind of battle hardened people who win wars.
The sad thing is civil war is a kind of Darwinian process.
It selects the most ruthless, toughest militant, least compromising people.
That's why you don't want to end up in a civil war.
That's not a good place to develop democracy.
And every time we do regime change, thinking that that's going to bring about a more humane, liberal, humanitarian, democratic order, it's a fantasy because violent regime change selects in favor of the people who are most ruthless, have the most guns and are most willing to kill indiscriminately.
And so the kind of nice mythical moderates that we have been going after were just swamped by the much battle hardened Al Qaeda and now Islamic front.
I mean, Islamic State extremists.
So I'm sure we've all read about some of the handful of political moderates who the CIA trained or the military trained, who were then sent into battle and instantly handed over all of their weapons, either to Al Nusra or to the Islamic State.
It would be a funny joke if it weren't so tragic.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, we're about to have to take this break.
But when we get back, we'll talk more about this demand that the president has repeated as recently as, I guess, a month ago now, that Assad must step aside and what all he means by that, and especially now that the Russians have intervened to the degree that they've intervened and where we're at in this whole botched Bay of Pigs in Syria.
It's Jonathan Marshall from ConsortiumNews.com.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Jonathan Marshall.
He writes for ConsortiumNews.com.
This piece is rebuffing peace chances in Syria.
Yeah, years and years now of rebuffing peace chances in Syria.
And yet, I don't know if there is a policy or what exactly.
Obama said just, I think, four or five weeks ago, Assad must go.
Still, that's the policy.
And that was the first time he had said that in years, reaffirming that that was a policy.
But then John Brennan has said, yeah, I think maybe somebody around here learned the lesson, head of CIA, that we don't really want to necessarily change the entire regime in Damascus into an al-Qaeda one, because that might be ugly and the start of new bad things.
So that makes sense.
And the news is saying that, hey, they've been holding preliminary talks toward the holding of talks in Vienna.
And AP just broke on Twitter that they're going to invite Iran.
And it's America, Saudi, Turkey, Russia, and Iran.
No Syrians, I guess, invited.
But anyway, you know, I don't know.
Do you have any idea what the hell America's Syria policy is, Jonathan Marshall?
You know, it's rather pathetic, but I don't think the administration knows either.
There was that famous little brouhaha a few months ago where the White House spokesman was criticizing all those who had demanded that the U.S. start training these various anti-regime moderates.
And, of course, when that turned out not to work, the spokesman said, well, Obama was against it, even though he instituted the policy.
It was like he was against it before he was for it.
It made no sense at all.
The buck obviously didn't stop in the White House there.
I think that as so often happens, there's a rash policy.
Remember, he drew the line in the sand on chemical weapons, and he insisted that the precondition was that Assad must go.
Then reality sets in, and he realizes things are a lot more complicated.
The people opposing Assad may be even worse than Assad, and if we insist on Assad going before we talk, there will be no talks.
And then he's stuck trying to find a face-saving way out.
Meantime, hardline neoconservatives are constantly badgering this administration to do more, to put troops on the ground, to create no-fly zones, to start a new Cold War with Russia.
And so he flails around.
The good news is that four years too late, this administration does seem to be willing to include Assad in negotiations for a transition government.
They do still want him out in the long run, and I think realistically, everyone, including Russia, understands that Assad isn't here for the long run.
Interestingly, the mass media keep pretending that Russia insists that Assad must stay.
They've never insisted that Assad must stay.
They've simply insisted that Assad be part of the process, and that the Syrian people make the final decision of who their leader is.
If you think about it, that's the classic principle of self-determination that the U.S. always asserts as the proper policy.
Not that we follow it very often, but we've always insisted that self-determination is the right policy.
We have the curious role reversal that Russia, throughout this conflict, has been enunciating the policy of self-determination.
And the U.S. and its allies, such nice democracies as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have been insisting that, no, Syrian people can't decide.
We have to decide for them and put in some anti-regime force.
The concern I have is that, well, it's great to see these negotiations getting off to a tentative start with all the right external parties.
Who, as you were kind of joking, Scott, who is there on the Syrian side?
The problem now is that after several years of extraordinarily violent civil war, the only people left opposing the Assad government are extreme Islamist fundamentalists who do not want peace.
