12/27/16 – Gareth Porter on Obama’s real strategic blunder in Syria – The Scott Horton Show

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Okay, so now introducing our good friend, Gareth Porter.
So good of a friend that he's willing to do an interview two days after Christmas when people are trying to take it easy.
Behind the real U.S. strategic blunder in Syria.
Gareth's latest for MiddleEastEye.net.
Welcome back to the show, my friend.
How are you?
Thanks very much, Scott.
I'm good.
Glad to be back again.
Well, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and all that stuff for you too.
Thank you.
So, yeah, well, let's not do that in a nutshell.
Let's go ahead and go through this from the beginning.
So, 2010, Chelsea Manning heroically leaks the WikiLeaks to Assange.
Assange starts publishing them and they have all this stuff about the American sock puppet dictator of Tunisia in them.
And everybody already hated him anyway.
And they already had massive food riots breaking out because of price inflation.
And that was the beginning of the end of him.
And then, blam, the people of Egypt said, wow, you can do that?
And then, so they went to overthrow their dictator too.
And the Arab Spring broke out.
So part of what was going on right around that same time was a day of rage or a few of them started in Syria.
And so even though the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt had been against American sock puppet dictators, the revolution just beginning to break out in Syria was against a dictator who had, I don't know how you want to characterize it.
It seems like he had been mostly compliant, torturing people for George W. Bush, that kind of thing.
He was no kept sock puppet like Hosni Mubarak.
But he was, you know, not causing trouble for the USA anyway, I don't think.
But anyway, America, and I guess as you write here, its allies decided we got to get rid of Bashar al-Assad.
So is that basically, you know, sound like a pretty sound lead up?
Sorry to sound twice in a row there to how your story begins here and with American intervention in 2011?
Yeah, I mean, I would I would frame it somewhat differently in the sense that Assad, the Assad regime had a very complicated relationship with the United States, you know, going back to the Iraq War.
Of course, Assad was certainly allowing people to cross the border from Syria into Iraq to to fight against the Americans.
And this was definitely held against him at that point.
And at the same time, we know that Assad was, you know, had a had a close strategic alliance with Iran.
I mean, the Iranians regarded and this, of course, is central to to the piece that we're discussing here, because the Iranians viewed the Assad regime as an absolutely crucial piece of their security policy, in the sense that that it was the presence of a friendly regime in Syria that allowed them to resupply Hezbollah with rockets and missiles, which were, on one hand, Hezbollah's defense against the Israelis.
And at the same time, and more importantly for the from the Iranian point of view, the Hezbollah arsenal was the really most important part still in 2011, still the most important part of its deterrent to an Israeli attack.
So so that's really part of the frame historically and geopolitically for for what happened in 2011 after the the outbreak of the protest against the Assad regime in Syria.
Well, and then, you know, I mean, we pretty much saw how in Libya they decided, well, we're going to co-opt this one.
And in Yemen, we're going to co-opt that one or try in Bahrain.
We're going to crush this one because we're not putting up with nothing from the majority Shia population of Bahrain.
That's our base and they can go to hell.
And so you can pretty much see the American slash Saudi reaction to the Arab Spring as it plays out where it's convenient for us.
We'll take advantage of it.
And where it's not, then they'll lay down and die.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And by the way, in the case of in the case of Bahrain, just to to add a slight or more than a slight amendment.
I mean, initially, at least the Obama administration was very concerned about human rights violations in in Bahrain.
And it was only really after the Saudis stepped in and threatened the United States with a reconsideration of the alliance, meaning reconsideration of access to the naval facilities.
In Bahrain that suddenly Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, did an about face and said, well, you know, we don't have to have a consistent policy in every state in every circumstance so that they suddenly changed their mind and said, we can live with what the Bahrainis and their Saudi protectors are doing against the Shia.
So now to zoom back into Syria again, as you say, and I guess this is the real problem that Israel has with Iran more than anything else.
We know it ain't their illicit nuclear weapons program that never existed.
Thanks a lot, David Sanger.
It must be something else.
