01/13/17 – Daniel Lazare on President Obama’s disastrous foreign policy legacy, especially in the Middle East – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing Daniel Lazare, writing again for ConsortiumNews.com.
This one is called How Obama Spread the Mid-East Fires.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing pretty good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
Yeah, so great article.
Great little rehash for Obama's legacy.
Legacies are so important to presidents.
And, well, this guy, he'll go down in history as what to you, Daniel?
I don't know.
I think he's a president who wasn't there.
I mean, he has this eerily detached manner.
He's a very cool guy, very calm, very likable, but somehow he just presided over a growing disaster, especially in the Middle East.
So here's the thing of it.
I was talking about this.
Well, we talk about this all the time.
But I got into it with Ronnie Ecolick the other day.
And this comes up all the time.
It's what Seymour Hersh called the redirection, or maybe he was quoting somebody else.
But basically, right around 2006, 2005 even, Zalmay Khalilzad and others in the government started realizing that, oops, we just basically invaded Iraq for Iran.
And now we need to make up for that with this Sunni turn and tilt back toward the Saudis.
And then in that case, it meant from the very beginning, really.
Backing Bin Ladenite types in Lebanon, in Syria, and in Iran.
From the very beginning.
And so Obama inherited this policy, but instead of saying, well, wait a minute, that's crazy!
He just doubled and tripled and quadrupled the damn thing.
Where it even ended up culminating in the Islamic State.
Which still exists, by the way.
After a year and a half of war against it as an actual place.
Not just a name of a terrorist group, but an actual place on the map.
The border between Iraq and Syria has not been redrawn at this point at all.
That's still their territory, right?
It's a pretty crazy thing.
What explains that?
Because he doesn't want to go down in history as the president who backed Zawahiri's men.
Does he, or does he?
He's a very hard guy to lead.
I think what explains it is that the invasion of Iraq and other events triggered a massive slide in Middle East politics.
And that the Arab Spring in 2011 was kind of a very mixed bag.
It was in some ways a very hopeful breakthrough, but in other ways a continuation and even acceleration of that slide.
And Obama responded to it really in the worst way possible.
He did it by backing a counter-revolution that originated in the Persian Gulf.
And this was a revolution intent on rolling back democracy and substituting in its place a kind of a stifling Saudi-style Sunni orthodoxy.
So Hillary Clinton, with Obama's backing, persuaded the Qatar, for example, to join in the effort to overthrow Qaddafi in Libya in March 2011.
And Qatar was quite happy to get on board because as soon as it was on board, it took $400 million, which is a lot of money to you and me, but pocket change for the emir of Qatar, and spread it out among Salafist rebel groups who proceeded to destroy the country.
And due to it, what equivalent forces had done to Afghanistan in the 1980s.
So Libya was a disaster area within months.
And then, to make things even worse, when the civil war broke out in Syria, Hillary convened a, quote, Friends of Syria conference in Istanbul, in which Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates agreed to donate hundreds of millions of dollars to anti-Assad rebels in Syria, who turned out to be exactly the same types.
Sunni, Salafist, fanatical, fundamentalist warriors who set about chopping off heads and terrorizing especially the minority population of Syria.
So that country was destroyed as well.
So Obama has presided over the destruction of two Middle East countries.
He then backed Saudi Arabia's war on Yemen, which is quickly reducing a third country to ruin.
He has sent drone bombers to other places as well.
I can't remember how many.
And so the result we have is a disaster area stretching from North Africa across the Middle East.
One that is, you know, a scene of civil war, religious sectarianism, spiraling violence, and a tidal wave of refugees descending on Europe who are, you know, overturning politics from Warsaw to Washington.
It's a first class disaster.
And it really, really is entirely at Obama's feet.
We know that he knows better, but he does it anyway.
He tells Tom Friedman, look, there's no moderates to back over there, but then he backs them.
And so he ends up, he's backing the Al Nusra Front.
And, you know, we know that even the New York Times, especially the Washington Times, but the New York Times even conceded, it's in all the emails, that certainly Hillary Clinton, and he must have known, that he was backing the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group in Libya, and that these guys were the veterans of Iraq War II.
They were Zarqawi's guys in Iraq War II.
He had to have known better, and he did it anyway.
It's not, none of us believe that, for whatever reason, maybe we should, but I don't think any of us believe that this is what he really wanted to do.
It's all just the history of all the horrible things everybody else wanted him to do that he knew better than to do, but then he did them.
So, as I said, the psychology is really hard to figure out.
I mean, it's hard not to respond to this guy in a really personal way.
