11/23/15 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back.
I was telling y'all earlier, it's now 4,000 interviews.
I bring that up, it's 4,000 and something, and in fact, I think actually there are quite a few missing that are on antiwar.com that, for some reason, have never been put on my own site, whatever.
Anyway, for all I know, it's 5,000, but I don't think so.
4,000 and something interviews, scotthorton.org, they're supposedly all there in MP3 format for you.
Let me know if you find any dead links.
Anyway, the point being, 4,000 interviews, and approximately 2,000 of them are of our good friend, Gareth Porter.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
How are you?
Of course, I know you were exaggerating for effect.
Yeah, okay, but it is hundreds, and I think a couple hundred.
The last time I counted, it was 150, but that was because it would automatically put the number at the end.
It would say, Antiwar Radio, Gareth Porter, number 149, or whatever.
But then we changed the title system to where now they have dates in the titles, so that means it's not a clone of the same title again and again and again, so it doesn't keep count the way it used to before.
It's kind of you to make this point, and of course, I'm honored that you've wanted to interview me so often.
Thanks.
Well, you write a lot of stuff.
The thing is, well, and I told this story before, the first time I interviewed you was in January of 2007, and Bush and Cheney were talking about maybe they were going to bomb Iran because not Saudi backing al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Sunni-based insurgency, but Iran that was backing all the same factions we were backing.
Well, they were the ones who were responsible for everything that had gone wrong in the Iraq war.
Maybe we needed to bomb the goods force bases and this kind of thing, and you came on the show and said, nah, don't worry about that.
If they do it, it won't be until the summertime, and here's how I know.
And you were saying what no one else was saying, and of course, you were right, and it came to a head that summer, and thankfully, antiwar forces prevailed.
But anyway, that was why I started interviewing you is because you had the x-ray eyes to read through a lot of lines in order to decipher what was really going on here, and what was really going on here was at least that we had time before it came down to it.
So anyway, and then I've interviewed you a thousand times since then, mostly over Iran's nuclear program, which you eventually finally wrote the book on, which everyone should read.
It's called Manufactured Crisis.
It's now mostly sort of kind of been put to bed, I think, I hope, for a while anyway with the new nuclear deal.
But anyway, the point is, you're a great journalist, and I like interviewing you because you know so much stuff.
This article is called How Terror in Paris Calls for Revising U.S.-Syria Policy, and I ask you, what's Syria policy?
Yeah, I mean, this is a good question, and the answer is it's a Syria policy that is so full of contradictions and ambiguities that it is literally impossible to really describe it in any coherent way.
I think that it's, and this is a theme that we've gone over or I've gone over I know many times on your show, it's the product to a great extent of Obama's response to domestic political pressures or perceived pressures or domestic political considerations, perhaps is a better way of putting it.
But definitely, you know, there are things about the policy that are difficult to make sense of, and I'm still trying to do that.
I mean, for one thing, I'm still trying to understand why the Obama administration is so eager to please the Saudis, so unwilling to do anything or say anything that contradicts the Saudi efforts in either Yemen or in Syria.
And I think this is something I'm going to continue to be writing about, and I'm still trying to solve that puzzle.
Well, yeah, it's a mystery to me.
It seems like any one of these American presidents could tell the Saudis to go to hell.
What difference would it make if they did?
Well, I think Obama is unique in this regard.
I mean, I think it's true that previous presidents would have been unwilling to tolerate what Obama has not only tolerated, but really supported over the past three years.
And so it does pose a political conundrum here to understand this.
I think part of the answer is definitely, and I'm going to be writing about this soon, that Obama is feeling the necessity particularly to support the Saudis in Syria because he has been so unwilling to have U.S. boots on the ground or even to carry out any military attack in the air against Assad.
And so he is, I mean, his view is that we need the Saudis to be in there instead of Americans.
And he said that in his famous interview or infamous interview with Tom Friedman, something to the effect that, you know, why can't we have Arab boots on the ground in these wars?
Now, you know, somebody pointed out to me the other day that he couldn't have meant the Saudis because they're so incapable of actually having combat troops on the ground.
And that's a fair point to make.
But I think what he meant by that was the Saudis involved deeply through their relationships with their allies, their Arab allies in Syria.
And that's the equivalent, therefore, of deeper American direct involvement.
I'm sorry, you lost me.
Are we talking about pretending to fight the Islamic State or we're still talking about overthrowing Bashar al-Assad?
Yeah, I mean, in this case, more of the latter, more of the latter, for sure.
Yeah.
So I'm trying.
He's saying let's work with the Saudis more to back Ahrar al-Assam and al-Nusra against Assad and the Islamic State still in November 2015, not their redirecting.