It's the fact that Iran backs up Hezbollah and Hezbollah has the power to keep Israel out of southern Lebanon, or at least, you know, the more Iran helps them, the easier it is for them to keep the Israelis from reinvading that place, which, you know, I guess they are want to do from time to time anyway.
And so, yeah, no question that Hezbollah is a thorn in Israel's side.
They want to get the Israelis and want to get rid of them very badly for a long, long time.
But, of course, again, Hezbollah has to do essentially with the strategic relationship between Israel and Iran as well, because without Hezbollah, Israel can threaten Iran.
And if necessary, they can carry out the threat.
So so that's why there's a very there's a there's a two way relationship between those two two issues.
In other words, so, yeah, they're not just worried about what Hezbollah will do if they attack Lebanon, but if they attack Iran, Hezbollah is sort of an Iranian auxiliary on their flank at that point.
Absolutely.
I mean, they can they can threaten.
I mean, the Iranians can can threaten Israel retaliation very effectively through Hezbollah without question.
All right.
So, yeah, we have a confluence of interests coming together here in 2011.
One thing, though, I was talking to various reporter types that I talked to on this show at the time, people like Patrick Coburn and others who said that, you know, this isn't going to be easy.
And especially once it was pretty clear that Obama was not going to launch a NATO air war, as he did in Libya.
After all, Libya had the fig leaf of a U.N. resolution.
He could have gone Bill Clinton, Kosovo style in Syria, I guess.
But he didn't as far as full air power goes.
So there were a lot of people even very early on.
Eric Margulies, I think, was another people go back and check the archives early in 2011 who said, hey, there's a lot of consensus for the Assad regime in Syria.
You know, people should not underestimate his staying power here, especially considering what's at stake, because if the Alawites lose power, they lose everything and maybe their lives.
And that goes for the Druze and the different kinds of Christians and Shiites, too, when their enemies are a bunch of head shopping suicide bomber types.
Right.
And so I think what this is leading to in terms of this, this article is the necessary conclusion that you have a president, President Obama, who was extremely skeptical about getting involved in a war, another war in the Middle East, especially in an Arab country and especially in Syria.
And he clearly was not in favor of the United States becoming directly and actively involved in this, at least on the surface.
But at the same time, what my story published today, it's really a column and it's written as a column, not a news piece.
What it shows is that where the power really lies in terms of U.S. national security policy, once again, as is so often the case, is not the president himself.
It's a set of powerful interests that have to do with the war making capability and interventionary capability.
That is the CIA and particularly the Pentagon and its auxiliaries and their relationship with the three Sunni states, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who had decided in September 2011 that they were going to overthrow the Assad regime using an army that they were going to put together an arm.
And so so it's that set of relationships.
It's it's where the power really flowed.
That is so striking and so important about this, about this story.
Well, what about the Israelis?
Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador, made it very clear to the Jerusalem Post, as he put it, Israel has wanted Assad gone from the beginning of this thing.
Yeah, of course, there's a confluence of interest there.
I agree in this.
This happened.
I mean, actually, Israel was a little bit late to the party.
My research shows and correct me if you think I'm wrong, but the earliest indication from the Israelis that they believe believed that it was time to get rid of Assad was April 2012, a few months after the trio of Sunni states had made the decision that they were going to do it.
And of course, they did it after consultation with the United States and got the United States, got the Obama administration to support it as as part of their decision making process.
But but the Israelis had not made a decision, as far as I can see, until April 2012 of that, that they were in favor of getting rid of Assad.
So I think it's pretty clear here that this is not something that the Israelis orchestrated first with the United States or, you know, that there was an Israeli Saudi agreement or something like that.
It was the in fact, the trio of Sunni states that made the decision among themselves.
OK, now's the time.
Let's do it.
Yeah, that's interesting.
I'd have to go back and look.
I mean, I know that Giraldi reported in December of 2011 that there are two new findings, one on Iran and one on Syria, and that they had been signed, I guess, the previous month.
And I know that Margulies reported September at the latest, 2011, that the French special forces and spies were there helping organize the opposition there.
