03/13/17 – Cynthia Storer on the Trump administration’s (mis)understanding of Islamic extremism – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, introducing Cynthia Storer.
She teaches intelligence analysis and counterterrorism for Johns Hopkins University.
And in fact, she's a former CIA analyst stationed at Alex Station on the Bin Laden unit.
Welcome to the show, how are you doing, Cynthia?
Thank you, thanks for having me.
Oh, I have to do, correct one little thing, though.
I know that with the documentary, Manhattan, things like that, it's made it look like I worked in Alex Station, but I didn't.
Oh, okay.
Everybody got that impression, because I was just Googling it, and that's what they all said.
That's exactly right, and if you don't mind, I would love the opportunity to correct that for folks.
I was in a different unit doing analysis for policymakers, but I also worked with the people in Alex Station doing that kind of operational analysis.
I see, all right.
Could I ask you a couple of questions about 2001?
I'm really trying to nail this down for my book.
And that is, I really wanna know how many, quote, real-ass Al-Qaeda guys there were in the country, and in Afghanistan, or even in the world at that time.
And I guess what I'm trying to parse especially is there were maybe 1,000 or even 2,000 members of the Arab Brigade fighting for the Taliban up on the Shomali Plain, but those guys don't really count as Al-Qaeda, just because they were Arabs in Afghanistan, right?
The real Al-Qaeda guys, friends of Osama, were how many?
Can you tell me?
That's a good question.
The estimate at the time was around 400 actual, or I should say what we had documented at the time was around 400 actual central card-carrying members, kind of guys.
But we always figured that was probably low because we didn't really have, we never could establish a baseline.
So I read Grenier's book, 88 Days to Kandahar.
He was the station chief in Islamabad, I think, in Peshawar, maybe.
Anyway, and he says that in order to actually be allowed to swear by it to Osama bin Laden, you had to be one of the very, very chosen few, and that there were a lot of fellow travelers around, but it sounds like a very exclusive club.
They weren't going for members.
They were going for basically a very core kind of special forces group and leadership level, and that's all.
Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right.
Their vision was to be the, so of course al-Qaeda means the base, and it's actually, there's a longer name later, but it's the base from which to build a worldwide Islamic army.
So they were the elite vanguard to put this in communist terms.
Actually, they used those terms too.
Right, okay, that sounds right to me.
Okay, good, thank you.
All right, now, so, well, there's a lot of skipping around that we're gonna do, I think, here probably today, Cynthia, but let's talk about this guy Gorka, and I'm sorry, I didn't write down his first name, and all of a sudden, it escapes me.
Sebastian.
Sebastian Gorka, okay, I don't know how I could have forgotten that.
Okay, so he is now in the White House working as the kind of right-hand man for Steve Bannon, and this has caused, and as a counterterrorism advisor, and this has caused a lot of controversy in Washington, D.C., because all you terrorism experts know each other, and none of you know this guy, and apparently, none of you agree with him.
I have to say, when I started reading the Washington Post article that no counterterrorism experts in D.C. know or like this guy, I thought, well, okay, I'm willing to give him a shot then, because I don't really like any of the counterterrorism people in D.C., or the job that they've advised our government to do over this last decade and a half or so, so maybe this guy's all right, but then, yeah, no, I think my hopes were sort of dashed.
But can you tell me what it is that's the discrepancy here that has everybody so hopping mad?
Yeah, he has a very, a view of terrorism, a view of Islam that is not very nuanced, and I know a lot of people say nuanced just gets in the way of doing things, but in this case, he's making some fundamental errors that I've seen people make over the last 20 years, and it never ends well, so for example, he is claiming that he knows what Muslims believe.
Now, I would be offended if somebody told me what I believe as a Christian, right?
Sure, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so he's doing that, he's saying, well, according to the Quran, Muslims believe acts, but that's not necessarily the case.
Religions evolve, people's interpretation of their religion evolves, and what he's describing as what Muslims believe according to the Quran, he and Frank Gaffney and some other people around them, are actually an interpretation, and he says this, it's an interpretation that goes back to the early days of Islam, but it's a particularly militant and extremist interpretation, and it pops up again throughout history, but it's always fought back by the mainstream.
So what he's done essentially is he has taken on the terrorist narrative.
The terrorists say, this is what Muslims believe, and Seb Gorka and Frank Gaffney and all those people say, yeah, that is what they believe, which is ridiculous.
Right, well, you know, it's funny, because it seems like even if you don't really know anything about it at all, if you're just Joe Easychair and you're sitting here listening to this, we can just count on your fingers, right?
Well, there's a billion Muslims in the world, so they're apparently not all at war with us, and then you know what the Gaffneyites say, though?
The Gaffneyites say, well, it's just about 10% of them that are the fundamentalists, and those are the ones that we have to fight, but that's still 10 million people.
Well, right, and so you don't even have to fight all fundamentalists, so then even if you just narrow that down to the Salafi jihadists, which is the proper term that they gave themselves, well, other people gave them and they took it on, anyway.