Absolutely.
I mean, this has emerged as a quite an explicit policy now, particularly in light of these what I've called the Sham peace negotiations or the Sham peace conference on Syria, because the plan is clearly to to to to absolutely rely on the support for Ahrar al-Assam in particular and and even al-Nusra to some extent to put pressure to put sufficient pressure on the the Syrian government to get an agreement that there'll be a transition, a transitional government and that Assad will eventually step down.
Yeah.
Now, so that's the only difference.
Maybe they're they're willing to budge a little bit from getting rid of him at the beginning or getting rid of him at the end, or they still never will.
That's the major evolutionary change in U.S. policy that that now the U.S. is willing to support a settlement in which Assad could remain in power for, you know, they're saying six months.
Obviously, that's negotiable.
They could extend the period, but but that it must be part of a transition.
But now are they do they mean a transition away from the entire Alawite led regime or what are they talking about?
Because that would mean the end of the entire state structure as it exists, wouldn't it?
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
And I have to say that there's a lot of ambiguity about that.
But I think they're trying to have it both ways.
They're trying to argue that, well, of course, we have to have a secular government.
And they've been explicit about that and a secular government in Syria.
That means I mean, that's a code word, I think, for protection of minority interests, including the Alawites on one hand and on the other hand, that it has to be a government in which the Sunnis have a fair representation.
And that's going to be the crucial part of that.
They're going to span sponsor in this transition for we four and a half years into this war for that to all work out, I guess we'll see.
Hang on one sec.
Y'all.
We're going to talk more with Gareth Porter on the other side of this break.
The Scott Horton Show.
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All right, guys, welcome back.
It's taking so dang long here.
All right, we're talking about Syria with the great Gareth Porter here.
So we got special forces embedded with the Kurds, who are the enemies of our allies, the Turks.
And I heard, I read in a couple of places, Gareth, that they're going to embed some special forces with the Army of Conquest, too, which puts them in the line of fire of the Russians, who are there for the same reason that we supposedly are there now, to fight the Islamic State.
I haven't seen that.
Where did you see a report to that effect?
I'll have to find it for you.
It was sketchy.
It was an implication more than a...
Yeah, I wouldn't trust that.
You think they're only embedding them with the Kurds and not with the Arabs?
They're not going to do that.
Why not?
And Charles Lister wrote about how the Saudis and the Americans have a, quote, room in Turkey where they run the Al-Nusra Front and the Army of Conquest.
They're the commanders of it.
Well, you know, I think there's a nuance there that's being dropped.
I think what Lister was saying was that the Americans, as I recall what he said, I can check this later, was that the Americans in that operations room had encouraged some of the groups, some of the rebel groups that had been supported by the U.S. to go ahead and join in with the Army of Conquest, and that was after the capture of Idlib.
It started in April of 2015.
So you can check me and see if I'm correct about that.
That's my recollection.
So I think the Americans are not going to be directly assisting Al-Nusra Front in an Army of Conquest war plan.
I think it's going to be more indirect.
I think, you know, they're counting on it, as I said, as a form of pressure, definitely.
They're letting the Saudis continue their policy of direct support.
And I reported, as I think you probably will remember earlier this year, that a very well-placed Saudi source told me that the Saudis were providing 40 percent of all the military necessities of the Army of Conquest.
Well, and this includes, am I right, new rounds of TOW missiles hitting the battlefield there in the hands of the Al-Qaeda guys?
Well, I mean, as far as I know, the Saudis have not gone off the reservation themselves and provided TOW missiles.
This is something, I mean, legally they can't do.
The TOW missiles, let me put it this way, the TOW missiles cannot be provided to anyone without U.S. support, without U.S. approval, I mean.
And so far, the indications are that all the TOW missiles have gone to places that the United States approved.
Now, you know, I don't know specifically all the specific names of the brigades that have gotten TOW missiles, so I can't precisely say, you know, none of those are now directly under al-Nusra control.
But I think it's more, you know, that they have that they're part of a coalition with al-Nusra Front or part of the command that the al-Nusra Front clearly is the dominant factor in.
I hope that answered the question.
Yeah, well, I guess so.
I mean, it seems to me like once Arar al-Sham and whatever other groups joined up with the al-Nusra Front in the so-called Army of Conquest, then, well, they just renamed al-Nusra and these groups joined it or no.
I mean, that's still plausible deniability to give TOW missiles to some of them, but not the other ones in the same group together.
Well, you know, I think that the United States is going to make clearly distinctions between al-Nusra Front and other organizations.
And, you know, by doing so, they feel that they're even within the Army of Conquest, you're saying within the Army of Conquest.
