07/31/16 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, July 31st, 2016, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all, and it is Anti-War Radio.
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Introducing Gareth Porter, he's my favorite reporter.
He's the author of Manufactured Crisis, the truth behind the Iran nuclear scare.
As well as 10,000 great articles about the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now writing about Syria.
Welcome to the show Gareth, how are you doing?
Thanks Scott, very nice to be back again.
Very happy to have you on as always, and very important article here as always, running at consortiumnews.com and at antiwar.com, Hillary Clinton and her hawks.
And when it comes to would-be president Hillary Clinton's cabinet, her war cabinet, we already really know who's in line, if not for exactly which job, and we already know what they think about a lot of things, huh Gareth?
Exactly, and it definitely appears that the person who has the inside track on this is Michelle Flournoy, who was indeed the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy under Obama.
Same difference, easy mistake to make, yeah.
Yeah, easy mistake to make at this moment at least.
But definitely is regarded as the top candidate for that job, if and when Clinton becomes president.
Well now Michelle Flournoy, she's the one who helped organize the successful surge in the Afghan war, right?
Won that war.
Well that was certainly one of her jobs, definitely, was to lend support to the surge in Afghanistan, and indeed when she left the Pentagon in 2007, it was of course in the rosy glow of David Petraeus' supposed triumph in the Iraqi context, and he had gone before Congress in his triumphant testimony there.
So she left the Pentagon and went to set up this new think tank called the Center for New American Security, and the whole point of it was to take advantage now of the Petraeus moment, and to get all this defense money, all the contractors, the major contractors of the Defense Department were going to kick in money, and they would build support for continuation of these kinds of policies.
So she was very much tied in with that whole policy, no question about it.
And it might be worth mentioning here that when they created the Center for New American Security, it's pretty clear just by the name that they meant to say, we are the Democrat version of the project for a new American century of the neoconservatives.
We're the neoliberals instead.
I would even be careful about saying that it was the Democrat version, because yes, it's true that she had worked for the Obama administration, but she was in fact very, very much aligned with Petraeus, and Petraeus by no means was a Democrat.
I mean, he was ready, as I think you know very well, to run.
He was considering running for president as a Republican.
So she was very comfortable with her Republican connections in the defense arena, and she could have served in either party's administration, no question about it.
And then now just to remind people a little bit of what they know but maybe forgot about the politics of 2009 and 2010 and how all this worked with the CNAS think tank on the outside of the government with its experts and then the people inside the administration.
But anyway, there was this whole marketing scheme about the surge and the new counterinsurgency doctrine or the coin, and it was almost you live there, Gareth.
Tell us about the peer pressure and the high school jocks and cheerleaders kind of peer pressure group thing going on in the selling of this brilliant new coin doctrine with quarterback David Petraeus is going to win the game for us and all the cool kids are in on it and this kind of thing.
It was almost 2002 again.
It's 2009.
It's a very nice analogy to see it as a kind of high school football game culture that is at work here because indeed it was as if everybody who wanted to promote their careers knew that they had to embrace this and be in tight with the people who were close to Petraeus.
And so that was, if not the only game in town, the main game in town that moment in the late 2000s period.
All right.
Now, so what have we heard from Michelle Flournoy lately?
Well, Michelle Flournoy clearly is acting as a, if not a surrogate for Clinton, you know, styling herself as an advisor to Clinton.
She has made no effort to dissociate herself from the Clinton candidacy, and indeed the timing and the substance of the report that was put out by CNAS last month and then was embraced and elaborated on by Michelle Flournoy herself at the annual meeting of CNAS and an interview with Defense One indicates, I think very clearly, that she was quite consciously in on a scheme to promote a new sort of harder line policy in Syria, which would be aimed at ultimately a regime change, which would take the form of strikes against the Assad regime.
That's part of the game that Michelle Flournoy is involved in right now with Clinton.
Yeah, and now this is, you know, breaking news here from, I think it's yesterday at the Independent.
Hillary Clinton wants to review U.S. strategy in Syria against ISIS and Bashar al-Assad's, quote, murderous regime.
