04/11/16 – Joe Lauria – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, introducing Joe Lauria.
He's written for the London Daily Telegraph, the Montreal Gazette, the Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and writes for the Johannesburg Star, as well as he's been doing a lot of good opinion pieces here lately for Robert Perry's site, ConsortiumNews.com.
This one is entitled, Why We're Never Told Why We're Attacked.
Welcome back to the show, Joe.
How are you?
I'm fine, Scott.
Thank you very much.
Very happy to have you.
Iraq, yes.
Oh, yeah, you're in Erbil, in Kurdistan, huh?
That's correct.
Well, geez, I guess maybe we should start in the present day instead of going all the way back in the past the way you do.
It's such a great article here.
I'm actually in the middle of writing a chapter just like this right now.
I'm going to try to not plagiarize you too bad.
That's all right.
Just give me some credit.
As I do so, yeah.
But anyway, so, yeah, hey, how's life in Erbil going?
How's war with the Islamic State?
You know, I was talking to some young people here today, and they don't watch the news.
They purposely live in a bubble here.
Physically, we're protected because the Peshmerga has really dug in.
The highway leading to Mosul, which is only one hour drive away from here, is blocked off by a wall and a gate on the, I haven't been there myself, but I've read about it.
I'm going to try to see if I can go in with the military to see what this looks like.
But right now, I know that it would be very hard for Islamic State to attack the city.
It was here in Erbil that Obama, it was after the Islamic State moved on Erbil in the summer of 2014 that he announced the airstrikes.
And then every American found out what ISIS is, hadn't heard of them before, because this city is sort of the red line.
They won't let them cross.
There's a huge amount of American investment here and Americans and other Westerners and the Israelis who are calling for independence of the Kurdish region all the time.
And so this place is going to be very difficult for them to get through to.
So we're safe.
But psychologically, knowing that a lot of these, a lot of people have their brothers and fathers and husbands out getting killed, getting shot, or simply just being away from home, defending this place, they don't want to think about it.
So what they are thinking about is economic problems.
The crash in oil prices, of course, has hit anywhere in the world, any country or region that's dependent on oil, and this is one of them, as much as they are.
And so everything's been flattened out here.
People haven't been paid.
Government workers haven't been paid in six, seven, eight months.
I don't know how they do it.
And the economy is really taking a hit.
That's really what's up most on people's minds right now.
Is there any indication that they're preparing, that the Peshmerga are preparing for a full scale assault on Mosul?
Yeah, but they can't do it alone.
They've got to do with the Iraqi army from the central government.
And as everyone knows, the relations are horrendous between Baghdad and Erbil here.
So, and that goes way back to feelings, of course, about Saddam and even earlier Arab atrocities against Kurds.
So the only part of Iraq that benefited, that celebrates the invasion of Iraq by the U.S. in 2003 is the Kurdish region.
They benefited enormously to the point where I don't see a lot of sympathy or even acknowledgement of the enormous suffering.
That their Arab compatriots went through because of this invasion, the hundreds of thousands that were killed, the continuing violence.
Maybe not on a scale as it was before, but there's still bombs going off.
Baghdad, even in Basra, which someone recently told me was quite safe, someone from there.
I can't easily go down there because I need another visa.
This is a completely separate area, even if it's not an independent country.
But there's no acknowledgement here.
And as far as Mosul goes, this is what they've been talking about for a long time.
How can they take back Mosul?
This is the second largest city in Iraq.
And this is where the Islamic State is well positioned.
And they've had it for over a year now, almost two years.
And the only way it can be done is a coordinated effort by the Iraqi army and the Peshmerga.
And there's such a mistrust of one another.
And Kurdish journals here told me that they simply don't want to die for each other.
And then there could be a huge dispute over who controls the city, if they should take it.
And how do you take this city of over a million people where civilians are living very densely, the U.S. military, which is patrolling here, they can't bomb.
And even if there were street-to-street fighting, there'd be probably enormous casualties.