There's one in the guard in the observer from.
I think I'm pretty sure it would be July about Bandar sending jihadists, you know, I'm trying to just search my brain for whatever I can try to remember from what we knew from 2011.
You know, it'd be worth checking Pepe Escobar's archives, too, because, you know, certainly I was interviewing him at that time.
And absolutely, you know, Israel's role would have been one of the questions at that time then.
And one that I would have been asking him and one that I think he probably was asking, too, because we already know that.
David Wumser, Dick Cheney's Middle East advisor, always said, you know, if we could expedite the chaotic collapse in Syria, well, that would be great for, you know, leading to our ability to reconstruct the future situation there.
That's more amenable to us.
And by us, of course, he means Likud.
That was the extremist Likud position, you know, before going way back.
Yeah.
Going back to 1996.
Yeah.
Going way back to the 1990s.
Right.
But but there was then a reassessment, obviously, in Israel of the Assad regime during, you know, the period, you know, of the first the first decade of 2000.
And so so they were not at all clear at that point until after the the Sunni regimes had made their decision that this is what they what was in their interest.
Because remember, in 2009, 2009, 2010, the Israelis were in process of negotiating with the Assad regime and the United States was helping to try to arrange those negotiations.
Now, you know, they may have been somewhat pessimistic, they may have been skeptical, but nevertheless, they were giving that a try because of of the alternatives that they saw, which were not very fighting.
In other words, they they were they thought that any alternative to Assad, that is, the Israelis believe that any alternative to Assad would be extremist Islamists, at least, you know, of the caliber or of the flavor of the Muslim Brotherhood, but more likely, you know, more more conservative, more extremist than the Muslim Brotherhood.
So so they were not at all ready to jump into a war to to try to bring about a war against Assad at that point.
And it was really I think they saw what was going on already.
I think they knew the United States had already secretly agreed to support through the Petraeus plan, you know, the Petraeus covert operation, the arming of the of the Sunni opposition forces against Assad.
And they said, OK, well, this is this is the time to to support it.
Well, yeah, no.
So let's get back to the Petraeus thing in a minute, because that's the whole, you know, rat line project.
And I was just making fun of myself, actually, and him a little bit on Twitter earlier saying, you know, I always attack Petraeus for escalating and losing two wars.
But I always forget to really put the blame on him for to the degree that he deserves it for Libya and Syria, which happened when he was the director of CIA.
And this is very important, because, again, I mean, I think what you see here is that the CIA played a huge role.
I don't talk about this in detail in my piece, but clearly Petraeus and the CIA were playing a huge role in presenting this plan to the White House and getting them to agree that this is the way to proceed to help the Sunni allies without getting directly involved ourselves.
And this this was the kind of argument that finally, obviously, Obama went along with a weak, weak willed as he is.
I mean, he was a skeptic about doing this, but he was not ready to stand up to the national security state of his own administration.
Yeah, ever.
I think you meant to hardly ever.
So and now Hillary Clinton.
So this was her last year in power was 2012 then.
And as soon as she was done at the beginning of the second term and she was out, the first thing she did was put an article in The New York Times, which clearly came from her.
It was no investigative thing.
It was, you know, she handed it to them that she, Panetta and Petraeus had tried and tried and tried to get Obama to do more to back the rebels in Syria.
But he would only do so much, namely meaning, I think what you're talking about here, coordinating the allies, basically the CIA running the Qatari and Saudi op.
Yeah, and this is this is part of the larger picture here of Obama really saying, no, not just to doing more in terms of the covert operation, but but refusing the Sunni proposal, which was originally they wanted to send not just anti tank to anti tank missiles to to the the chosen commanders who they would pick handpick in Syria or bring from outside Syria in some cases, but also they wanted actually the United States to supply shoulder fired surface to air missiles to these folks.
In other words, they wanted to go from the very beginning all the way to the capability that they have been trying to get the United States to agree to to support for the last five years.
And of course, this during this past year, we know that it has been done that these these not not just anti tank missiles, but shoulder fired surface to air missiles have been supplied to the certainly to Arar al-Sham, which means an effective supply al-Qaeda as well.