So I think all these foreign powers can talk all they want, but it's going to be very, very hard to put any pieces back together again after they've smashed Syria into a million parts.
Well, I mean, the thing is, the answer is simple.
It's just politically impossible.
And I'm not saying this is one I favor, but I'm just saying from the imperial side, what makes perfect sense is the Americans agreeing with the Iranians and Hezbollah and Russia and the Ba'athist minority and, to a great degree, Sunni-backed government in Damascus, that they will, in fact, no lying, pull all their support for the jihadists and proceed to sit back and watch as the Syrian army crushes the Islamic State and the al-Nusra Front and reestablishes the Syrian State to its old borders and then hold some elections and whatever.
But there's no Nusra because there's no more Saudi, Qatari, Turkish, Israeli, American support for them.
You may be a little bit too sanguine about how quickly the Islamists would die out, I think, at this point.
They have some independent sources of income, including oil, in both Syria and Iraq.
They also will continue to have private support in the Sunni world that's very difficult to shut off completely.
They've got captured weapons.
This is a genie that's hard to put back in the bottle this late in the game.
Well, there are a lot of them, but as far as, you know, the Islamic State used to be a group.
Now it's a place.
It could be turned back into a group fairly easily.
You know, Eric Margulies jokes that the Turkish police could sack Mosul.
You know, you wouldn't even need the Turkish army to invade.
Just send in the gendarmes and the war would be over in a week and a half.
Well, I think that's the kind of hubris we got into when Obama, what, a couple of years ago, talked about the Islamic State being kind of a non-entity.
And it's grown hugely since then.
I just, you know, time will tell.
I don't think it'll be that simple.
I think the other problem is the only way your scenario would work is if this entire international community continued giving very large amounts of aid to Assad.
Given his record, that's just not going to happen.
It's not going to happen on a one-sided basis.
Well, I wouldn't take anybody more than the Russians.
I mean, really, my proposal, even as horrible as it is, still only has America butting out, but enforcing the butting out of our allies, too, basically.
How do we do that?
Saudi Arabia has made it very clear that it's willing to go its own way.
And given the financial resources it has and its proximity to that theater, we don't have the capability of enforcing an arms embargo.
The best thing we can do is find some kind of agreement that makes Saudi Arabia buy into it.
Yeah.
Possibly.
Although then again, America has a lot of carrots that they could threaten to pull from the Saudis.
You know, they can talk real big about what they're going to be able to do, what they could do without us, but we haven't seen them try it yet.
We've only seen them try it with American cooperation all along pretty much, right?
I think one of the big failures of the Obama administration was buying Saudi support for the Iran nuclear deal, which I think was, by the way, a very good deal.
But I'm afraid that the Obama administration gave Saudi Arabia a blank check in return for supporting that deal.
One part of the blank check went to Yemen, where, as you well know, the U.S. is still supporting Saudi aggression throughout Yemen at huge civilian expense.
And the other part of the blank check, or one of the other parts, is going to Syria, where we basically are not doing much to block continued Saudi aid to Islamists in Syria.
Yep.
And civilians are paying a huge price.
And given that we keep intervening in these countries in the name of humanitarian intervention, it's a very cruel irony indeed.
Yeah.
The Israelis and the Saudis both just, oh, you know, the nuclear deal has hurt our feelings, and we need to be, you know, comforted by give us more billions of dollars and blank checks and bombs and aggressive war and a blank check to treat al-Qaeda guys in our hospitals and God knows what madness, so that we can help secure their safety by double extra assuring the civilian nature of the Iranian nuclear program, huh?
Wow.
Obama totally muddled his message.
He should have said, this is one of the toughest nuclear agreements ever devised in history, you know, with tougher sanctions and inspections than almost anything else we've ever seen.
This will directly improve the security of both Israel and Saudi Arabia.
No way are we going to then have to pay an additional price on top of that.
You guys should be thanking us, not the other way around.
Yeah, exactly.
All right, well, listen, I've already kept you over the time, but I really appreciate this article, and I really appreciate you coming back on the show, Jonathan.
Thanks, Scott.
Bye-bye.
Good stuff.
All right, so that is Jonathan Marshall.
He's at ConsortiumNews.com, rebuffing peace chances in Syria.
It's a really good one.
Go back and read it.
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