I mean, you and I went to high school with guys like Obama.
He's a really cool guy, and the kind of cool guy who adapts effortlessly to whatever institution he finds himself in, whether it's the Illinois State Legislature, the Harvard Law Review, or the White House.
But you know what?
He's just too cool.
He just adapts too effortlessly, and consequently, he doesn't rock the boat.
He just seems to go along, he seems to be all too unflappable, and as a result, he just doesn't change things.
And he, therefore, put up with a lot of nonsense.
But his values are very strange, too.
For example, after Qatar agreed to join the anti-Qaddafi effort in Libya, he welcomed Emir al-Thani to the White House in April 2011, where he expressed appreciation for, quote, the leadership the Emir has shown when it comes to democracy in the Middle East.
Well, Qatar is an absolute dictatorship.
I mean, Qatar has shown no leadership whatsoever.
So what was Obama thinking?
What was he saying?
Was he stoned out of his mind?
Was he merely being cynical?
Obama's own State Department has branded him as a lawless autocrat who represses freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, etc.
And even countenances human trafficking for domestic workers and other kinds of workers.
But Obama just disregarded that and described the guy as a great democrat.
So was he fooling us?
Was he fooling himself?
Or what?
Well, democracy just means country that does what America says.
Huh?
Oh, I'm sorry.
Oh, well, democracy just means a country that does whatever America says.
So in that sense, you know, of course he's a champion of democracy.
That's what makes Obama the leader of the free world, is that the Qataris and the Bahrainis are under our thumb.
God, I wonder.
Well, and speaking of which, all right, now, Dana, I want to play for you this clip.
I'm sorry because I may have put you through this before, but I like it and it's instructive, I think, for people.
It's the very end of February 2012.
Hillary Clinton is still the Secretary of State.
And she is being questioned by CBS News.
And the frame of the question, of course, is why aren't we doing more to help the rebels in Syria?
And so she's basically excusing Obama's reluctance to do more, which we know that she was always pushing for more at this point, as you already said.
But anyway, so here was her defense of Obama's position to CBS News then.
This is February, I believe, the 28th of 2012.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
Hamas is now supporting the opposition.
Are we supporting Hamas in Syria?
So I think why, you know, despite the great pleas that we hear from those people who are being ruthlessly assaulted by Assad, if you're a military planner or if you're a Secretary of State and you're trying to figure out do you have the elements of an opposition that is actually viable, we don't see that.
So there you go, yes, speaking of knowing better.
All right, so, I mean, what do you make of that?
There's Hillary.
She spent, as you just said, the whole rest of the year trying to come up with these friends of Syria plans and pushing, as she even bragged later, that she, Petraeus, and Panetta, they all wanted Obama to do so much more and he was reluctant and would only do so much when she just made the perfect case that this is what Ayman al-Zawahiri wants.
I mean, you couldn't put it worse than that, could you?
Well, what Hillary did was she sort of performed a kind of rhetorical trick.
She then announced that the way to outflank al-Qaeda was by supporting the moderate rebels and allowing them to take the lead so that, essentially, the extremists would be shut out of the battle.
That was the stated logic, the strategy that she and Obama put across.
It just never made any sense because what happened is that the pre-Syrian army, the so-called moderates, very quickly joined in a tacit alliance with al-Qaeda and to the point of sharing weapons and stuff.
So whatever aid the U.S. gave them wound up very quickly in the hands of al-Qaeda.
So whereas the U.S. claimed to be outflanking al-Qaeda, it was really joining forces with al-Qaeda.
Right.
Oh, I know.
Yeah, let's talk about what you wrote here about Palestine.
Alright, so now, Daniel, the other thing is, and this is the thing that always happens, is that the president, whether it's Bush Sr. or Clinton or Obama, Bush Jr. or Obama, they all go, oh yeah, we're going to try real hard, see if we can get a two-state solution for a minute here and have a peace process.
And then, yeah, not so much.
You know, I guess not.
Bill Clinton did it.
They always seem, usually they seem to wait until the last year or two of the presidency.
I guess with Obama they tried at the very beginning of the second term for just a minute.
And then, you know, Mr. could-have-been-president, John Kerry, the current Secretary of State, he gave this big speech saying, man, if only Israel would do what I say, kind of a thing the other day.
What do you make of it all?
I didn't make very much of it.
And I'm kind of appalled by the liberal reaction, which is very pro-Kerry.
And everyone's very happy to see Kerry finally beating up on Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli hardline prime minister.
But, you know, first of all, as you point out, he waits until his last few weeks in office when it doesn't really matter anymore.