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All right.
Now, so I'm sorry for skipping around so much here, but I really want to get back into that rat line stuff here in a second.
But I want to go back over a couple of things here real quick, because I think it's important for the consensus in Washington, D.C.
Depends a lot on what the Israelis want.
And there's two great sources for Michael Oren really speaking for Netanyahu here, I think.
One is the Jerusalem Post, where he says, yeah, we wanted him gone from the beginning, whether that's exactly right or not.
I take your point.
Yeah.
But then there's the other thing.
All you got to do is type in Oren Sunis.
And it's Michael Oren, again, the former Israeli ambassador.
And he's at the Aspen Fancy Pants Conference.
And he's talking with Jeffrey Goldberg.
And it's right at the beginning of the clip.
It won't take much time.
And he explains that, well, there's this in Syria.
There's the Sunni evil and the Shia evil.
And we prefer the Sunni evil because the Shia evil is backed by Iran, which has military nuclear capability, which, of course, is a lie.
And then he blames the entire death count of all sides of the war on Assad as his other excuse.
But this actually took place at the end of June 2014.
So just one week after Baghdadi had declared himself the caliph and the ruler of the Islamic State.
And still he's saying we still prefer the Sunni evil to the Shia evil.
And he directly refers to, hey, don't get me wrong.
They just massacred 1,700 Shia Iraqi Air Force cadets out there in the field.
So, yeah, he's specifically referring to the Islamic State here and still saying, but we prefer this evil to that one.
And then, you know, I think there's also the New York Times story where on the front page the keywords here are hemorrhage to death.
We prefer that both sides hemorrhage to death.
At that point, it seemed like maybe they were backing off from, yeah, we really ought to get rid of Assad to, yeah, let's just keep the war going for as long as possible just to weaken all sides, ultimately, kind of a thing.
Yeah, I think that's really been the primary Israeli point of view.
That seems like Obama's policy, too, right?
I was just going to say that I think that became Obama's policy when it was clear that there was going to be a stalemate, you know, that this was not going to be a short war.
Originally, let's go back to the beginning here in September 11th, September 2011.
Obama's advisers were telling him, look, this is going to be a short war.
He's not going to last long.
Once it became clear that his advisers had told him wrongly that there was going to be a short war, this was going to become a very bloody, longer conflict.
Then it was clear that the Obama White House was saying, OK, we're not going to choose winners.
We're just going to keep it going so that neither side can win.
Then we'll cite our policy as the basis for trying to get a peace negotiated settlement.
But this was only done because it turned out that his advisers gave him very, very bad advice.
And this is really the crucial point that I'm trying to talk about in this piece, which is that nobody warned Obama that if we get into supplying or helping the Sunni states to supply the opposition forces with arms, this is going to – and if they're successful, if they are on the verge of pushing back and even threatening to defeat the Assad regime, we're going to get an intervention by the Iranians in Hezbollah and possibly later on by Russia.
And that's because nobody had the wit to understand the importance of Syria to Iran strategically, which we had just talked about earlier in this conversation.
So this is why it was such a strategic blunder on the part of the White House, which was a strategic blunder by the entire U.S. national security state.
There was nobody who was smart enough who was giving advice to Obama on this to identify the strategic danger that what was going to happen was that there would be a success on the part of the opposition forces sufficient to bring about an Iranian Hezbollah intervention.
That would thus then bring about a stalemate and there would be a long, bloody sectarian war.
And that's why it's important to understand the origins of what we have seen over the last few years.
So a year ago when the CIA was helping the terrorists – and I'm skipping all around here.
We're going to have to go back a couple of years in a minute.
But a year ago when the CIA was helping the terrorists so much that they were taking the Idlib province and had – if I have my coburn right, I think it was they had severed the highway between Aleppo and Damascus.
And this was the red line for Putin that made him say, uh-uh, that's it, dude.
Here, we're going to start bombing your mythical moderate asses right out of here.