Right.
I mean, this is an interesting story because it comes in the same day as my article coming out, and it's another Clinton advisor, somebody who is clearly associated with Clinton's foreign policy, who was, again, in the Obama administration as both in CIA and the Defense Department under Panetta as chief of staff, who is saying now publicly, his name is Bash, B-I-S-H, saying that Clinton will definitely call for a review of policy, first thing when she becomes president, and making it clear that the purpose of the review would be to support regime change in Syria.
Yeah.
Okay, now, so listen, we're on in Los Angeles and there's thousands of people listening and there are varying degrees of understanding about the civil war in Syria going on, so let me make a very rough analogy and then you criticize it, okay?
But if we were the British talking about interfering in the American civil war, this is like saying, Hillary's position is like saying, in order to defeat the evil slave-owning Confederacy, we first must overthrow and destroy Abraham Lincoln, who is in the middle of fighting a war against them, because after all, he's the only reason that they're fighting, right?
Well, you know, that analogy is okay.
I mean, I have nothing against it particularly, except that, you know, I think that just to understand the Syria issue in its own context, as a situation where the U.S. has managed to blunder into an effort by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to overthrow the Assad regime, bringing in, essentially, thugs from Iraq who were, you know, involved with Al-Qaeda, and basically using them as a tool to bring down the regime there.
Now, you know, that goes off in a lot of different directions, but that's enough for me to say, you know, the United States should have no part in it whatsoever.
In other words, what I left out of my analogy was, the British would have had to have created the Southern Confederacy in the first place, and then said, we've got to get rid of Lincoln in order to get rid of them.
Yeah, so the Syria situation, you know, sort of defies any effort to come up with an analogy that is as damaging to the policy that Clinton is pushing.
You know, I just think it's, in its own terms, it's just about as bad as you can imagine for the United States to be, you know, for anyone in the United States, let alone a candidate for president, to be pushing the idea that we should get involved in the war to overthrow Assad, when, in fact, our allies and the people that we would be promoting to take over are going to be the people who are supposedly the terrorists that the United States regards as its number one enemy in the world.
So, I'm sorry, you know, that is so bad that it defies any competition from any other historical analogies, from my point of view.
Yeah, no, you're absolutely right.
I mean, it's, and look, to bring it down from even sounding on the level of hyperbole, you know, just in the most realistic, you know, bare-bones typeface assessment here, is there anyone prepared to seize the power in Damascus if America was to overthrow Assad and the Baathist regime there?
Is there anyone prepared to replace them other than Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State?
No, absolutely not, and I feel totally safe in making the prediction, and I don't make predictions generally, that if the United States and its erstwhile or actual allies in the Middle East were to succeed, as you've sort of suggested as the question to be examined here, the result would be a long and even bloodier civil war that would involve the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, which has changed its name now in Syria to something other than Al-Nusra Front, but it's still the same outfit, and it would be a war to determine which terrorist state would actually dominate the entire country of Syria.
It would not be the moderates.
They are also around at this point, and have not been a serious contender for power since 2012.
Well, and it's also the case that the government, as horrible and fascist a dictatorship as it is in Syria, which I don't think anyone disagrees with, you know, before the war or since it broke out, it is supported by all of the Alawi, the Shia, Arabs, every kind of Christian that you can name, the Druze, and any other, even the Kurds have their autonomy from it, but they don't want, they've said explicitly the Syrian Kurds, they don't want regime change for Al-Qaeda in Damascus.
Right.
And wait, wait, wait, one more thing, because it's important, and I don't know, maybe you have a real handle on this, but some good number, perhaps a plurality or even a majority of Sunni Arab Syrians would prefer the current Baathist state to these terrorist lunatics.
And so even though they try to paint it like it's all Sunnis on one side and everybody else on the other, it's not even that.
I don't have a handle on that, Scott.
You know, what percentage of the Sunnis would stand up and oppose ISIS and or Al-Qaeda in Syria, but certainly some of them would, no question about it.
