08/18/16 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, introducing the heroic, the great, the wonderful, the best, Gareth Porter.
My favorite reporter.
And he's got one today at Truthout.
We're running it at Antiwar.com as well.
It's best news I've heard in a long, long time.
Turkey and Iran reach agreement on conditions for Syria peace.
Tell me everything.
Well, Scott, this is indeed good news.
I don't want to overstate it in the sense that, you know, this is being presented as the end is in sight in Syria by any means.
But it is a starting point that is extremely important.
I certainly, I think I feel very confident in saying that this is a stronger start toward an eventual peace agreement to end the war in Syria than anything that has happened under the auspices of the United States, Russia, and the United Nations.
In other words, that series of UN-sponsored big, big international meetings where all the parties are invited, except in one case Iran was not invited.
In another case, none of the Syrians were invited.
But in this case, I think what we have is the parties that are in a position to make decisions that could bring about a cessation of support for the Nusra Front al-Qaeda folks on one hand and pressure on the Assad regime to bring about certain political reforms that could at least satisfy Turkey that there is a political system in the making in Syria that, you know, is fair to Sunnis as well as other religious groups.
And that would be the basis then for a ceasefire and a political settlement.
So that is that's the vision that underlies the beginning sort of preliminary agreement on principles that Turkey and Iran reached this week or which was announced at least on Tuesday by the Turkish prime minister and confirmed by the deputy foreign minister of Iran.
So now you bring up here the you call it a major policy shift by Erdogan toward getting along with Russia and Iran again now.
Right.
I mean, the reason that this is happening, as far as I'm concerned, is clearly that President Erdogan of Turkey made a major foreign policy decision to pull back on the reliance on the simply relying on the combination of military pressure by the al-Qaeda folks, Ahrar al-Sham and their allies against the Assad regime, translating into decisions by the Russians, the Americans and ultimately Assad to give in.
And in some fashion, you know, give signals that that Assad was ready to step down.
And then instead of that, to rely on a deal with the Iranians and by implication, at least with the Russians, to essentially bring about a deal such as the one that I just outlined in one sentence.
And of course, I need to to rephrase it and repeat it.
A deal that would involve on the side of Turkey clearly ending the support for the armed opposition to Assad across its border, on the side of Iran and Russia, putting pressure on the Assad regime to agree to certain political reforms that is thus far resisted.
But in addition to that, the part of it that I haven't talked about yet and which is the reason for the Turkish shift in policy is that it would involve a commitment to reining in the Kurdish forces in northern Syria, forcing them to or at least putting pressure on them sufficient to get them to agree to retreat beyond or east of the Euphrates River, something that at this point they show no sign of being willing to do.
And of course, the United States could be helpful in that, could be involved in that.
But the agreement that has been reached just just the last few days clearly does not require that the United States be willing to do it.
It would mean that the Russians and the Assad regime together would would put pressure on the on the Kurds to to pull back.
And that's to pull back the what's now the western border of independent Syrian Kurdistan to move back further to the east, is that correct?
That's part of it.
I mean, that's a partial description.
But what's involved here is the Turkish fear that what the Kurds are now planning, and indeed they're undoubtedly correct that the Kurds are in the process of knitting together, pulling together two parts of a Kurdish or two separate zones of Kurdish control and knit them together into a single Syrian Kurdistan, if you will, a mini state that the Kurds would at least claim is a an autonomous zone which which has the potential for an independent state.
And that, of course, is what the Turkish government has declared in the past and still now is insisting cannot cannot happen there.
They're insisting that that's a red line and that in addition to that, the red line in terms of of Kurdish military forces is that they must move back to the eastern side of the Euphrates River.
Now, you know, whether how that's exactly going to work, that that that remains to be remains to be seen.
But that that is indeed the Turkish demand at this point.
And and the United States has said, according to the Turks, the United States has promised that it would get the Kurds to pull back to the east of the Euphrates.
But so far, the United States has not done that and indeed has not been publicly talking about it.
And I'm not I cannot say precisely what US the US position is on that.
But so far, there's no sign that the US is acting on that, that red line of Turkey.
Well, we're certainly I don't know, certainly, but it seems like we're helping the Kurds extend their eastern border further.
I saw some reports of sectarian cleansing in that town that they had recently liberated from the Islamic State.
So I don't know how determined they are to bite off more than they can chew there.
So according according to the information that's that's now available, the the Kurds have have already made it clear that they want to capture Al-Bab, which is the town, small city near the Turkish border.
That would mark the furthest the furthest they've they've moved their forces from the east to the west.
