02/16/16 – Joe Lauria – The Scott Horton Show

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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.
On the line, I've got Joe Lauria.
You and Joe.
Foreign affairs journalist based at the United Nations since 1990.
He's written for the Boston Globe, the London Daily Telegraph, the Johannesburg Star, the Montreal Gazette, the Wall Street Journal, and ConsortiumNews.com is where I have a couple of very important ones here.
Saudis goad Obama to invade Syria and risking World War III in Syria are two of his latest there.
Welcome back to the show, Joe.
How are you, man?
I'm fine.
Thank you very much.
I'm talking to you from Erbil in Iraq.
I was about to say that.
I forgot to, but I'm glad you did.
They're from Iraqi Kurdistan.
He's on the line there today.
All right.
So, geez, I guess the big question is U.S. and Russia say they have a ceasefire deal.
What difference does it make?
None, I'm afraid.
And they knew that when they announced it.
And even the next day, Sergey Lavrov was saying there's only a 50-50 chance.
The issue comes down to what was the problem before these peace talks, these aborted talks in Geneva took place, which was the U.S. and Russia do not agree on a definition of terrorism and who are terrorists in Syria.
So the fact is that this cessation of hostilities allows continued military action against terrorist groups.
The only two they agree on are Islamic State and Al-Nusra Front, the al-Qaeda branch in Syria.
But there's a whole bunch of other groups, the Army of Conquest and these groups that the Americans say are moderate and that the Russians say are not.
So the Russians are going to keep hitting them, and there's going to be a problem there.
So there's going to be continued hostilities.
But more importantly, the Russian-backed Syrian Arab Army is making enormous gains on the ground.
Even U.S. officials and testimony in Congress have had to admit this, and that's when you know that the Russians are telling the truth, when it's confirmed up on the Hill.
They are approaching Raqqa, which is the so-called capital of the Islamic State.
There's one story up there, unconfirmed, that the Syrian Arab Army has to cut off a 15-kilometer-wide stretch, and it will be able to cut off the eastern part of the Islamic State and the west.
It will be cut off inside Syria, let alone Iraq, and that they're marching on Raqqa.
And there's a lot of people speculating that the Americans want to get there first.
There's kind of a race to get to Raqqa first to see who can conquer the Islamic State.
But right now, the Russians, the Syrian Arab Army, the Iranians, Hezbollah, Iraqi Shiite militias, who are fighting on the side of the government in Syria have without doubt the upper hand.
This bombing started in September, and it's made an enormous difference on the ground.
So there's obviously a drive towards a victory, and that's the reason why the Saudis and the Turks are going absolutely nuts and want to invade, and they want to get their men on the ground, but they don't.
They can't do it without the Americans, especially the Saudis.
So that's why I wrote that piece saying they're trying to goad the Americans into invading, to be part of the coalition on the ground, because they are desperate.
They've spent five years of investment trying to overthrow Assad, and it's all blown up in their faces now.
And only the Americans could save them, and only Barack Obama could stop them.
God dang, what a mess.
And I already know what you're talking about, but still you got me all tied up in knots here.
All right, so first of all, for the audience, you need to know, Raqqa, that's the capital of Islamic State.
That is, you know, I mean, obviously they can flee to Mosul and Fallujah and fight another day, but if they lose Raqqa, that's a huge loss for IS as far as that goes.
But then, so, and I think this audience, we got a pretty good idea of who's on which side of the lines, except, of course, there are a lot of contradictions, because, you know, America's on both and even more, three and four sides of these different lines, where we support Badr in Iraq but oppose them in Syria.
We support the Kurds in Iraq and in Syria, but we are also NATO allies with their enemies, the Turks.
You know, and so, you know, when you say that there's a race to Raqqa and the Russian air power is backing up Assad's army on the ground and they're running and the U.S. wants to beat them there, the U.S. wants to beat them there with who?
With the YPG Kurdish Syrians?
Or with this new Saudi force that they're building up there?
I mean, that's the part I can't get my head around, is the idea of some kind of, you know, Saudi infantry pouring in from Turkey or something like that to beat Assad's army?
I mean, they're just putting themselves in Russia's crosshairs at that point and counting on Obama to face the Russians down or something?
I don't know, Joe.
What?
Yeah, it's not going to happen.
They're not going to get anybody on the ground.
And the Islamic State will probably lose Raqqa to Assad's forces.
And that's maybe the end of the Saudi dream of overthrowing Assad in Syria.
Well, but the Turks have been attacking the Kurds and even Assad's army, right?
Turks are a different issue.
Because Aleppo is probably right now more important even than Raqqa.
That, if they can, they've pretty much encircled it.
I mean, the Syrian army with Russian support, they pretty much encircled that city.
There are Islamic State in the east, and there's only half of the city that was controlled by rebels.
And they've got that pretty much surrounded.
They're cutting off aid and arms and supplies from Turkey into various rebel groups, including Islamic State.
And this is what Turkey cannot abide by.
And they've started to strike Raqqa.