And, you know, the minorities that we're talking about, the Alawis, the Shia, and the Druze and so forth, are a minority in Syria, clearly, they're a relatively small minority.
This is a classical case of whether you are going to not just override minority rights, but expose those minorities to the threat of not just ethnic cleansing, but genocide at the hands of some of these extremists who we are, you know, arguably have helped to inflict on the Syrian population over the last couple of years.
Yeah, well, I mean, the Al-Nusra slogan, I think, has been Christians to Beirut and Alawi to the sea, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
And Al-Ahrar Al-Sham, as I've written, I think, as you know, is certainly part of that grouping of extremists who are prepared to take extreme measures against, you know, the Alawites and others in Syria, no question about it.
All right, and now, I'm sorry, Gareth, because we are a little bit somewhat off topic of your article, which we're going to get back to in a second here, but just to accentuate the absurdity of all of this, this article that I think you saw in the Washington Post, an op-ed that ran saying that, well, geez, since, you know, the terrorists that America has been backing have been taking a real beating lately, and we can't outright intervene right on Al-Qaeda's side, you know what we could do?
We could bomb Hezbollah in order to help tilt the advantage back toward Al-Qaeda.
This ran in the Washington Post in real life in July of 2016.
I wonder why it was the Washington Post.
How could that have happened?
I mean, to a stranger listening, it sounds like I'm a liar.
I admit that.
But they can go and look at the website.
It's there right now.
I'll find the title while you're talking.
The point is that this is an exact sort of a replica, if you will, of the neocon argument that after 9-11, we should target Hezbollah and Iran, that this is the perfect opportunity to do that.
I mean, there's no logic to it whatsoever.
It's just an opportunity that if the American people are stupid enough to go along with, let's take advantage of.
That's absolutely crazy.
Well, and that's the thing is, it's not just in a vacuum.
Again, it's explicitly in order to tilt the advantage back to those sworn to Ayman al-Zawahiri, which is another thing I need to follow up on that you mentioned there that, well, al-Qaeda in Syria changed its name again.
But I wonder whether you think that really means that they have called off their loyalty to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the butcher of New York, as I just said.
Everybody who is following this at all seriously knows that that's just a tactic and that it was made necessary by the possibility, at least, of a U.S.-Russian accord to cooperate militarily against al-Qaeda in Syria.
And so in their wisdom, they thought, well, you know, we'll just change our name and make it look like we'll be independent of al-Qaeda, and that'll somehow frustrate or throw a monkey wrench into the plan.
But, of course, that's not going to succeed at all.
It's so obvious that nobody takes it seriously, not even the Obama administration.
So we don't have to worry about that.
Oh, that's good.
The Obama team already said, yeah, we're not buying that.
That's exactly right.
I mean, the White House has been quoted as saying that, the State Department, and somebody in the military as well.
Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't people in DOD clustered perhaps around Ash Carter, the Secretary of Defense, who would like to have that argument not be made publicly because they're opposed to the cooperation with the Russians.
But that's another problem.
Right.
Okay, real quick, my footnote for my insane-sounding accusation there.
Really, it ran in the Washington Post.
It's called the right target for the U.S. in Syria, Hezbollah, you know, because they're doing the best job of fighting al-Qaeda.
Exactly, yeah.
No, really, that's in the Washington Post.
Everybody go look it up right now.
And the other thing is, so I was going to ask you, so what of this deal with the Russians?
Because you've been writing about this very complicated cessation of hostilities deal where the mythical moderates were supposed to separate themselves off from al-Qaeda.
That never really happened.
So now the al-Qaeda guys are renaming themselves so that we can start calling them mythical moderates too.
But at the same time, is it really right that John Kerry is crying uncle and he's shaking hands with Lavrov and they're really going to have a joint American-Russian war against not just the Islamic State and not just for the Kurds but more or less for Assad against the mythical moderates all the way to the Nusra guys?
I admit that it's difficult to actually believe that the Obama administration could contemplate doing the right thing or it is relatively the right thing in Syria.