And number two, there was a very important subtext to that talk that was largely overlooked.
Kerry said quite clearly the reason he wants to have peace between Israel and Palestine is in order to hammer out a regional alliance involving Egypt, Jordan, and the six Gulf Cooperation Councils countries, which are Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Republic, United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Bahrain.
And to wield them into an alliance against Iran.
So therefore, you know, he wants peace in one corner of the Middle East.
So he'll have a freer hand to engage in various imperial misadventures in another part of the Middle East, in the Persian Gulf, which is really what the U.S. only cares about.
When he's the guy that just negotiated the nuclear deal and took the largest outstanding issue between our country and theirs off the table, the threat of their civilian nuclear program becoming a nuclear weapons program.
He's the guy.
That counts for nothing?
That's why he's got to be even more horrible on every other thing.
Yes.
In a nutshell, yes, that's exactly it.
So, I mean, so, you know, the whole thing is so incoherent.
So he makes a gesture towards Iran, a very important gesture, but he's got to follow that up with renewed assurances to Saudi Arabia, which is, by the way, that's why Saudi Arabia launched its air war against Yemen in March 2015 and why the U.S. felt obliged to get on board, because it wanted to assure the Saudis that it was still on their side despite the peace arrangements with Iran.
You know what?
Let me ask you more about that, because I was just interviewed on another radio show this morning, and that's exactly what I told them.
Why are we doing this to Yemen?
Well, it's to placate the Saudis, is what the Obama people told the New York Times.
It's to make them feel a little better about themselves after the nuclear deal.
But then I'm thinking, man, two years of air war?
There's got to be more going on here.
I mean, for whatever reason, I guess the National Security Council has decided whether the Saudis agree or not, right?
That it's intolerable that the Houthis rule Sana'a?
Is that it?
Well, I think what it's about is about oil.
The Persian Gulf contains 54% of the world's fossil fuel supplies.
That is an immense price, and even though the price of oil has fallen 50% over the last year and a half, the U.S. has invested literally trillions of dollars in militarizing the Gulf, and it's not going to walk away from that investment.
So whatever it takes to protect that investment, it will do.
If that means sacrificing the life of 10,000 Yemenis, then that's their problem.
So in other words, you're not saying because, oh, boo-hoo, the Houthis threatened the gates of the Red Sea or anything like that.
You're just saying because the Saudis want to and we have to keep them happy.
Basically, yes.
Listen, the Red Sea itself is a very important trade corridor.
So I guess the U.S. is a little bit worried about a hostile force backed by Iran gaining a chokehold on this trade corridor.
But the real reason, the ultimate reason is oil.
Oil, oil, oil.
And the Persian Gulf has been the focus of U.S. foreign policy since World War II.
The administration, Washington has been amazingly consistent on this point.
It has invested literally—it has invested $7 trillion in the estimate of one Princeton University economist, and it's just not going to walk away from that investment.
So it will do whatever it can to protect it.
And as I said, if that means sacrificing 10,000 Yemeni lives, then that's just—that's their problem.
It's monstrous.
I mean, I'm not trying to excuse it one bit.
I mean, it's horrible.
I mean, I've seen pictures of the wounded and dead children.
And it's just absolutely monstrous.
But that's what the U.S. is doing.
Yeah, man.
All right, so now tell me about just what kind of kook you think Recep Erdogan is.
Because here's a guy who took a policy that said, no trouble with our neighbors ever, and changed it into, let's back a bunch of Bin Ladenites against Assad.
Which, you know, not bragging or whatever, but just context.
It was discussed and agreed on this show that without a NATO-style air war, Assad isn't going anywhere.
He represents a coalition that would prefer him to jihadists any day, no matter how bad he is.
And that that kind of status quo is more or less going to hold.
He's not going to lose Damascus to Bin Ladenites.
And yet, Erdogan wasn't that smart.
And for that matter, Obama just absolutely went along, no problem, with letting Erdogan back al-Nusra and even the Islamic State.
I mean, Phil Giraldi told me he was in Turkey, and he saw guys raising money for the Islamic State on the streets there.
So, that semi-permeable membrane there, the Turkish border with Syria, where jihadists for years were crossing there, coming from all over the Middle East and all of that.
What is the point of that?
And how well did it work out for Turkish policy compared to what Erdogan was trying to accomplish there, Daniel?
Oh, it's been a disaster.
An absolute disaster.
I mean, Turkey is in desperate straits.
That society is falling apart before our very eyes.
Erdogan, you may recall, actually was sort of slow to get on board the anti-Assad bandwagon.