But they're also, they have two aims, of course, the Turks.
This is Erdogan, who is becoming more authoritarian by the day.
And as I point out in my article, he isn't even legally in charge of the government.
That should be the prime minister.
But he's running the show.
And he wants to defeat not only overthrow Assad, but he wants to defeat the Syrian Kurds.
Because they're aligned with the PKK, which is a group, of course, that he's been fighting in Turkey.
And it just finished a big operation, and it's now turned his attention to the Syrian Kurds, where the Americans and the Russians are supporting the Syrian Kurds.
Isn't JSOC embedded with the Syrian Kurds right now?
Well, the Syrian Kurds are one of the most effective ground forces to defeat Islamic State.
So the U.S. also wants to defeat Islamic State, but they want to overthrow Assad.
Whereas Saudis and the Turks are only interested in Assad.
It's clear that they've been supporting Islamic State.
So if the Syrian Arab Army and the Russians get to Raqqa, they've destroyed Islamic State inside Syria effectively.
And if they completely take over Aleppo, they've pretty much taken over the main population centers of Syria after having taken back a lot of territory in Latakia in the early part of the Russian involvement.
So it's a very critical time for the Saudis, and they cannot do anything to stop it unless the Americans lead a ground invasion, which, of course, could lead to a conflict with Russia.
And I don't think Obama's going to do that.
He's been very reluctant to get involved in this war.
As you recall, Hillary Clinton, when she was Secretary of State, and Petraeus, they both wanted him to set up a no-fly zone.
They wanted him to arm more rebels with heavy weapons.
He continues to refuse to do that.
The closest he got was after the chemical weapons attack in August of 2013 in Ghouta, the suburb of Damascus.
And at the last minute, you know, he backed away, even though it was across his red line, threw it to Congress, and then he made this deal with the Russians to get rid of all of Assad's chemical weapons, which just happened now.
And as Josiah Hirsch has written, he believes British intelligence tipped off Obama that that was actually the rebels that used those chemicals and not Assad, which would make a lot more sense.
Yeah, and we know that the CIA analysts were in revolt and refused to put out a CIA estimate blaming Assad for it.
So that's pretty much what you need to know right there if they're going to resign over it.
So Obama has been very reluctant to get involved, and I don't think he's going to, you know, accede to the desires of Erdogan and Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is actually, in many ways, the monarch right now.
He's only 30 years old, but his 80-year-old father is suffering from dementia, and he's the defense minister, and he's ran this disastrous war in Yemen.
He cannot defeat the poorest Arab country with the strongest Arab army, and all of his credibility and his future may be tied up in that Yemen war.
You know, the collapse of oil prices have hurt the entire Saudi ruling circles, because many people have lost benefits.
They've been given a gravy train, for the most part, for all these years, but now they're cutting back.
And he's got to win this war in Yemen.
He can't.
So he may be going for broke in Syria, because if they lose in Syria, the guy, you know, they're in real trouble there.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry.
We've got to take this break.
Hold it right there, everybody.
When we get back, we'll have more with Joe Lauria about the just insane crisis in the Middle East.
He's got two very important pieces at Consortium News for you here, risking World War III in Syria and Saudi's goat Obama to invade Syria.
Hang tight.
We'll be right back after this.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Joe Loria, UN reporter, for the most part.
Right now he's covering the absolute disaster in the Middle East.
Latest two articles here for ConsortiumNews.com.
Saudis goad Obama to invade Syria and risking World War III in Syria.
ConsortiumNews.com for those.
So, yeah, there's so much to talk about and even to go back over here because it's all so much with so many different sides to this conflict and what have you.
But I guess, first of all, I want to go back to the ceasefire deal.
Obviously the Russians have proven, like in the case of the chemical weapons you mentioned there, that they have the ability to influence Assad to do what it is that they want him to do.
If they come up with a ceasefire, they could get him to abide by it and his army.
But then who was it that America was supposed to influence by agreeing to this ceasefire?
We were supposed to tell the Turks and the Saudis to stop backing the terrorists there?
Or the CIA was going to agree to instruct Ahrar al-Sham and al-Nusra, or maybe just the former, that, OK, guys, we made a deal.
We want you to ceasefire now.
And do the Americans believe that they control Ahrar al-Sham and al-Nusra just because they give them guns and money all damn day for the last five years?
Because I don't really think that they do control them.
I don't know if they think that, and I don't know if they do control them.
The Saudis have much more control, of course, and Turkey.
But it doesn't sound like America has much control over Saudi and Turkey.
I mean, what was it that they promised Lavrov they were going to do?
It's mostly about humanitarian access right now, getting aid to various places.
Some towns that are being besieged for the last three or four years have not received much aid.
So the idea was some of those areas where there's fighting going on, where they don't involve terrorist groups, and again, there's a disagreement between the U.S. and Russia about what a terrorist group is in northern Syria, that they're supposed to lay down their arms and allow the U.N. and other aid agencies to bring aid in there.
That is really the main issue here.
The ceasefire was supposed to have been negotiated beneath it.