At that point, were they – were the terrorists getting out ahead of the policy?
They were being more successful than Obama wanted them to be?
Or the CIA wanted them to be more successful than Obama wanted them to be in that way?
Or what do you think?
Very good question, Scott.
I don't know the answer exactly what the calculus was on the part of the CIA, on the part of the White House.
When they clearly went along with this, you know, the tow missiles being provided, that was clearly a policy that the White House knew about, made no effort to stop, was clearly on board with.
And, you know, I have to say that it looks very much like the White House wanted to gain some leverage over the Assad regime to bring it to the table on favorable terms.
And this, of course, would have been none other than John Kerry, secretary of state, pushing this the hardest.
So I think, you know, my guess is that it was Kerry's influence more than anybody else that induced the White House to go along with this on the grounds that otherwise we were facing a situation where we're going to look stupid, we're going to look unsuccessful, and everybody's going to attack us.
Right.
Now, so when in 2010, when Kofi Annan had come up with his plan, and Hillary was, you know, meeting with the Friends of Syria in Qatar, I think they tried what, two or three different times in 2000, maybe going back even to late 2011, certainly through 2012.
Was that just obfuscation so they could keep the war going?
That was just a plan for regime change one way or the other?
Or what happened with all that?
In 2012, nobody seriously believed that there were going to be peace negotiations, I don't think.
I mean, it simply wasn't a realistic possibility.
Now, you know...
I mean, they created a government in exile for some reason.
They really thought they were just going to helicopter it in there and drop it on top of Damascus and leave?
Well, I mean, I don't know how difficult or how easy they thought it would be at that moment.
But certainly, you know, they did not believe that there was going to be a negotiated settlement.
I mean, you know, either there was going to be a successful effort to overthrow the regime and that Assad would have to step down and there would be a huge, you know, disorder in regard to the leadership of the Syrian Arab Republic.
Or, you know, it was going to take longer to bring that about.
I just, I mean, I don't believe that there's any evidence that there was serious belief that there could be a negotiated settlement at that point.
Yeah.
Well, or, yeah, or one that they could voice on the country either.
I mean, Hillary herself told CBS News in February of 2012 that, geez, when it comes to the credible kind of opposition that we could support to be a replacement, we don't really see that.
We don't really have anybody to replace the current regime with.
And she said that because the CBS guy framed it like, why aren't you doing more?
So she had to defend the policy and admit the truth that, well, there's really nobody to put in power.
And then she correctly invokes Ayman al-Zawahiri and says, well, he likes the revolution there.
So I'm not so sure it's a good idea to help it succeed.
And then, of course, that's what she continued to do throughout the rest of the year anyway.
But she herself explained why not to do so better than anybody.
Yeah.
And again, it depends very often.
The answer that you get from somebody in that position really does depend on what their political interests are in terms of the answer.
I mean, you know what it looks like.
So it's a very good point.
And, of course, we know now from the State Department released emails, I think not the WikiLeaks ones.
Either way, there's one from Jake Sullivan to her saying, hey, look, boss, AQ is on our side in this one.
And that's from a few weeks before.
So I think it's February, not January.
It's February 2012.
And so she's, I guess, pretty obviously can't really read her mind.
But she's pretty obviously thinking of that email and that news story about Ayman al-Zawahiri that he sent her when she invokes that to the CBS reporter.
Which brings up the other, of course, really important question here.
I guess I'd have to go back to look for the very first time the State Department called al-Nusra al-Qaeda.
But it was clear that they were, that this was al-Qaeda in Iraq from at least 2012, early 2013 at the latest.
And tell me this.
Do you remember offhand when John McCain went to meet with the Northern Storm Brigade?
That was in 2012, right?
I don't remember.
I think it might have been 2013.
I'm not sure.
It's a good question.
I have to go back about the whole Elizabeth O'Baggy and all that.
I think it was in 12.
And then if you Googled, I mean in real time at the time, when I searched Northern Storm Brigade, up came a Time Magazine interview with their leader that had taken place prior to John McCain going to meet with them.
