02/17/16 – Dan Sanchez – The Scott Horton Show

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Darren'scoffee.com All right, you guys, welcome back.
Yeah, I'm Scott.
It's my show, The Scott Show.
I'm here on the Liberty Radio Network, noon to two, eastern time, on the weekdays.
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All right, next up is Dan Sanchez, writing at antiwar.com, a regular contributor.
He and Sheldon Richmond are both our newest regular contributors at antiwar.com.
This one is called Israel and Syria.
Plan B is to Balkanize.
Welcome back to the show, Dan.
How are you?
Well, it's great to be with you, Scott.
Very good to have you here.
And, you know, I recommend your articles to people all the time, because I think they're really good.
And they ask me things, and I go, you know what you should do?
Here, read this.
And they go, oh, thanks.
I get it now.
What I try for, there are some issues where there's no definitive, thorough statement of the important details.
And so sometimes when I come across an issue, I just, in my head, like, you know, maybe I should write that, since it doesn't exist.
Exactly.
It's the entrepreneurial spirit, you know.
Ah, a place in the market where I might could fill a gap here.
Absolutely.
And, in fact, I'll go ahead, as long as we're talking about it.
I'm patting you on the head and everything.
From Clean Break to Dirty Wars and Seize the Chaos.
Those are the two that I like the best that I'm always recommending more than the rest.
But there's a lot of other great ones.
Everyone check them out at original.antiwar.com slash dan underscore Sanchez, or just check the right margin there at antiwar.com.
So, anyway, this is along the same lines as those.
Again, Israel and Syria.
And so the subtitle here is Yanan to Yalan.
So, or, I don't know, is it Yalan?
There's no apostrophe, but I don't really speak Hebrew very well.
Anyway, Moshe Yalan.
Who's he?
And what did he say that you thought was so interesting, Dan?
He's the defense minister of Israel.
And the thing that he said that was so interesting is that he endorsed a partition of Syria.
You see, there's a war in Syria, and it's a civil war, but it's also a budding world war involving the U.S. and Russia, countries in the Middle East, countries in Europe.
It's really quite a conflagration.
And he thought that a partition might be a good plan B.
Now, we know it's plan B because, as Michael Oren always reiterates whenever anyone goes off script, plan A is Assad must go, that they want regime change in Syria.
And so it's interesting that he would choose now for this plan B because it just so happens that there's sort of a turning point in the war.
That Russia and Russian airstrikes plus Shiite militia and Syrian government and Hezbollah ground operations have really got the rebels in a corner.
And in fact, Aleppo, it seems to be almost like a last stand situation in the city of Aleppo, which is the second biggest city in Syria.
And so it is now that he is saying, well, you know, let's do this.
Let's have a partition.
Now, what's interesting about that is that it's not the first time he's floated this idea.
There was an interview in 2013 where he also talked about maybe it would be a good idea to have a partition.
And the way he, the context that he gave it is that, you know, it's kind of artificial what Syria is now anyway.
After all, it was sort of just carved up, just sort of a compromise between diplomats, Western diplomats sitting at a table after World War I.
And that was the creation of Syria.
There was the Sykes-Picot Treaty.
And so it's really very artificial, so we shouldn't be too wedded to it.
And so we might as well just create a partition.
Well, yeah, and so, you know, the level of cynicism here is just amazing.
But, you know, I guess that should be the least of it.
But, you know, the thing of it is that there really doesn't seem to be.
Well, like, for example, the leaders of Syria and Kurdistan now, you know, I don't know how likely they are to want to go back under the control of Damascus.
But on the other hand, it seems like that the possibility that that could be negotiated certainly exists.
Their leaders are on the record saying that they, you know, don't want to be under Damascus.
But they don't want to see Assad fall because of what would happen to everybody else who his state is protecting right now from the al-Nusra Front and the ISIS guys.
And so, you know, the idea that, oh, well, you know, geez, I guess it'll just have to be broken into its smallest pieces.
Because some major proportion, I guess, although I doubt it's a majority of the Sunni population is backed by a bunch of foreign powers is at war with everybody else.
So, you know what I mean?
It's like the kind of pretend riot in Tahrir Square in June of 2013, right before they canceled the revolution.
And al-Sisi declared his military dictatorship where, you know, they said, oh, no, we have to prevent a civil war and all this.
But they were preempting something that was not really going on.
What was going on in Tahrir Square at the time was more like festivities than a riot and another revolution, you know?
And same kind of thing here, like, oh, geez, things in Syria are going so bad.