Even if you just narrow it to the fundamentalists, and by the way, just so everybody knows, fundamentalism originally means scriptural literalism, okay?
It's a Protestant American term from the 1920s, and it definitely applies to the people on the Islamic side now who are being terrorists, but not all fundamentalists believe in using violence, you know, just because they have the same idea about what God wants, it doesn't mean they have the same idea about how to get there.
Right, well, and as you- And the last aspect, according to our own, you know, according to our First Amendment to the Constitution, you can think whatever you want.
It's what you do that gets you in trouble.
Well, I mean, it sounds like what you're saying here is that, and it's pretty clear, right?
You just, if you have an agenda, you can cherry pick whatever you want out of any holy book and make it sound as crazy as you want, but if Gorka and Gaffney aren't checking with any Muslims to ask them if this is what they actually believe, I know they have a couple of ex-Muslim fellow travelers well-paid to tell them they're right all the time, but, you know, they could just take a cab and say, hey, cabbie, do you believe this?
And see what he says, and I bet it's no, or else why is he driving a cab instead of trying to kill you, Gaffney, right?
Well, even worse than that is that, you know, it's not even about what you believe.
We do need to understand what people believe if we're going to understand a movement, right?
What supports or underlies terrorists.
I get that.
But we don't want to treat people badly when they aren't doing anything illegal because that always has bad repercussions.
All right, well, now, so I read something about you this morning, which must have been inaccurate.
Cynthia, but it said that you had helped to kind of come up with the model of terrorist radicalization that the CIA uses.
Any chance that's correct?
Yeah, I did.
All right, well, so can you explain a little bit about that?
Yeah, why did you say you thought that must be incorrect?
Well, because everything I told you that I read about you so far, you've said, no, that's not correct.
No, it's just, sorry, it's just the nuances, and if you want to rerecord any of that, I'd be happy to.
Oh, yeah, no, no, it's fine.
I like being told I'm wrong because that's how I know what's right at the end once I'm correct.
It's just something.
Oh, there you go.
Well, and like you said, most people think those things, too.
Yeah, so the idea behind this model, and model's probably too formal a term, it's a framework, but is that people don't wake up one morning and decide to be terrorists, right?
They go through a process, just like you don't wake up one morning and decide to deal drugs, generally.
You've been associating with people, and get involved in using drugs, that kind of stuff, right?
So the same thing happens on, when you're for political radicalization, because that's what we're talking about here.
People go through stages, and it starts with, actually, to explain this, this is gonna sound ridiculous, but I remember a researcher in England said, oh, it sounds just like this other model, which is about sex.
And that is that you don't start off at the end point.
You start off with a little kissing, and this and that, right?
And then once you, and then you move along, and then once you've gone all the way, it's not like you stop doing those other things.
Does that make sense?
Sure.
So that's basically what we're looking at here, is people start with wanting to have some sort of individual belief, because something's gone wrong in their life, and whatever they believed before doesn't work, or maybe they were born into a particular belief set.
And then the next thing you wanna do is you wanna convince everybody else, right?
Oh, I believe this is wonderful.
It's good for me.
Now I'm gonna convince everybody else it's good for them, too.
And then if it's political, then the next step would be, if for some reason you're not getting very far in your social program, like the government is getting in your way, for instance, then people start to talk about overthrowing the government, and that's where you get, you start to get into the violence factor.
In other words, it sounds very universal.
It's not necessarily has anything to do with any branch of Islam or anything else.
You could be talking about political radicals anywhere in the world.
It is absolutely universal.
I've used this to talk about, and not only me, but other people I've briefed have said, oh yeah, that's just like so-and-so.
Any ideology you name, you can use this, yeah.
All right, well then.
Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.
That's okay.
So the keys to this is that that difference, that step between being peaceful about it and being violent about it, researchers have found over the last 30, 40 years, I mean, a lot of people have been working on this, that the key right there is the government reaction.
So it's the government doing things to suppress people and to make them afraid for their lives that then creates the counter reaction.
Well, of course, then that's the purpose of terrorism is to create a reaction as well.
Right, but the terrorism comes after the government does something to scare people to death.
Does that make sense?
So my rule is never shoot a protester.
Just don't do it.
I don't care what they did to you, don't shoot them.
All right, but now here's the thing.
Nevermind Gorka and Gaffney because, I mean, I know less about Gorka, but I know Gaffney and that whole segment of let's demonize the Muslims.
It's an industry and it's a political agenda and they're clearly not even being honest.
And yet still everybody between you and them thinks that this is about Islam.
And so why aren't you starting off your framework here with, well, once somebody believes in whatever kind of Islam it is, then.
Oh, I see.
Well, actually the framework starts with, so I depict this as a pyramid, a step pyramid because you have to, it's a hard slog to the top as opposed to the other way around.
And for the Salafi Jihadi, which is the particular ideology we're talking about with regard to the Sunni Muslim terrorists, okay?