When the U.S., France, and Britain called for Assad's overthrow in, I believe, August 2011, Erdogan actually held back.
But eventually he succumbed to U.S. pressure.
Not only to U.S. pressure, but also it was widely thought that Assad would go, that he would follow in Gaddafi's footsteps in Libya, and that yet another Middle East government would fall, and the U.S. would be able to put in an obedient, docile regime in its place.
So Erdogan went along with that, and also Erdogan, being sort of a mild Islamist, felt a deep ideological kinship with the Syrian opposition, which was dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood.
So Erdogan figured, you know, I can't lose.
I mean, Assad will go.
I'll get a kindred government in Damascus.
The U.S. will be grateful for my efforts.
My status will rise at home.
My own mild Islamism will be ever more successful, and I'll be elected president for life.
What could go wrong?
Well, in fact, everything has gone wrong.
Assad didn't go.
The anti-Assad rebel movement turned out to be run by al-Qaeda and ISIS.
They established cells throughout Turkey.
They were then furious when Turkey turned against them and formed an alliance with Russia, their main enemy, and now they're taking their vengeance.
Bombs are going off all across Turkey.
The society is splintering very rapidly, and democracy seems to be nearing a termination point.
Yeah, and so there's been more and more terrorist attacks there.
He's really picked a fight with the PKK as well as with the jihadists, as you mentioned there.
And he has how many forces now?
I've lost track of this part of the story.
There's so many facets to it, Dano, that there are Turkish forces that are in Syria right now, I guess, fighting al-Nusra, in the name of fighting al-Nusra, but really guaranteeing that the Kurds, that the YPG, Syrian Kurdish forces, stay east of the Euphrates.
And are they fighting them at this moment?
And by the way, these are the same Kurdish groups that America and Russia are both backing against the Islamic State right now.
Are they fighting them at this moment?
I'm not sure they really are, but the Syrian incursion is working out very badly as well for Erdogan.
He's had another problem he faces.
It started off gloriously, but the Russians made it clear to him that he could not use air power.
He could not bomb Syria at will or he would face the wrath of the Russian air force.
So he's had to send troops in unprotected by air power.
And consequently, they're bogged down, they're having a very difficult time fighting ISIS.
They've experienced significant casualties.
And that can't be going well with the people back home.
Meanwhile, he's facing a major Kurdish insurgency inside Turkey itself.
And he is facing the ultimate prospect of the YPG essentially consolidating its forces so that it would establish an autonomous zone all along the hundreds of miles of a Syrian-Turkish border.
One can almost feel sorry for Erdogan.
He faces all the troubles of Job.
His policies have collapsed in a really spectacular way and there's no way out for the guy.
He's painted himself into a corner.
The Turkish Republic is much more unstable than people realize.
But then again, the U.S. Republic is much more unstable than people realized.
And so the U.S. itself is heading towards a crunch as Donald Trump prepares to take office and the CIA seems to be doing everything in its power to stop him from entering the White House.
Are you going to go that far?
Are they really trying to stop him from being inaugurated at this point?
I think it's absolutely extraordinary.
They're pulling out all stops.
It's pretty amazing.
Why did Clapper show him this 35-page dossier alleging that he was cavorting with prostitutes?
And vouch for the source to CNN and say we don't know about the facts but we like the guy that wrote it.
Precisely.
And so why did he do it?
How was he expecting Trump to respond?
This is a big question.
And what's he going to do about it?
I think he's either got to crush them or they're going to own his ass the same way they've owned Obama this whole time.
I think it's absolutely correct.
And I think it's absolutely extraordinary.
This is a country which has prided itself on its peaceful transfer of power every four years.
Other countries, the old banana republics, have coup d'etats but not the United States.
Every inauguration day one president takes office another one rides off into the sunset and it's all peaceful and legalistic.
But that was a long time ago.
Now suddenly we have an intelligence establishment which is actually in open warfare against the president-elect.
The president-elect denouncing the intelligence community as Nazis.
They don't really have a plan.
It's not like Obama's going to try to stay in office or anything like that.
There's no ambition to do that.
What are they going to do?
Put Petraeus in there?
So what was Clapper expecting when he showed him this 35-page dossier or the two-page summary?
Did he expect Trump to break down in tears and admit it was all true?
And then when Clapper put his hand on Trump's shoulder and said in gentle but comforting tones but firm tones to step down Donald and allow Mike Pence to take over?
We don't know what's going on but something really weird is going on behind the scenes.
That is clear at this point.