I guess we should just do everything we can to completely destroy it.
What's left of it.
And destruction is the name of the game.
It is exactly as cynical as you might imagine.
Because this is, I mean, you can imagine that what the plan could be is balkanization.
Like I say in the title of my article, that like you say, the smallest possible units that, you know, if you balkanize the country in that way, you can see how strategically Israel might want its neighbors to be shattered into a thousand pieces.
So and that there's a long heritage of this strategy.
You know what?
Save that for the next segment, because there's a lot to discuss there that we don't have time to discuss before this coming break.
But I just wanted to talk about or, you know, ask you to talk about what happens if they can do this like they did in the Balkans, where they come in and draw with a black magic marker over what were sort of kind of de facto lines between ethnic factions or religious factions or however you do it.
But then once they take a black magic marker and say these are now real borders, and doesn't that leave so many people on the wrong sides of those lines and subject to that much more violence then?
Well, that's exactly the issue.
I mean, that's why it's so unbelievably arrogant of Moshe Yalon to say, oh, okay, we're going to get rid of the old Sykes-Picot, and we're going to have this like more refined Sykes-Picot, because still it's going to be outsiders holding the magic markers and carving things up.
And the thing is that because it's outsiders doing it, and it's not self-determination, that it's going to be chaos.
And we don't know exactly how it's going to be chaos.
We don't know who's going to come out on top or anything like that.
But the thing is that outsiders don't have the incentives.
They don't have the on-the-ground knowledge to make compromises.
Because like you say, even with smaller circles with the magic marker, the thing is that within those circles there's still going to be lots of diversity.
There's still going to be different nations within those circles, and they can fight just as much as the fighting is going on right now.
All right, hold it there, Dan.
We've got to take this break.
We'll be right back with Dan Sanchez from AntiWar.com.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Dan Sanchez about this piece, Israel and Syria.
Plan B is to balkanize.
And again, you know, it is a complicated mess.
It's hard for anybody to give any kind of summary.
But, you know, in the war there, as I think is so often said, nobody really likes Assad, the dictator himself.
But everyone, not every individual, but as far as you could characterize the different ethnic and religious factions that live in Syria, they all back the regime against Arar al-Sham al-Nusra, the Islamic State, and for that matter, the rest of the so-called mythical moderate jihadists who are the same damn thing anyway.
And it's not even clear at all that the majority of Sunnis are on their side.
In fact, I don't think that they are.
Mostly this is a project by the United States, Turkey, Qatar, and Israel to attempt or at least push a half a regime change.
I think Saudi, Israel, and Turkey wanted a full one.
America went for a half a one here for the last five years.
Let them hemorrhage to death, as the Israelis put it in the New York Times.
Keep both sides bleeding and hemorrhaging to death over the long term.
And so, that's important because what we're talking about is the Israeli Defense Minister pretending that, yeah, we're just going to have to completely create, you know, break up, and make Alawistan Syrian Kurdistan, Syrian Druzestan, and he might as well have gone on to say, and why not new states for the Marianites, the Assyrians, and the Chaldean Christians too.
As long as he's just making up stuff.
Let's just pretend that all these factions all hate and want to kill each other because they have different religious beliefs.
What a ridiculous lie.
He's so far out ahead of his own narrative.
It's completely ridiculous here.
But he's giving away the game.
And the game is destroy it all.
And that's where we were interrupted at the break there, Dan.
So, go back and tell them how it got to be this way.
Okay.
Well, first of all, one important distinction is that when you say Sunnis, and the majority of Sunnis, that we need to distinguish between the majority of local Sunnis versus the foreigner Sunnis, because a lot of the forces, a lot of the rebel forces are foreigners.
They're from Saudi Arabia, from other countries in the Middle East.
And the issue that you bring up is very important because that's what he wants us to think, is that it's just sort of a purely religious conflict.
And it has nothing to do with interventions that have been done in the past over ten years.
And so it's really problematic because in the 1980s, there was a document called the Yanan Plan.
Well, it's known as the Yanan Plan.
And Oded Yanan wrote something very similar to what you just said.
It almost sounded like you were reading it.
He said, Syria will fall apart in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure into several states, such as in present-day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shiite Alawi state along its coast, a Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state in Damascus hostile to its northern neighbor, and the Druzes who will set up a state, maybe even in our Golan, and certainly in the Hauran and in northern Jordan.
And so that is from 1982.
That is not the quote that we were talking about before.