But the fact that people, unnamed sources within the Obama administration clearly coming from the CIA and DOD are making it clear that they're very unhappy with this proposal gives me assurance that somebody is doing something or is trying to do something right here.
So it does appear that yes, there is a possibility that some kind of agreement could be reached.
It has not been reached yet.
We don't know whether it will in fact happen.
We don't know what conditions precisely have been attached to it by the Obama administration.
We know that they are claiming that they are going to somehow not ground completely but partially ground the Syrian Air Force, that that is the aim of this proposal from their point of view.
But of course that really translates into not bombing our boys, that is the CIA vetted so-called moderates although nobody really uses that anymore.
So that may not be a real problem if and when this actually is finally agreed to fully.
So I think that there is at this point a real possibility that there could be U.S.-Russian agreement to carry out the joint effort against al-Nusra Front or against al-Qaeda.
Let's simply call it al-Qaeda because that's what we're talking about.
And that doesn't mean that there won't be some problems cropping up because inevitably they're going to be there.
Within that effort to cooperate there are going to be differences of interest.
And so it doesn't solve the problem but it's a move in the right direction.
All right, now a little Kremlinology about what's going on at the Pentagon.
We've read in the Daily Beast a couple of pieces by Nancy Yousef about infighting between the CIA and military where the military is backing, and this would be the Joint Special Operations Command I assume or I think I understand, backing the Kurds in what's called Rajava, pseudo-independent autonomous Syrian Kurdistan now, as it is, who have been getting into firefights with the CIA-backed terrorists.
Whether exactly Arar al-Sham or the Army of Conquest or whatever they call it at any given time, Jaysh al-Islam or whatever this and that.
And they're killing each other and the CIA guys actually got the upper hand on the spin in one of the recent Daily Beast articles on this saying that, oh yeah, the military, they're just buying into Russian propaganda about our mythical moderates.
They're not terrorists at all.
They're great guys.
But you mentioned a minute ago Ash Carter actually is very much in favor of this kind of thing, more of the CIA's line on this.
So I wonder if that means that you think that there's some kind of split between JSOC and the rest of the DOD and Ash Carter on this or between just Ash Carter and the generals?
Or how do you think that splits up?
Oh, I think it's probably complicated.
And I certainly don't know the names or positions of the folks that are talking to Nancy Youssef and talking to Reuters as well over the last several weeks, knocking the whole idea of any cooperation with Russia.
Particularly that's been the spin in the last few weeks.
But definitely it's those folks who are, one, either and or opposed to this because it's going to ease the pressure on Russia at the global level, which is of course what the Pentagon is really all about, primarily at this stage of their evolution.
That's where the money's coming from is to prepare for war with Russia and China.
And so that has to be uppermost in their mind.
So I think that's probably the primary motive behind jumping on any suggestion of cooperation with Russia and indeed perhaps even supporting the CIA people in taking a crack at the folks that some people in the military are working with in the YPG, that is the YPG zone.
So, I mean, I think both of those things are involved.
But my guess is that at this point, the thing that's primarily in play is the larger Cold War with Russia and the fact that cooperating with Russia in Syria is very much opposed to, it's in opposition to that primary interest of the Pentagon, particularly the civilians who are in charge of the budget of the Pentagon.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so is there anyone in Hillary's orbit who speaks cautiously on any of this stuff?
Because, you know, the average person might think we are talking about the Democrats, right?
We're not talking about Dick Cheney and Richard Perle.
We're talking about nice women and stuff.
Aren't any of them reasonable or they're all just hawks to a man?
Look, I'm sure there are lots of reasonable people who are supporting Hillary Clinton, reasonable in the sense that they have their own issues which they think Hillary Clinton will be good on.
You know, that's the Democratic Party base.
But we now know that it's no secret that the neoconservatives have a dog in this contest.
They have a candidate they're supporting and it's Hillary Clinton.
And Robert Kagan is now raising money for Hillary Clinton.
You know, he's making it, he's openly embracing Hillary as their candidate.