And that is what supposedly has is one of the factors that has motivated Turkey to take this pretty dramatic, diplomatic move toward Iran and Russia in response to what they perceive as as the intention of the Kurds to move further west and to, as I say, basically repair the groundwork for a single major Kurdish mini state along the Turkish border.
All right.
Now, so I guess I'm a little confused about this because it seems like they've had an autonomous mini state in Syrian Kurdistan for a while.
But you're saying it's basically divided in two major parts and that it's divided.
I mean, the larger part of it is indeed the part that you are.
And I think most people are well aware of which covers the the eastern side of of that territory that the Kurds control.
And you're saying right now that Turks will grin and bear that.
But what they can't bear is the the combination of the two different Kurdish regions being joined.
Well, at least that is the implication of of their current action.
Now, you know, they would not say that they're ready to to accept it by any means.
No, I really raise the question of what they're going to do about independent Syrian Kurdistan.
I mean, they have a decent relationship with Barzani and Talabani in in Iraqi Kurdistan.
But the YPG are, you know, basically the cousins of the PKK and the eternal enemies of of Erdogan's government.
And the and the further implications, of course, of the consolidation of the full territory that that the Kurds now control or could control in the near future, is is that they would in fact constitute a you know, when combined with the Kurdish territories in Turkey and in Iran, they would constitute the farthest reach of Kurdish territory thus far in in contemporary history.
So so there is a real threat here to, you know, the the Turkish and indeed Iranian and Syrian concern about about Kurds forming the Kurds, potentially forming a single Kurdish state, which, you know, crosses those or extends into the territories of those three states.
Yeah, boy, it's going to be interesting in the aftermath of the sacking of Mosul by the Shia militias and the Peshmerga and the US Marine Corps here coming up in a couple of months.
Right.
And of course, I haven't mentioned that, of course, there is a Kurdistan in Iraq as well, that that is also part of that picture.
And all of that fits into the picture here of a of Turkey.
The next war.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it certainly it certainly is a major cause of, you know, all sides here acting in ways that that constitute a serious conflict, potential conflict that could turn into a war.
All right now.
But so it is a real big deal, though.
Back to the beginning here about Erdogan has basically decided he is willing to back down from insisting that Assad must go.
Well, that that is one of the implications of of the principles that have been adopted.
Now, you know, it's a bit more complicated than that.
The two principles that have been agreed on are, first of all, that, of course, the ones with one we've been talking about is that the Syria must be not not not partitioned.
So, in other words, the Kurds would would have a recognized many state that would be allocated.
And of course, the concern is the United States is moving towards that policy.
I think that's clearly the implication of this.
The second principle is that that Syria will have a government, a political system that is fair to all religious and ethnic groups.
And this this represents, of course, the the Turkish concern that the Sunnis have been shortchanged in the politic in the political system of Syria and their insistence that that has to change.
Now, you know, that's what I think.
We know that the Russians have been trying in the past to push Assad to accept very significant constitutional reform.
They have drafted a constitution which they submitted to the Assad government late last year, if I remember correctly.
It was reported last spring by Al-Akbar, the pro-Hezbollah daily in in Beirut.
And according to Al-Akbar, the Assad regime refused all of the changes that the the Russians had proposed.
So that didn't work.
But it did indicate that the Russians are pretty serious about trying to get Assad to accept a very far reaching changes.
But of course, they have not used all of their all of their leverage that they could potentially use.
And that clearly is implied that that the Iranians would rely on the Russians in trying to reach this agreement and carry out the agreement.
So those are the two principles.
But there is a third principle that was discussed by the two sides and and not agreed to.
And that involves the way in which this agreement would be reached.
The Iranians clearly were not yet ready to put very strong pressure on the on Assad to step down.
And what the third principle is that the that the future of of Syria would be decided by the Syrian people themselves.
Now, that's that's code language for the question of whether Assad would have to step down before a settlement is reached.
And by agreeing to that potential principle or by having that principle on the table, the the Turks would be recognizing that there is an alternative acceptable to them that an alternative to Assad stepping down before the final settlement is reached.
And the question is whether the details of the other two principles would be fully acceptable to Turkey.
And that appears to be the question mark that still remains.
If those details are acceptable, then it appears that the Turks would be prepared to accept the third principle.
So that's the fine detail of the wrinkle that underlies a third principle that's not agreed to.
Yeah.
Two sides.
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I wonder if they worked it out, if the Americans would still keep back in Arar al-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra anyway.
Well, that's that's a very important question.
Not not clear at this point how the Americans would respond to or how they they are responding.
What what is their response to this very important diplomatic shift by Turkey?