So it's an extremely difficult operation, even if the Iraqi government and the Kurdish regional government were on the same page.
Now, there was a story about three weeks ago that the offensive had begun.
Simply, they took a village that was close to Mosul, but it's pretty much been stalled there.
And the Americans opened up a new small base nearby to coordinate this.
So they want to do it.
They're planning to do it.
Kerry was here, John Kerry, in Baghdad just a few days ago and talked to both the Kurdish leaders and the Iraqi leader about how to get this moving.
And it could happen at some point.
I don't know when.
And it would be really awful, I think, when it does happen, even if they take back the city.
Yeah, Patrick Coburn told me about how the Kurds, the Peshmerga, rolled into Mosul in 2003 in that invasion.
And then the population made it very clear that, OK, you can go now.
You know, Saddam's army went ahead and withdrew pretty quickly anyway or something, I guess.
They went further south to fight or something.
And but the population made it clear that you guys can go back to Kurdistan now.
You're not going to hang around here.
You're not going to be welcome to hang around here.
So and then, yeah, like you're saying, when you say the Iraqi army, that means the Shiite militias, the Bata Brigade and and their buddies.
So it's it's all, you know, very sectarian.
And unfortunately, yes, it is not here.
They're almost all Sunnis here.
There are, of course, a lot of interesting religious minorities like the Yazidis.
There are even Zoroastrians here and Christians.
But so the sectarian issue is not a problem.
It's a very secular society here, which is a good thing.
There's no very fringe religious extremists and Islamists that have not really posed any problem to Kurdish society over the years.
You know, Barzani, Mahmoud Barzani, of course, is the longtime leader of this region.
They even call this area Barzanistan.
He was in the Soviet Union for many years.
I mean, and so the Communist Party still exists here and it's completely secular and the kind of thing you want to see.
But there's just no coordination with Baghdad.
The the Kurds are selling oil without agreement of the central government.
So the central government is not giving 17 percent of tax revenue to this region, which is especially hurting the Kurds now because they're not getting the same amount for the oil.
When the oil price was high, they didn't give a damn about that 17 percent.
They were making more.
Now that is really hurting them.
Well, by the way, what exactly is the status of Kirkuk now?
Because as Mitchell Prothero was instructing us on the show, Kirkuk, you know, the Kurds claim it, but it's way out there in the desert.
It's not up in, you know, what's typically considered Iraqi Kurdistan, even though there's a huge Kurdish population there.
But so, yeah, I just wonder how firmly in control of the Peshmerga that city is at this point.
Well, I haven't been there yet.
I had a chance, but it fell through.
There was an Iraqi journalist who said he would not accompany me there, that it would he wouldn't feel guaranteed my safety.
That's not what other people tell me who are going there.
So I don't have any on the ground experience of what's going on.
But what you say is correct.
You know, the the Kurds here have gone beyond their own territory.
They are extending territory.
There's no question about that.
There was a story, I think it was Amnesty International, a couple of months ago that talked about a town that was, I can't remember now the name of it, that was taken back from ISIS by the Peshmerga and they didn't stop there.
And they even destroyed houses.
The Arabs who had fled in the area because of the fighting, they destroyed their houses so they couldn't come back and take it over that land.
So if that's correct, then Amnesty is probably credible on that.
That doesn't reflect well on the government here that they're trying to expand territory.
Well, and there's been all kinds of sectarian cleansing back and forth, whereas Saddam had moved a bunch of Arabs up to Kirkuk to make it a majority Arab city for a while.
But that was only in response to back when in history, when the Kurds had come down and kicked a bunch of Arabs out.
You can go back and forth forever about that in a border town like that, you know, who has a claim, as long as people want to identify the claims based on, you know, an ethnic difference or whatever, it's insane to think.
That is another flashpoint in the problem between Arabs and Kurds, clearly.