Yeah, well you know the thing is about Donald Trump he's the only guy in the whole country who is not a vice president a senator or a governor who could have possibly won the nomination and it's only because he is rich enough and bold enough brash enough willing to tangle he got straight up there and stomped Jeb Bush into the ground in the most impolite and impolitic way that you're not supposed to do things and he didn't give a damn he went up there and crushed him so I think you come at the king you better not miss they clearly pissed him off and he's just sitting in his tower biding his time until he actually takes the oath and gets in the chair but then what?
I don't know I don't mean to be too optimistic my long time prediction has always been that he would tell them you guys do whatever you want you don't have to fight with me but I don't know I don't think even Trump knows he's authoritarian etc etc etc but he's also the most radical president since William Jennings Bryan or Henry A. Wallace in 1948 if they had won the presidency but they didn't and he did so as a result the military foreign policy intelligence complex is in a panic because Trump wants to switch sides in this great zone of conflict from Syria through Eastern Europe and they don't know what to do they are in a first class panic it seems to me the obvious compromise that he's making with them though is you still get to have special forces and CIA drone wars and terror wars from Morocco to the Philippines we're just not going to overthrow the nation states and we're not going to pick a fight with Russia but he's endorsed their plan for a trillion bucks or two worth of new nukes and all of that but they want to show that Russia is their focus from Estonia to Syria and he's not he's saying no this is very radical it really is and they're in a tizzy it's really an amazing thing and especially is watching all the liberals line up with the CIA and the deep state and denounce Trump above all for daring to push back against the claims of the American intelligence establishment that is just a barrel of monkeys it's even worse the Guardian has run an article by its New York correspondent Ed Pilkington urging the CIA to continue probing the Steele dossier regardless regardless of what Trump tells them if it finds anything to go to Congress and therefore initiate impeachment proceedings so essentially the Guardian is calling for the intelligence agencies to take covert action to depose a sitting US president this is a big big deal check out this one too I'm sure you saw it's in Ynet News and now in Haaretz as well that American spies presumably CIA told Mossad don't leak to us don't talk to us don't share classified material with us that we're going to have to share with the president because he might leak it to Russia and Iran which I mean are these people kidding me or what where he just brings the army division home from Germany and marches them to Langley you guys are fired, all of you beat it, go get a job you're done, they're crazy either they're going to shoot him in the face or he's going to shoot them in the face one or the other, it's really coming down to it now it seems like deep instability is looming it's really an amazing moment in history the American structure is coming undone Donald Trump as the guy of all people to be the one taking even this shadow, this most palest imitation of a Ron Paul-ian position is enough to put them at full DEFCON 1 Did you ever see the movie Seven Days in May?
Yeah Oh well, it's a great movie Hey JFK, let them film it in the White House because it was a concern of his Right, but they hear the president question in the movie, for your listeners who don't know, it's about a movie made in 1964 I believe it was about a military plot to overthrow the elected government but the president in the story the mythical, the fictional president was an earnest liberal but now we have the same story unfolding but it's a madman right-winger who is playing the role and who is no Ron Paul-ian at all who is really a right-wing Jacksonian and a nationalist and a militarist for that matter again, he said you can have your terror war, you can have all the terror war you want, you can invade every country in Africa which you're so calm for all I care basically his position so far we're just not going to overthrow the secular dictators for a little while that's not good enough for them, Jesus anyway I'm sorry, I'm running so late here thank you so much for coming back on the show, Dan I love talking with you and reading you talk to you soon, bye-bye alright y'all, that is Daniel Lazar and I'm so sorry I've been saying your name wrong this whole time too Lazar, Daniel Lazar you can find him all the time over there now at consortiumnews.com how Obama spread the mid-east fires consortiumnews.com and check out the archives, scotthorton.org more than 4300 something or other interviews there going back to 2003 now at scotthorton.org and find all the latest stuff too at libertarianinstitute.org I'm on Twitter at scotthortonshow as well see ya you can digitally print with solvent ink so you get the photo quality results of digital with the strength and durability of old style screen printing I'm sure glad I sold thebumpersticker.com to Rick back when he's made a hell of a great company out of it and there are thousands of satisfied customers who agree with me too let thebumpersticker.com help you get the word out that's thebumpersticker.com at thebumpersticker.com you hate government?one of them libertarian types?or maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers, or warmongers me too that's why I invented libertystickers.com well, Rick owns it now, and I didn't make up all of them but still, if you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go libertystickers.com has got your bumper covered left, right, libertarian, empire, police, state, founders, quote, central banking yes, bumper stickers about central banking lots of them and, well, everything that matters libertystickers.com everyone else's stickers suck