And I think they're undoubtedly at this moment in a series of sort of emergency meetings trying to figure out what they're going to do about it.
Are they going to hold out, resist this, put strong pressure on Turkey to change to change their policy?
Or is it, on the other hand, contrarily going to change the politics of U.S. policy toward Syria in the other direction?
Sort of changing the balance, if you will, between what I perceive, at least as the differences between the White House on one hand and the major bureaucratic interests, the DOD and CIA supported to some extent, but resisted to some extent by the State Department, which which is that they want, of course, the United States to continue support for the al-Qaeda and their allies in Syria, because their primary interest is to continue the pressure on Syria and to lay the groundwork for a long term U.S. military presence and CIA covert operation in Syria.
So I think that remains to be seen how this is going to work out in terms of U.S. policy.
It's completely crazy.
And part of me and not only have I been doing this a long time, I've been talking to you about the finer details of it for a long time.
So I still kind of can't get over the fact that anybody in D.C. with a straight face can pretend that Iran, Assad, Hezbollah are the problem here, when al-Qaeda are the ones who knocked our towers down and the Islamic State are the ones who cut our reporters heads off.
And, you know, to read Daniel McAdams has a great one today about Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post just screaming her head off that Iran and Hezbollah are fighting in Syria.
Iran backed militias are fighting in Iraq, but she never says who they're fighting against.
They're fighting against our only enemies.
But we're just supposed to just forget that and just put Israel first, I guess.
If Benjamin Netanyahu and Michael Oren and the rest of his policy advisors say that the Shia crescent axis of evil is the real enemy here, then who cares about who died in the towers?
That's a long time ago now.
That that has been at least the rhetorical base basis for U.S. policy in Syria now during the Obama administration, particularly since 2013, when they began to see the 2013, 2014, let's put it somewhere in that period, when the Obama administration first realized that the that Al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate Al-Nusra Front and its jihadist and Salafist allies really had the potential here to put strong pressure on Assad and could be the basis for, you know, a policy of really putting pressure on to to force Assad to make a major concession of stepping down as part of an agreement.
And that became the rhetorical the thrust of U.S. foreign policy in Syria.
So, I mean, that indeed, I mean, what you've described as the neoconservative Israeli position has been accepted by the Obama administration, covering up the reality that that the only legitimate security interest the United States has in Syria is is to stop Al-Qaeda from taking over and Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State from taking over.
So, I mean, that is indeed the major cover up that's been going on and continues and and has to be resisted strongly.
Now, I don't want to be too kooky about this, but I don't think I think it's a fair question.
You know, Patrick Coburn said on this show from 2011, certainly 12 on that, hey, American and allied NATO and GCC and Turkish and whatever.
Oh, yeah, that counts as NATO.
NATO and GCC support for the jihad in Syria is re-energizing the insurgency in Iraq.
And if you go to Baghdad, any Shiite politician will tell you, holy crap, this is so dangerous.
What are you doing?
Please stop it.
And we know that in the August 2012 DIA memo, they describe this as a real danger.
That's the quote is that there's a real danger that if we create an Islamic state in eastern Syria, they could blow right back into Iraq, too.
And I wonder whether you think that there were people in the White House and the National Security Council who took the basically the same thing you just said.
It was you think they're thinking about Syria and applied that to Maliki as well.
Oh, so you don't need us.
You only need the Iranians, huh?
Well, let's see how you like having a re-energized al-Qaeda based Sunni insurgency.
And I bet you need America again now.
Yeah, I have a hard time believing that that's the case.
The reason being that Obama had staked so much of his reputation on the idea that that the United States, his reputation in terms of his policy in Iraq specifically.
Well, I don't want to be too narrow about Obama.
I mean, I had that great clip that you found a Jim Michalczewski back in 09 when Obama was taking power, saying, yeah, over here at the Pentagon, they say we're staying in Iraq for 50 years.
And they don't really care what the president thinks.
They stole it fair and square and they're keeping it hell or high water.
Right.
So, OK, I was really limiting my answer to to the White House, the National Security Council and and Obama.
And that may have been how I phrased it in the first place.
Sorry.
But so the broader question, absolutely.
I think that there are undoubtedly individual officials who, you know, from the beginning of, you know, sort of seeing the the jihadist presence, they're becoming very effective.
We're we're beginning to think, well, you know, we could use that in our in our policy to put pressure on Assad.
So, yeah, I have no doubt that that it was viewed that way by individuals from the beginning.
And it's it's you know, you've got a very complex set of interests here from 2012, 2013 to down to the present.