Well, that's where all the oil is, so, you know, it makes it where everybody has a real incentive to say, oh, yeah, this is our Jerusalem when what they mean is Houston, right?
Yeah, there's there's one other big thing hanging over one's head that no one wants to talk about here.
I bring it up and they just change the subject.
Literally, that's the Mosul Dam.
I'm sure your listeners know about that.
This dam could break at any moment.
They're trying to fill it with concrete.
A new dam is needed.
But that area was taken over, if you recall, by Islamic State for a period.
And they were driven out.
But they're nearby.
It's dangerous for workers to go there.
There's a question of money.
If that dam breaks, this is the Tigris River would flood or could flood all the way down to Baghdad and certainly would take out Mosul and millions of people could die.
And this is just a horrific thought.
I'm in higher land right here.
But even the people here who would not be affected, who are far enough away from the river that we wouldn't be affected here in Erbil, but they don't want to talk about it here.
It's just there's this thing people don't want to acknowledge that there's a war going on an hour away from here and that there's this dam that's hanging over everyone's head.
It's just we're in a bubble here.
Yeah.
Well, you know, so on the radio show, I talked about this article, I think, in The Guardian all about that.
It was really alarming the way that they put it.
And then I got an email.
I wonder what you think about this.
It's just an email from a name I don't know, as far as I know.
It's just kind of a random thing.
But what he said was that he was basically a consultant for American energy firms in Kurdistan and that his assessment that he had given his company, he was claiming was the same one he was giving me, which was this was vastly overblown and that they've been able to do a lot of work on the dam and where The Guardian said that both doors were stuck all the way shut, that that wasn't true, that they were able to let quite a bit of water out and this and that.
And so is there an overall problem?
Yeah.
But is it the kind of crisis that they were painting in The Guardian where, you know, the the ground is literally eroding out from beneath the thing and all of that, he said, was way overblown?
I wonder if you heard any kind of argument along those lines.
No, I mean, I don't know who this person is.
I don't.
I don't either.
I don't either.
But I.
That's why I ask you, because you're there.
Yeah, well, if he has a self-interest and it seems like he does, he's consulting for an oil company that would probably pay him a good amount of money if they build.
He might have a self-interest that could skewer what he said.
I don't know.
I don't want to say, but that could be the case.
That's the first time I've heard that.
You know, even at the U.N. Security Council, they had a meeting somewhere in the U.N. may not have been on the council.
I'm not there.
And that's where I'm normally based, of course.
But the U.S. set up a meeting to discuss the dam.
I mean, I don't know what resulted from it, not much, except they talked about it.
But I think it's pretty sad just to illustrate that it's being taken seriously.
Yeah.
Well, it's not very encouraging if, as you're saying, people just don't even want to talk about it at all.
I want to hear arguments because that's how we get to the truth.
One guy says it's no big deal.
And the other guy says, oh, yes, it is.
And here's why.
And then we really get to the bottom of things, you know?
Yeah, but I'm not talking to engineers.
I mean, I should have to.
But I'm just talking to average citizens who don't want to talk about it because they want to think about what could happen.
Yeah.
Well, so there's a good one for your next story.
Yeah.
Actually, that's not a bad idea.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Because you're right about, you know, if that thing does break, then the threat to the civilian population below Mosul is, you know, are including Mosul.
And then, as you're saying, all the way down to Baghdad can hardly be overstated.
Millions of lives at stake.
Millions.
To be very morbid about it, that would be one way to get rid of ISIS control in Mosul.
That's not the way we want to do it.
Yeah, it seems like, well, if you just want to call on a couple of airstrikes, they could do it that way.
But there's got to be a better way.
You can't do it airstrikes.
Yeah.
All right.
So let's talk about some.
Oh, go ahead.
No, I'm just saying they have to invade Mosul.
And it's yeah, that's and they're not on this.
They're not agreeing to the Arab central government and Peshmerga.
So that's going to be the big story if they actually do try to take back Mosul.