Just to make sure I understand you, the premise being that the Americans, the CIA, could influence virtually, I guess, all groups other than Nusra and ISIS to cease fire and allow the U.N. to come in, etc., if they asked them to?
Do I understand that right?
Well, yes.
These groups are being told to stop fighting in various areas where aid can get in.
Whether either side can arrange this is very questionable.
It would be very good, of course, if that could happen.
But a ceasefire that was supposed to be negotiated in Geneva as the first order of business, and then they were supposed to bring together a transitional government for six months, and then for a year have this government where Assad steps aside, write a new constitution, have an election.
That thing is almost completely dead.
It's supposed to start up again on February 25th.
We'll see.
But the opposition, led by the Saudis, had 100 groups that they melded together.
They were the ones that came with a condition, even though Staffan de Mistura, the U.N. envoy, said this was unconditional talks.
They weren't even direct talks.
They were proximity talks.
They were talked through de Mistura.
But the opposition, the Saudi-led opposition, said they wanted Russia to stop their military action before they would talk, and Russia didn't agree with that.
And they will not agree to stop fighting now because they could still hit terrorist groups.
And, again, the difference will be who are the terrorist groups.
They could certainly hit Islamic State and al-Nusra under the terms of this hostility, cessation of hostility.
If you want to set it up here, maybe we should have done this at the beginning.
You know, we've got the two sides.
We've got the Saudis and the Turks and the U.S. and Europe on the side of various groups that are trying to overthrow Assad.
And Israel.
Well, Israel is another issue here that we could get into.
I put that on the side because they're playing a very different game, I think, than the U.S. or the Turks or the Saudis or even the Europeans.
And we know from this Defense Intelligence Agency document from August 2012 that those groups, the Turks, the Americans, the Europeans, the Gulf Arabs, helped support the establishment of a Salafist principality in eastern Syria that would put pressure on Assad.
And this document warned they could join up with like-minded extremists here on the Iraqi side of the border, and that could become an Islamic state.
They actually used that phrase three years or two years before it came into being.
So we know that this group now has become a Frankenstein.
So the United States really, I think, to some extent is very serious about trying to defeat them, although it's been a half-hearted effort.
And the Saudis have done nothing, and the Turks have done nothing to fight the Islamic State.
There's plenty of evidence that Turkey and Saudi Arabia continue to support them, because they are trying to overthrow Assad, and they're the strongest force to do that.
So in the middle of this, the Russians saw that nobody was taking care of the Islamic State, and that if they won, they would overthrow Assad, and this group, or a horrible group like that, could take over Syria and threaten Europe with terrorist attacks that we saw in the beginning, of course, already in Paris and in Russia.
So that was one of the main reasons Russia got into that.
There's also the pipeline side of this, which maybe we shouldn't get into.
Yeah, go ahead.
Well, you know, one theory was that this entire Syrian war began.
One of the main reasons is because Assad rejected a Qatar-Saudi pipeline deal.
They would pump liquefied natural gas from Qatar, which is one of the largest natural gas producers in the world, through Saudi Arabia and then through Syria to the Mediterranean and on into Europe, which would cut out Russia, of course.
Russia is the biggest natural gas supplier to the Europeans.
So when Assad denied this, and went instead with a deal from Iran through Iraq, northern Iraq here, and into Syria, shortly after that we saw an uprising in Syria.
I don't buy it in that way at all.
That's one theory out there.
There was a genuine uprising against Assad in line with all the rest of the so-called Arab Spring.
But very early on, outside powers glammed onto that and started to manipulate and use it for their own interests.
And one of them may have been to defeat Assad, put in another government that's friendly to the Gulf Arabs, so they could put this pipeline.
And I don't think it's just that, because the Saudis' motive, main motive, is cutting out Iranian influence from the region.
And this is, of course, from Iran across here, northern Iraq, into Syria, and on into Lebanon, to Hezbollah, to some extent in Yemen.
So on both sides, Iranians and the Saudis both see each other as being rivals, so they both think they're acting defensively, but in many ways they're working offensively.
So the Saudis want to cut off Iranian influence in the entire region.
And if they win in Syria, and of course they're one of the principal backers, and maybe the principal backer of Assad, have been for years, money, and now arms, and Iranian troops, Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and certainly Iranian-backed Hezbollah coming from Lebanon into Syria.
If they win with the Russian support, this is a huge, huge blow to Saudi Arabia.
And the Turks have their own interest in the Kurds.
They agree with the Saudis on overthrowing Assad, but they also have their own inter-regional dispute, and that's with the Kurds, as we got into earlier, these PKK-linked Syrian Kurds, not the Kurds here in northern Iraq, which Turkey has very good relations with.
Alright, well, I'm sorry we've got to stop right there for this break, Joe, and let you go, but thanks very much.
I can guarantee there are going to be people who email me and say, Man, I listened to that Joe Laurier interview three times to learn all that stuff.
It's some great stuff.
I really appreciate it.
JoeLaurierConsortiumNews.com, y'all.
Have a good one.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
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