And with various shifts going on, for example, when the when the war against ISIS began and the Pentagon had its own war in Syria, that was that was a shift that affected the internal bureaucratic politics within the Obama administration on on Syria policy.
You know, I think it I think it would have made those people who were involved in in carrying out the war against ISIS even more adamant about, you know, no war against the Assad regime would have strengthened their determination.
Of course, I mean, that's just an example of the kind of of of complications in the bureaucratic politics of Syria policy in the Obama administration.
Yeah.
And so now, well, let me ask you this.
I, you know, I read this great article the other day at War on the Rocks that was debunking a lot of the mythology about Sunni this and Shia that.
And I think maybe he was being, you know, a little too generous about the bottom brigade.
But maybe I'm wrong.
You know, I guess to kind of paraphrase it, the guy is saying that, yeah, there was a lot of ethnic cleansing or sectarian cleansing by the shite militias back in the battle days of Iraq.
War two in the civil war there.
But more or less, once they won Baghdad, they didn't want to continue expanding the the borders of Shia Stan.
And so when they've kicked the Islamic State out of Samara, out of Tikrit, out of Ramadi, out of Fallujah, they're not expanding the borders of Shia Stan.
They're letting the Sunni populations come home and they're even incorporating Sunni militias in with the Shiite militias to help fight alongside the Iraqi army against the Islamic State.
Sunni tribal leader militias and that kind of thing.
I wonder if you think that.
I mean, to me, this sounds very hopeful, basically, if I can try to take it at face value, Garrett, that, you know, because the worst danger is that whatever is done against the Islamic State, sort of like as we've been talking about with Kurdistan, whatever happens against the Islamic State, we're going to have a brand new normal.
That's going to be very abnormal.
And we're going to have a lot of incentive for people to push to make things back the way they were again.
Maybe, you know, the days before the Islamic State.
Right.
If not fight to save the Islamic State.
I think it's more complicated than sort of saying that the Shia, you know, have changed their their attitude, changed their ways completely, you know, in the current in the current conflict with Islamic State and in Iraq.
I mean, you know, certainly they have learned some lessons and I think they have been chastened by, you know, the failure of certain things and and the cost that in terms of of Sunni resistance and support for Islamic State.
But on the other hand, there are certain ways in which, you know, if you're determined to use traditional military methods against the Islamic State, even even with, you know, efforts to to leaven it with, you know, political political methods, you are going to have certain choices that are tough choices.
And we know I think it's it is it's a documented fact that the the Shia militias and the government, to some extent, have been forbidding the some Sunni from returning to their homes or from remaining in their homes in areas where they're trying to establish firm control.
Just this morning, I was, you know, seeing there was a story from from Iraq that that the actual families that support or are members of not support our members of the Islamic State are not being allowed to return to to to, you know, certain certain places where the government and the militias are reestablishing control.
Now, that's that's to be expected.
That's not surprising.
But, you know, there's a danger, obviously, in that turning into a limited form of of cleansing that makes you know that that pisses off the entire Sunni population of the area.
So it's not it's not easy to draw the line here.
As I'm saying, it's very easy to fall into policies that can be provocative.
You know, of course, there's going to be abuses and this kind of thing.
The real question that we'll just have to wait around to see is whether they really try to expand the border of Iraqi Shia stand to, for example, include Fallujah from now on and and really make that super majority Shiite city, that kind of thing.
I guess we haven't really seen any effort to do that yet.
Right?
Not that I know of.
No, I don't think that's.
And the policy of the Dawa and the Supreme Islamic Council always was strong federalism, meaning have George Bush kill all the Sunnis and give us the capital city.
But other than that, they never really were hell bent on trying to dominate Mosul.
I guess Ramadi kind of Mosul, Fallujah were sort of outside of the protection of Baghdad in 2014 is why they were so easy for the Islamic State to sack in the first place in the majority Sunni cities.
They're clearly not going to try to change that.
It's it's in places that are near the city's smaller towns where they're trying to establish security zones.
I think that's that's an issue.
Definitely.
That's a question mark.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, and just further consequences on down the line then.
And here we keep going, Gareth.
Yep.
All right.
Listen, you're the best.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much, Scott.
Good to talk to you always.
All right.
So that's the great Gareth Porter.
He won the Gellhorn Prize for his journalism about Petraeus and McChrystal killing people based on their cell phone data back in the Afghan surge.
Really great stuff there.
He's the author of the book on the Iranian nuclear program, Manufactured Crisis, the untold story of the Iran nuclear scare.
He writes mostly for Middle East Eye and Truthout.org.
This one is republished at Antiwar.com today.
Turkey and Iran reach agreement on conditions for Syria peace.
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