There's another thing here I'm worried about, in a sense, because they drive in Syria by the Syrian Arab Army and Russian air cover.
You know, they've taken back Palmyra and they're moving to take Aleppo now.
I just saw a news flash that Al-Nusra Front, the al-Qaeda affiliate, is mounting 10,000 terrorists, as this Russian website says, putting it near Aleppo.
So there could be a major battle coming up over Aleppo.
But after that, it's, you know, driving towards Raqqa, the capital so-called of Islamic State Syria.
A lot of these guys may be driven back here.
One of the things the Syrian government with the Russians to try and do is cut off supplies between here and Iraq and in Syria to cut them off completely.
But a lot of those fighters might retreat here to Iraq, which could complicate even more what's going on in Mosul and maybe try to take back some of the land that they've lost here.
That's just another scenario.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Well, and, you know, they're saying Nancy Youssef at the Daily Beast is saying that there's 6,000 or more, I think, U.S.
Army and Marines there now, half of them generals or not.
It was only dozens and dozens of them generals for some reason.
I guess they're all just punching their ticket over there or whatever.
But anyway, so, yeah, you know, I know that this isn't your exact expertise or what, but, you know, I just.
I'm trying to get my own handle on the relative strength of these different groups.
And just, you know, I know that, you know, Prothero said that it was definitely the Marines that the Marine Corps Special Forces that helped that were decisive in taking Ramadi from the Islamic State last year.
And it seems like, you know, because he was joking that, yeah, all of a sudden the Iraqi Army sniper range increased by hundreds of yards or whatever it was because they're Marines.
He said, no, there's no there's no combat boots on the ground because the special forces prefer sneakers.
And he was explaining what brand they like and whatever.
Anyway, I see.
By the way, the news yesterday was that 10,000 people internally displaced are returning to Ramadi.
So, oh, really?
Good news.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So and, you know, it was the last the last city out there, you know, in Sunnistan to fall to the Islamic State.
So but anyway, but yeah, I just wonder and I guess, you know, whether more ISIS guys are coming back from from Syria aside, I wonder how many guys it really would take, do you think, if you combine what's left of the Iraqi Army, which I gather is basically just the special forces, if the Americans could somehow corral the what what the Kurds have available, what the what Baghdad has available and including the Bata Brigade and whatever, do they have enough to march on Mosul at all?
Or or no freaking way and not until Hillary sends in the 3rd Infantry Division or what?
Well, it's funny you say Hillary, because I don't think Obama would do that.
But it may take that.
And there is no talk of US ground forces being involved in that.
I haven't heard.
Does it seem like it's all on hold until then?
Or they're really working on it kind of thing.
You know what I mean?
They're talking they really they're really working on talking about it that way.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, OK, so let's talk a little bit about ancient history here, because I think it's so important.
Like I said, I'm writing a book that begins this way.
Why it is that they hate us.
And, you know, I actually was talking with a guy who was working on my truck and he was explaining to me about how, yeah, you know, everybody knows that Bush senior Bill Clinton are the ones who picked this fight with these Al Qaeda guys and that kind of thing.
But, you know, Iran, man, they just hate us.
God, they hate us.
They hate us so much because they hate us so much.
Man, they hate us, hate us, hate us.
And so somewhere at the beginning of history, wherever it is, it still starts with them, whoever them are.
Isn't that right, Joe?
We've never done anything to these people.
Why don't they want to appreciate our vast generosity in sending our bombs and missiles and troops here to kill them into democracy?
They just don't seem to want to accept that.
And they're really ungrateful.
Now, of course, there's I wouldn't say ancient history because I'm in Mesopotamia here.
So that really means something else.
But going back to the early part of the 20th century is when in the article that you refer to here that I've just had published in Consortium News.
This is when the Arabs were double crossed after the First World War with the Sykes-Picot Accord, which still ticks off a lot of Arabs that I know.
And Britain and France were supposed to give independence to the Arabs.