So the reason why they think that the Alawis will break apart, the Shiite Alawis are the governing religious sect, that Assad is an Alawite, and it's very much a minority.
And Aleppo is the city that we're talking about being at the crossroads and being sort of a last stand for the Sunnis, and so that's why he's thinking a Sunni state in the Aleppo area.
Another Sunni state in Damascus, which is the capital, and to its northern neighbor, the Druzes, who were sort of the puppet sect for Israel in the Lebanon, the Israel-Lebanon war.
And so they're hoping that this sectarian divide will be real, and it's almost like they're believing their own lies, because that was David Wormser's whole theory too, that it's rife, it's ready to fall, it's all sectarian.
They're at each other's throats, that Saddam and Assad, that they're the only thing keeping each other from each other's throats, and once we knock them out, it'll just unleash them, and then it'll all become balkanized.
And wait, tell them, who's David Wormser?
David Wormser is a neocon, a neoconservative, I think a dual-citizen Israel and US, and he was an official in the Bush administration.
He kind of floated from department to department.
He was at State, he was at the Pentagon, he was kind of everywhere, and he wrote two strategy documents, and these are the documents that you brought up earlier regarding my articles.
I wrote, A Clean Break to Dirty Wars, and Seize the Chaos, and so those two articles are about these documents where he talked about Israel's policy vis-a-vis the Middle East.
And the second one is where he really outlines the balkanization strategy, that he wanted to expedite the chaotic collapse, is the way he put it.
And so it was shortly after that that the neocons really started pushing through the Project for a New American Century throughout the Clinton administration to knock out Saddam as the first domino that they thought would eventually balkanize the entire Middle East.
Well, and you know, it's interesting to me about that Yanon plan, that if you read it, this guy's an insane lunatic, and he's completely wrong, he sounds like the most paranoid kind of right-winger about the near and medium-term future.
I mean, humanity is doomed, the Soviet communists are going to rule the whole world, the U.S., I guess, and England will just fall, or be out of the picture, and it'll be poor little Israel against the world, you know?
And, yeah, boy, was he just pessimistic about the situation that they were in, and it's funny, in a horrifying way to me, to think of just the counterfactual, if they had not been stuck in their own narrative this whole time, and recognized that, you know what?
They could get along with the people of the Middle East just as well as they'd get along with the dictators of the Middle East if they would just quit their perpetual war against the people of Palestine, Lebanon, etc., and unlike that clean-break policy of, we must just maintain full-scale dominance, if instead they had a policy of, hey, let's more or less try to get along with our neighbors, after all, we've got to live here for a long, long time, and things like that, it would probably work just fine.
There's no reason to think that it wouldn't.
Again, as we discussed on this show before, all of the Arab states either recognize Israel or are willing to recognize Israel if they'll get out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and that includes the Palestinian Authority, and that even includes Hamas, for Christ's sake!
So they're carrying out this plan as though they're still living in this nightmare dystopia that they had predicted back 35 years ago, but they're not.
They don't live there.
They live here!
Yeah, and what's really amazing is that if they think that they're going to just ride this out, that they could just sow chaos throughout the entire Middle East, and just ride it out, it leads to thinking about Netanyahu's recent statement where he talked about building a huge wall, and he actually used the word to keep the savage beasts out, and you get the same, Yalan gave the same sentiment in his recent quote, and it's really a paranoia, and I think the paranoia is based on the occupation.
Ultimately, the occupation of the Palestinians, that that is the telltale heart that is driving Israel mad, that it's the issue that makes them want to shatter anything that looks like it could conceivably be a threat any time in the future.
So they would rather have a jihadist stand all around them, or they would like puppets.
Like I say, puppet is plan A, jihadist stand is plan B.
But what they never want is any kind of Arab nationalism.
Arab nationalism, they think, will eventually lead to a concentrated, effective opposition to the occupation.
And as you say in your previous piece, I mean, David Wormser is absolutely explicit about this, that, you know what, if the tradeoff is a bunch of Bin Ladenites, I don't care.
Exactly.
It's right there in there.
All right, listen, I got to let you go because I'm over time.
Thanks so much for coming back on the show, Dan.
You're great.
Thank you, Scott.
Bye-bye.
All right, y'all, that is Dan Sanchez.
So from Clean Break to Dirty Wars, Seize the Chaos, and a whole bunch more, but also, you know, one, two, skip a few.
This one is Israel and Syria.
Plan B is to Balkanize.
It's on Antiwar.com right now.
So go and look at it, and we'll be back in a minute.
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