Exactly.
Yes.
And there's something called the Islamic Front, which Arar al-Sham is the nominal as well as the real force.
I mean, Arar al-Sham actually has more troops, apparently, than al-Nusra Front.
They are a larger military force than al-Nusra Front.
And they are the ones who dominate this Islamic Front.
And al-Nusra Front is not part of it.
And I think that, you know, that's an arrangement which is aimed at making it more acceptable for the United States to say, yeah, it's fine to provide weapons to anybody who's part of that front because it's not part of al-Nusra.
So, you know, I think there's a dodge going on.
There's a major political dodge going on here, no question about it.
And I think that's really essential to understanding, as far as we can, what the Americans are up to here.
Yeah.
It's amazing that even this far into it and even after all the refugee crisis is hitting all the European countries and everything, they still are willing to just continue the current policy and not try very hard to get over the hurdles and really have some kind of peaceful resolution as soon as possible, however soon that could be.
Well, you know, when you start talking about a peaceful resolution of this conflict, I mean, even John Kerry, who is, you know, pretty has a pretty long record of saying things that, you know, you know, just are BS about Syria.
He is admitting publicly that we're not close really to a breakthrough here.
I mean, he's also making statements suggesting that, oh, you know, just give us a little bit more time.
But he has said, you know, in recent days, in the last week or 10 days, that, you know, peace is not around the corner in Syria.
And so, again, I mean, this is part of the Obama administration's playing verbal games with the American people.
But they appear to be trying to go into a phase of these talks, these negotiations, where what is supposed to happen is that the group of outside powers are going to decide who is a terrorist and who isn't.
And those who are deemed kosher, if you will, if I may use that term under the circumstances, will be allowed to enter into the transitional government and be part of the power structure.
That's going to be so funny when they include al-Qaeda, because after all, if they can treat them at Israeli hospitals, then they must be kosher.
Well, actually, they've already publicly said, no, no, al-Nusra Front is not acceptable.
Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda's Syria organization is not going to be an acceptable partner.
They do not qualify.
They are terrorists.
I mean, in fact, al-Nusra Front helped them out by, you know, made it easier for them to take that position or made it more difficult to take a different position by recently approving the terror attacks in Paris, believe it or not.
And this was despite the fact that they were supposedly carrying out a charm offensive last summer.
I'm sure you remember this spring and summer.
They were trying to present themselves as a moderate alternative to ISIS.
So anyway, I just this is by way of saying that, no, al-Nusra is is not going to be approved.
They've already leaked that.
But but what is interesting is that everybody else is is fair game.
You know, Arar al-Sham, all the other folks who are allied with al-Nusra Front, who are in the same command structure and who fight alongside them, those people are going to be waved on through, according to the best analysis that I've seen of this so far.
The what are they going to do then?
Arar al-Sham is going to make a deal.
They're all going to meet in Switzerland, come to a pact with Assad in America and Russia and whoever.
And then what are they going to do about the al-Nusra Front and the Islamic state?
Just because we made friends with some of the Mujahideen, they're going to help us get rid of the rest.
How could they?
Well, exactly.
That's not going to happen at all.
We know that perfectly well.
And so do the designers of this this crazy notion.
I mean, the whole thing is is sheer fantasy.
It doesn't connect with reality.
And that's what rethrows me for a bit of a loss to understand, apart from, you know, just sheer, you know, sheer public relations saying, oh, look here, we're working for peace.
And that could be the easy explanation.
How they feel they can get away with this.
I don't know.
Because, you know, it doesn't it doesn't add up to any formula that makes the least sense in terms of the real forces at work in Syria.
I mean, it's not going to accomplish anything.
You know, it's not going to get the it's not going to get the Syrian government to make concessions because they can see what's going on.
I mean, you know, bring in the jihadists into your government with al-Nusra Front still outside, but allied with the same folks that are inside.
No, of course, that's not going to happen.
So I don't know what they expect to result from this, except some very shallow, meaningless public relations value.
Yeah, well, I don't know, man.
Bill Kristol said this was a good idea.
So maybe if we just hang in there.
Yeah, I mean, you know, these are all man.
Anyway, hey, you do great work.
Thanks for joining me for Episode 4000 and something here, Gareth.
Always a pleasure.
Thanks, Scott.
Appreciate it.
That's the great Gareth Porter, everybody.
He wrote the book Manufactured Crisis all about Iran's nuclear program.
I think you should read it and I think you should check out his archive, you know, if you want to at Middle East Eye.
Middle East Eye dot net, this one is called How Terror in Paris Calls for Revising U.S.
Syria Policy.
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