And then, of course, they didn't.
And they put in their puppet kings to rule.
And whenever they needed to intervene to put down rebellions.
And there were so many of them.
They did.
They killed thousands.
First use of air power in Iraq in the early 20s against counterinsurgency.
And then when the U.S. took over at the end of the Second World War from Britain in dominance over the region, you know, it started again.
And the 50s is the era of most covert operations in the Middle East and attempted a 1949 coup by the two year old CIA to overthrow a democratically elected government that had been independent only for three years from France.
Because they wouldn't agree to a pipeline plan that the Saudis favored and the U.S. wanted.
So they got rid of a democratically elected guy and they put in a military dictator.
The same thing pretty much happened four years, four years later in Iran.
They wanted to nationalize the oil.
And of course, they overthrew Mohamed Mozadek, the prime minister, and put in a king.
So I call it a reversal of 1776 when the Americans overthrew a king to install democracy.
And this is the opposite.
So and then six years, three years after that in 56 in Egypt, when Nasser wanted to said he would nationalize the Suez Canal, Britain and France and Israel intervened.
And it was only then that really the U.S. took over by stopping that war, by threatening the U.S. told Britain they wouldn't give them any energy supplies and they would have emergency energy supplies and they would cut off the IMF from Britain, which was having currency problems then.
And that's when the U.S. took over.
So then from then into the 60s, it was the U.S. backing Israel in their two wars.
And in the 80s, Libya was bombed by Reagan and the United States backed Saddam Hussein here against Iran.
And but it got worse as we're getting closer to today, because this the 1991 first Gulf War by Bush's father, when they shot all those guys in the back as they were withdrawing.
And the burying alive soldiers with bulldozers.
And then they told the Kurds and the Shia to rise up.
And there was no defense for them.
And there was there was slaughtered, especially the Shia.
And then they instituted the no fly zone here.
And this is when the Kurds got really their nominal independence or autonomy.
And now up to George Bush's invasion in 2003, which was the largest Western invasion in this hundred year period.
And then Libya, the overthrow of a government, a stable government.
And all these guys were secular rulers, as we know, Gaddafi, Saddam and Assad in Syria.
None of them with maybe the greatest human rights records, one worse than the other.
Saddam, without question, was the worst.
But there was stability there and they were cutting off and blocking political Islam and extremist political Islam from gaining a foothold.
And the U.S. from the earliest time, as Eisenhower said, let's stress holy war.
That's back in the 1957 attempt by the United States to have another coup in Syria simply because the elected officials here were having good relations with the Soviets.
And it's an extraordinary story of what happened there because they wanted to get Jordan and Iraq, which were close allies of Britain and the U.S. then to invade Syria.
They talked about various ways, pretexts of causing, you know, to blame something on Syria, a false flag of some sort.
It's all on the record.
And what happened was Turkey put 50,000 troops on the border.
And only when Nikita Khrushchev implied he would nuke them if they moved on Syria that the Americans had Ankara back off.
In February, a very similar thing happened.
If you remember, the Saudis and Turks were talking about invading Syria again when they saw that they were losing.
They had invested four years of money and time to try to overthrow Assad.
And here were the Russians coming in and backing the Syrian Arab Army reconstituted.
And they were taking back all this territory.
And it was, again, the Americans had to put a brake on that because they wouldn't have done it without the U.S.
But it's getting worse, the intervention here and the anger and the hatred.
As I point out in this piece, it's really welcomed, welcomed, but also surprising.
There are more terrorists.
And when these guys commit atrocities in Brussels, in Paris, in London, in New York, they make statements telling us why they did it because of all this intervention and violence from the West and manipulation, political manipulation, and putting in these puppet, awful autocratic leaders.
This is why they're attacking us.
There are other reasons I get into in the piece, personal, psychological reasons, money.
Some guys in ISIS were fighting for money.
They've been deserting because they've cut their pay in half.