And their leader says, yeah, I'm a veteran of Iraq War II where I fought against the Americans under Zarqawi there.
So we all knew this all along.
That's been the entire kind of outrage is if there's a slower motion train wreck to, you know, live through the horror of witnessing worse than the march into Iraq War II.
It's this arming of the American people's al-Qaeda enemies this whole time in Syria for five years running now.
Yeah.
And of course, I mean, I'm sure you know very well that the U.S. government did designate Nusra Front as a terrorist organization in December 2013.
Oh, OK.
I thought maybe it had been before that even.
Well, you would think so.
But it wasn't until it wasn't till December 2013.
And then in 2014, there was an airstrike against, of course, the Khorasan group.
Right.
And here's.
Which was just part of al-Nusra for the audience.
That's right.
And so this is something I'm going to write about.
What's so interesting, David Ignatius just wrote a column recently.
That's the CIA's man.
One of the CIA's men at The Washington Post, everybody.
Sorry.
Go ahead.
Well, he's the CIA's man, the Pentagon man, etc.
But he documents the fact that the the when we the United States carried out that bombing raid in 2014 against al-Nusra Front and al-Qaeda, the CIA backed group that was very close to working very closely with al-Nusra Front was very upset.
They said, you're ruining it for us.
Al-Qaeda will never work with us now because they don't trust us, because it's the United States supporting them.
And guess what?
For the next year, year and a half, there was no more strikes against al-Qaeda or al-Nusra Front in Syria until November of this year.
And so one has to believe that our strategists in the Obama administration decided, well, it's more important to have our boys be able to work closely with al-Nusra Front and have them get along and cooperate than to be able to carry out strikes.
Even if there's some reason to believe that, you know, al-Qaeda is doing something nasty with regard to the United States in the West.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it'd be worth revisiting the work of David Enders at McClatchy Newspapers during that time, because I was talking with him a lot.
And, you know, he had I'd actually first begun interviewing him when he was covering the Iraq war back in 2005.
And so and this is something you and I have talked about over the years.
I know you're very familiar with this concept that during Iraq War II, the Sunni insurgency there was broadly tribal based and former Baathist government elite based.
And then they tolerated for a time the jihadis, the Zarqawiites, whether they, you know, really worked with Zarqawi or not.
But according to the military and the CIA, for different times with different incentives behind their numbers, would always more or less admit that they were less than 10 percent of the Sunni based insurgency in Iraq at any given time.
And then, of course, it was not Petraeus, but it was the Sunni tribal leaders who really turned on al Qaeda and had marginalized them almost out of existence or well, relatively, you know, to to much smaller scale beginning in 2006 before the surge even started.
But anyway, I digress a little bit.
The point being that I would ask David Enders circa 2011 and 12 and 13 and such that, hey, man, remember how in Iraq al Qaeda was the smallest part of the broadly nationalist Sunni based insurgency there?
And he would say, yeah.
And I would say, so what about the Al Nusra Front, al Qaeda in Iraq, in Syria?
And he would say they dominate the field, man.
This is their revolution.
This is not the broadly Sunni tribal groups and whatever Sunni factions of the Baathists who are, after all, dominated by the Alawites in that political party is in Syria.
But still that no, this is the inverse of that.
This is al Qaeda in Iraq's war in Syria is what this is.
And that was clear from the beginning, really, that, yeah, OK, maybe they're mythical moderates.
It's not that they're mythical.
It's just that their power is mythical.
If anything, they're just the arms procurement branch of Zarqawi's group.
Yeah, I agree.
Absolutely.
And I think this this part of the story of the U.S. role in the in the war in Syria is the greatest, perhaps you could call it Orwellian lie that the American people have been subjected to so far in this entire conflict.
I mean, it's it's got to be it's got to be dramatized and brought out, you know, just just to get the get the idea out there that, you know, on one hand, we're told that that the United States is supposed to be taking care of terrorism.
They're supposed to be pursuing counterterrorism policy in the Middle East.
But, you know, this shows that it's exactly the opposite.
That's exactly the opposite.