And there's, you know, it's no accident because, in fact, he knows that she has absorbed the basic notion that have driven the neoconservative movement from the beginning.
The idea that the United States should exercise military power over as much of the globe as possible and particularly the Middle East.
And so she is very much in tune with their thinking and there's no ambiguity about that.
All right.
So now the last I heard from Leon Panetta, he was, I mean, other than him getting booed off the stage or almost at the Democrat Convention for the USA chanting protesters, counter protesters saved him.
Last thing I heard about him before that was when Hillary resigned her secretary of state position after the first Obama administration term and put and made it very obvious that it was, you know, she was behind it, put a big article in The New York Times saying that she, Panetta and Petraeus had all tried to convince Obama to double down on the CIA support for the rebels, so-called rebels, the terrorists.
Yes.
Extremely important point.
Extremely important point.
They were allies within the Obama administration against the Obama position, which was, we can't, we can't get involved in trying to arm the opposition to Assad.
Remember what happened in Afghanistan?
Or at least not to the degree they actually win, I guess was his objection, right?
Because he has, he has ordered the CIA to help him all along.
Well, I mean.
Just not as much as she wanted, that's all.
It's a more complicated story, which has not been fully told, but all the pieces haven't been put together.
But remember in 2013, you know, this was, it was June 2013 when Obama agreed, really, to the first U.S. shipment of arms to the rebels.
Before that, what the CIA was doing was providing logistical assistance to a Qatari-Saudi-Turkish funded and carried out arming of the rebels.
So, you know, there's a difference clearly between those two things, although they're moving in the same direction.
Well, I mean, we know from Eric Margulies that we had French intelligence and French special forces were in Syria from at least the summer of 2011.
And that's a NATO operation.
That's the USA, too.
France is just a satellite of ours.
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure people were mucking around there and, you know, they were trying to pick out allies and so on and so forth.
But, you know, nevertheless, the Obama administration, I can tell you that it's very clear that Obama himself was still very reluctant, even in June 2013.
In April, May, June 2013, he was still reluctant to get involved in arming the rebels for the same reason that he was opposing the Petraeus scheme in 2012.
And this is just an indication of just how deeply this split within the Obama administration has gone.
I would argue that this situation has been the longest running and the deepest split within any administration over a major issue of war and peace that I can recall in contemporary American political and military history.
I mean, there's just so much of the sniping, the bureaucratic infighting that's gone on over this for so long that it's an epic tale of struggle over a policy issue.
He came as close as you can come in 2013 to starting a war against Assad and then backed off.
And we still don't know the whole story of that.
But, you know, maybe there's maybe there's more to it.
Maybe there's something that was going on with the Russians at that moment that gave him the courage to do it.
I don't know.
Hey, Gareth, I know you were up to your eyeballs writing your Iran book at the time.
But do you have a comment on the Kofi Annan proposal of 2012 and the various attempts to work out an early peace deal and whether they could have succeeded if Hillary Clinton had actually supported them instead of trying to undermine them?
You know, I mean, I at one point was tempted to try to get into that more deeply to see if I could talk to somebody who could give me more inside dope on what Kofi Annan's thinking was.
And I didn't.
I didn't spend the time to do it.
I haven't spent the time to do it.
And so I'm reluctant to say much more than, you know, yeah, I've heard I've heard a story suggesting that Kofi Annan believed the Obama State Department was not at all helpful.
In fact, was was trying to shoot down an effort to bring peace.
And that's all I know.
I mean, I don't know how much truth there is to it.
But, you know, a very interesting question indeed.
All right.
Well, thanks for coming back on the show, Gareth.
I always appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
All right.
So that's the great Gareth Porter.
You can find him at Middle East Eye and Consortium News.
And here he is at Antiwar.com.
Hillary Clinton and her hawks.
A very important article there running at Antiwar.com by the great Gareth Porter.
I'm Scott Horton.
That's Antiwar Radio for this morning.
We'll be back here next week from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 4,000 of them now, going back to 2003 at ScottHorton.org.
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