But the overriding reason they give is the anger, the hatred of the West for intervening in this region and not allowing Arab democracy to flourish or certainly Arab nationalism.
First, after the First World War and then with Nasser, who tried to revive this idea, it was crushed.
And political Islam was the favorite choice of the Brits and the Americans.
And look what we've got now.
Look what's happened.
Look at the extremism we have.
And then, of course, we know more recently that there's direct connection with groups that became the Islamic State.
There's the Defense Intelligence Agency document from August 2012, which predicts the rise of the Islamic State, saying the U.S., the West, the Gulf Arabs, and Turkey were supplying and supporting Salafist principality in eastern Syria to put pressure on Assad, that they could join up with similar extremists on the Iraqi side here and create an Islamic State.
And that's precisely what happened.
It's a kind of Frankenstein now.
And now they've got to try to defeat this group.
And it seems like whenever they were going after Assad, they didn't really bomb them very much.
It's again here in Erbil, or if they moved on Jordan or Saudi Arabia, you know, they would be struck.
So this century of interventions led to the hatred.
That's why they hate us.
And only a very few act on that hatred, a very small minority of Muslims or Arabs or Iranians, whatever, have acted on this to commit acts of terror.
It is extraordinary that there isn't more of this.
But it's what is important is for the American public to know this history.
And it's a kind of hidden history, not to the people here in the Middle East.
They know it too well.
But Americans don't get this because the American corporate media, a subservient media for the most part to their governments, do never give this context.
They never help to explain why these things happen, what the Arab and Iranian attitudes are towards the West and why these guys, they won't publish what the statement is, but they belittle it.
It's an Orientalist point of view, typical Western view that Eastern people, you know, you don't listen to what they say.
We know what what's best for them.
And whenever they say something, you know, we just ignore it.
And that's what's happening here, that the reasons given for these attacks are ignored.
And I think it's high time that we see now what your friend Ron Paul during the 2007 Republican debate.
I went back and I almost put that into the piece was just way too long.
He had this exchange with Giuliani.
You must know that Rudy Giuliani, well, he says we they hate us because we're bombing them.
And Giuliani said that was the most extraordinary, most absurd thing you ever heard.
And so Giuliani is expressing this typical Western view that we've done nothing.
We're good.
We're the exceptional nation.
And how dare they hate us?
And Ron Paul has laid it out.
And that's heretical to say that in the American scene right now.
Yeah, well, and and that's really what changed a lot for millions of people when they saw that, that, wow, there's actually one politician in all of Washington, D.C. who's willing to tell the honest truth about what we all know is true.
Come on.
We remember that there was such a thing as the 1990s, the 1970s.
And, you know, whatever it is that you want to bring up.
Hell, I got one good story about how the CIA and the State Department were for the revolution.
The Shah was dying anyway.
And they thought, hey, Khomeini is OK.
We know him from 1953 when he helped us overthrow Mossadegh and reinstall the Shah in the first place.
So we can deal with him.
It wasn't until the hostage crisis broke out after they invited the Shah to America for cancer treatment that, you know, in the riots and all that took place that then the Cold War with Iran broke out.
But they even supported the Ayatollah, for Christ's sake, these guys.
Yet there is evidence of that.
There's a memo that I've seen where they refer to him, someone in the U.S., the Minister Carter administration, as a Gandhi of Iran.
I mean, some ridiculous thing.
So you're right.
They they they thought.
And don't forget, there is also evidence by Dreyfus.
I think you've had him on your show.
You've mentioned his book many times, Deal with the Devil, where the Khomeini and others extremists in Iran were part of the uprising against Mossadegh in 53.
So this, as I said, it began with Eisenhower era to deal with right wing anti-communist or religious extremists, which were thought to be better allies than secular rulers and secular Arab nationalists.
And that's the joke about ancient history.
That's where that comes from, is Jimmy Carter was asked about the coup in 53 and he said that's ancient history.
But it was only 26 years before the revolution.