Well, and listen, I'm sorry I didn't even give you a chance to really explain what's, I think, a really important and I'm not sure if you broke this already or you're breaking it in this column that you have a new source, a former apparently very high level White House official.
Is that correct?
Well, of course, I can't really say National Security Council, Pentagon, CIA.
Can you say that?
I can't say that.
Okay, you can't say.
But yeah, high enough to know.
Is it a deputy?
Can you tell me that?
No, I can't.
I can't.
But you're telling me it's somebody that you think knows.
And so now I understand from your article pretty much, you know, this person's responses to your questions.
But can you tell me what this person's bottom line was for wanting to talk to you in the first place here?
What you know, more or less what it was that they wanted to say?
I can't explain it any more than to say that this is somebody who was a dissenter from the policy in, you know, not that it was somebody who was a dove saying, you know, United States should never be involved in any war in the Middle East.
Or, you know, certainly, you know, it wasn't somebody who would support my position or your position.
And the person, you know, believed that either the White House should have tried to do more to earlier on to support the opposition or should have done more to try to avoid the war to end the war.
I mean, one of the two.
I mean, it was the person believes that there was a tragic, serious strategic error made from the very beginning and, you know, continuing.
So, you know, this was a person who was not happy with the policy that was pursued.
All right.
Now, Garrett, I promise the audience that we get back to David Petraeus here real quick, too.
And so I believe it was what mid 2011 through late 2012 that he was the head of the CIA.
Notice nobody ever picks on him for Benghazi happening on his watch.
But this was it was on his watch.
And that's not because CIA is in charge of State Department security, is it?
It's because the CIA had their own operation going on in Benghazi at the time.
What was Petraeus's role in the Libya war and the Syria war in that era, Garrett?
Well, I mean, I have not I have not really delved into that specific question.
Oh, I don't mean that night of that attack, necessarily.
But I mean, in Libya and Syria overall in the in Hirsch's rat line.
Yeah.
In general, I mean, we can say that the the head of the CIA was somebody who did not want, obviously, the truth to be told about what was happening in Benghazi.
I mean, that was, you know, that's the most important thing, I think, from the point of view of the role that the CIA was playing in Libya at that point.
The, you know, clearly there was an effort to cover this up.
And the CIA, more than anybody else, wanted to make sure that the truth didn't come out.
And so, I mean, I think this is a large part of the explanation for why, you know, the Republicans, you know, had all those hearings, but never began to get at the truth.
Right.
Well, now, all right.
So I want to make sure before we wrap this up, I'm sorry for keeping you so long here.
You're always very generous with your time.
But, you know, oftentimes when I accuse government officials, especially the very worst, most violent and dishonest government officials of being stupid, I know it sounds like I'm basically letting them off the hook in a sense.
And certainly I get that criticism sometimes that, oh, yeah, no, everything is all an accident.
Every horrible thing that they burned to death is just a big, stupid mistake because of how big and stupid they are.
When, in reality, if me and Pepe Escobar can have all this ironed out by April 2011, what's really going on here, then how can it possibly be that nobody on the National Security Council is saying, these are Zarqawi's guys.
Tilting Sunni against Iran is one thing, but doing this is another, no way.
Come on.
I mean, this is all a premeditated murder plot.
This is high treason.
This isn't stupid.
Well, it's both.
I mean, you know, you can be treasonous and stupid, but, you know, treasonous trumps stupid.
So, yeah, I mean, I think that's the key point, that these people made decisions because they believe that they were in their interests.
They were in their interests as institutions, as organizations.
And, of course, Petraeus never makes a decision that's not in his personal interest.
And they did so at the expense of the interests of both the Syrian people and the American people.
And that's really the most important point.
I mean, I think that, you know, what they did was stupid, but it was also worse than stupid.
It was evil.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right, Gareth.
Well, you're the best, man.
Thanks very much for writing all the great stuff you do and for coming on my show.
Thank you for having me, Scott.
Always glad to be on.
All right.
Happy New Year, man.
Thank you.
But, yeah, Scott Horton Show and support.
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