And so that would be like if the Ayatollah had overthrown our government and install the Shiite dictator over America back in the Bush senior years, I guess we'd be over it by now.
Right.
Come on.
That was 26 years ago.
We're used to that.
What does that have to do with our revolution against him today, Joe?
That's just really.
And, you know, one of the reasons I like living here in this region is that history does not die like it does in the US.
It's really alive.
And it's not hard to think back decades, if not centuries, and see where people are still affected by this and form their view of the world from that.
And I want to get back to what you're saying about the Syria thing, too, here real quick before we got to go, because all of what you describe there, all of it is harmful.
All of that.
All of it is immoral and against the national interests of the American people.
And Lord knows the people of the Middle East.
And yet the Syria thing, that's the one that's not just murder.
That's just suicide.
That's absolutely crazy where America and its NATO partners go along with this Saudi-Turkish deal.
And I guess, you know, Israeli and neocon plan to and CIA and whoever to get rid of Assad by backing a bunch of jihadist terrorists who we know as Zarqawi's guys, al-Qaeda in Iraq.
And they came over that border and everybody knew this.
This was in McClatchy newspapers in 2011, 2012 that, yeah, it's al-Qaeda in Iraq is back and they're the ones fighting in the war in Syria.
And we cover this on the show all along.
You've written about it.
Bob Perry, Lord knows, has written about consortium news all along.
Everybody's known this all along.
America's on the side of the jihadists in Syria.
And for whatever reason, I'm not entirely sure.
You have so many more Europeans, I guess, just because the time gone by, who who grew up in the age of Iraq War II and who are now fighting aged males who have gone to Syria to fight, only, of course, to be stabbed in the back eventually and to be let loose to turn on on Europe.
I mean, what's happened in France and Brussels?
Like you're saying, it's amazing.
It ought to be in the Guinness Book of World Records.
How few terrorist attacks the West has suffered in engaging in this policy.
And that's the part to me that's just unbelievable.
Like, I can see them being cynical bastards and saying, let's use al-Qaeda against Iran's ally Assad.
OK, that's that makes sense in D.C. logic.
But at the expense of, you know, obviously, in a few years, you're going to have waves of terrorists coming back into Europe and maybe even having access to the United States as well.
I mean, man, it's treason.
Really bad.
It is.
It's crazy.
Treason.
Yeah.
The first they are not protecting their own civilians, their own citizens.
And that's what they say.
That's the first job of government.
They're completely failing at that.
It's it's short sighted, to say the least.
And and the effect, it could be growing now in Europe.
We're seeing more and more of the possibilities of more attacks.
And maybe somebody will start explaining this.
Now, this piece, because I wanted to get it in a publication that would reach a wider American audience, because the people who read conservative news, it's like preaching to the converted, even speaking to your listeners.
Many of them already know that because they've been listening to you for years now and your guests.
How to get this into the mainstream is the challenge.
How to confront the mainstream media's and the corporate media's narrative on this, where they just completely excise history.
And anything the US government does that's highly questionable, like we're discussing here, is never in there.
And I could tell you and your listeners that I tried twice to get that story about that DIA document into a major American newspaper.
You mentioned it at the beginning, but I won't say what it is.
And twice it was denied.
They would not publish this story.
That's suppression of news.
You can't be more unethical than that, in my opinion.
And but guess what?
They weren't alone.
No corporate media in the United States has published that story.
And we had it on Al Jazeera, Mike Flynn, who was the DIA, General Flynn, DIA director at the time, saying that this was not the US turning a blind eye.
It was a willful decision in Washington to support the Salafists in Syria.
And it led to the Islamic State.
So this was a beyond a bankrupt policy.
It undermines the entire narrative of the so-called war on terror when you're dealing with terrorists for a short term gain.
And of course, as we've seen in Iraq and in Libya, the neocons and their allies in the region, they don't think about what's going to happen after.
And even Bernie Sanders at least have said this, you know, Hillary Clinton is for regime change and that she never thinks of what's going to happen the day after you overthrow these guys.
And who would take over in Damascus if they had overthrown Assad?
Yeah, this is why Russia intervened.
They could not see this anymore.
Putin laid it out at the UN about an hour after Obama spoke last September, in which he held out the offer of a alliance with the United States to defeat Islamic State the way the Soviets and the Americans had an alliance.
You don't have to like each other, but you have a common enemy here.
And of course, the Americans have been rejecting it.
Well, there are signs now that maybe they may start cooperating more because Islamic State is somewhat on the ropes now.
Well, I even read a thing that said that Kerry and Lavrov, well, their staff are writing a new constitution for Syria.
Is that is that real?
Does that imply real cooperation or?
I don't know if that's true, but that would imply cooperation with any military cooperation if the Americans are serious about destroying Islamic State.
Of course, they projected onto Russia saying they're not serious about destroying ISIS.
They were hitting ISIS from the beginning, but they had hit other terrorist groups so that the Syrian Arab Army, which the Russians reconstituted, could move eastward and defeat other groups, take Latakia back, take Idlib, parts of Latakia, Idlib, and then move on Aleppo.
And now they've taken Palmyra and they are poised to go after Raqqa.
And at this point, you know, the Russians have left Iraq to the Americans.
There was some talk at the beginning that the Iraqi government was asking the Russians to come in.
It didn't go anywhere.
So there's been a division of labor.
The Americans better start doing something here that brings us back to Mosul again.
I don't know.
That would be the real big prize.
It's a much bigger city than Raqqa.
And that is really the center of Islamic State right now.
Well, and, you know, the question is, I mean, I would rather have the Americans just do absolutely nothing, come home and forget it.
But well, they should have done anything.
But now they've made this guess what's to be done.
Well, I mean, and that's the real question.
I mean, when we're talking about writing a new constitution for Syria, the Russians are going to stick by Assad, right?
They're not going to go along with an American plan to get rid of him.
So are the but are the Americans willing now finally to say, you know, OK, we're sticking with the Ba'athists in Syria because that's a hell of a climb down from we support the Zawahiri guys there.
They won't say that publicly.
They'll never say that publicly, but maybe privately.
That's what they're doing.
Look, when Kerry did say publicly that he would allow Assad to stay on six more months under this latest U.N. plan, which if they have a ceasefire, which is partial now, but they would in six months start this transition government and Assad would have to step down.
And then a year later, they'd have a new constitution and a general election and Assad could run again.
And when Kerry suggested he could stay for six months and maybe run again, the neocons went berserk.
The Washington Post editorial board and others, New York Times columnist Roger Cohn, you know, this went they went crazy.
So you never get they're never going to say we're backing Assad.
Now, the irony here in the paradox is that the Russians would like Assad maybe to step aside.
But he's he's won all this territory back and he doesn't want to step aside.
And he's gumming up the works to an extent in Geneva.
Now, the guys on the opposition from the Saudi led group here, the side negotiating committee, they're just awful, these guys.
So both sides.
I mean, that the Geneva talks, I think this is going to be decided on the on the battlefield.
I think that was clear a couple of years ago.
And it's being decided on the battlefield, not to the advantage of the U.S. and particularly their allies in Turkey and in in Riyadh.
All right, well, we better leave it there, because if I keep interviewing you, it's going to be too long for people to want to listen to.
So thanks very much for doing it, Joe.
It's really great to talk to you again.
All the best.
Same to you, Scott.
Appreciate it.
All right, Joe, that is Joe Lauria.
He's at Consortium News Dotcom and the Johannesburg Star and formerly with the Wall Street Journal and all over the place.
Normally covers the United Nations in New York now reporting from Irbil, Iraq.
It's the spotlight today, by the way, why we're never told why we're attacked.
The spotlight today on antiwar dot com.
Thanks, Joe.
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