Not the Shia, that's Hezbollah, it's different.
But for the Sunnis, yes, you have to be a Muslim, but some people come into Islam sort of becoming Salafi and becoming Salafi Jihadi pretty early.
And other people have been Muslims, we've got families of Muslims, they've been Muslims their whole life and then something happens in their life where they switch over to a fundamentalist interpretation and then sort of move down the path.
So it's definitely, it's not something that everyone is susceptible to.
What about when you have like 9-11 hijackers hanging out at the strip club and you have, well, I've seen interviews even with Islamic State fighters who are like, yeah, I'm not particularly religious, I just wanna get them Safavids out of here, you know?
Right, well, and then there's the other, and then there's the other thing that happens is, so when we're talking about this model of radicalization, we're talking about people who become terrorists over a period of time and they attack, school buses and I don't know, things like that.
I'm not saying this very well.
Civilian targets.
Yeah, when you're talking about an insurgency or a war where you've got a lot of fighters, yeah, of course, most of them are not gonna be dedicated that way, that's not what happens, right?
You have your hardcore in the center, then you have all of your people who are convinced that this is the right thing to do but maybe for a variety of reasons, some of which are personal, some of which are because their friends went, you know, peer pressure, there's all kinds of other reasons people do stuff.
Well, you know, I was actually really surprised.
I thought I knew all of these but John Schwartz in a recent article for The Intercept had found this great quote from a senior official in the George W. Bush administration who had told Walter Russell Mead, who, you know, has a very serious reputation, not the kind of guy to fabricate a quote like this or anything and it was a Bush Jr. administration official said, you know, if we never had occupied Saudi Arabia and we hadn't have done all those no-fly zone bombings in the Clinton years from there, Osama might be just sitting around in the Khyber Pass boring people with his tales of the old days and stuff and in other words, saying that these mujahideen who worked for the United States during the days of Ronald Reagan or at least worked on the very same project with us in Operation Cyclone and all that, that if we hadn't gone to the Middle East after the end of the Cold War, they might still just work for us or at least be, you know, former employees or whatever.
We wouldn't necessarily had a problem with them at all which is, you know, I think the contrast between that and oh my God, it's a war of civilizations between the white Christian West and all Arabs and Muslims in the world which is the Gaffney line that they're pushing right now and that they're convincing people to believe in in large numbers, I think, because it's such a simple explanation.
The contrast between those two points of view is just vast.
I wonder where you come down on that?
It is, well, okay, so I do agree that, you know, this war of civilizations thing is not the best way to categorize what's happening but this particular school of folks who say that, oh, you know, if we hadn't done all these things in the Clinton administration, then Bin Laden would just be in a cave.
You know, that's political and it's ahistorical actually.
Al-Qaeda was formed in part with this idea that they were gonna take over the world.
You know, that's part of the deal and they went after, you know, Egypt and Jordan and other countries before attacking us but attacking us was really early.
I mean, it was, you know, 1993.
Yes, that was after the first Gulf War and yeah, that particular tax in Yemen may have been related to that but that was always gonna happen eventually.
They started with Muslim countries and planned to expand.
Plus, not to mention which, Bin Laden claimed that the reason Saudi Arabia wasn't, they sent a bunch of letters to the Saudi government in the early 90s saying, you know, you need to reform and the Saudis were like, yeah, wait, right, whatever and Al-Qaeda blamed Bin Laden and others, not just Al-Qaeda, blamed the US for influencing the Saudis, okay?
So even if we hadn't put troops in the Gulf, we still would have been blamed.
Close.
Well, the troops were a big part of the influence but yeah, I see what you're saying.
But if America hadn't had bases over there, it seems like, you know, 400 guys trying to wage a regional revolution much less take on the superpower.
I mean, in other words, it made sense when Zawahiri argued we gotta attack the Americans first because as they put it, we already were at war against them through the governments we supported and through our occupation and support for Israel's occupation and all that but if we hadn't have been doing any of those things, then the far enemy argument wouldn't have made any sense and it would have just been 400 guys versus King Fahd and then they would have lost and then that would have been the end of that, right?
So again, this is interesting.
There's been some debate about where that idea came from and if you read Peter Bergen's works and the people he interviewed and also looking at early Al-Qaeda documents, it appears to me and I'm pretty strongly, pretty strongly actually that the influence to go after the United States first was not Zawahiri.
I mean, you have to remember, he wasn't even a member of the organization.
Well, actually, Abdullah Azzam had told Eric Margulies back in 1986, when we're done with the Soviets, you're next but it was again because your guys are in our country, your combat forces, you have bases in the Persian Gulf, you have this more covert then but still already military presence in Saudi Arabia and that's what he was talking about.
Well, that's true but yeah, I mean, certainly having troops in Saudi Arabia, definitely, I shouldn't say definitely but it does appear to have sped up the agenda, if you will.
So it made attacks on the United States come a lot faster than they might have anyway and you're right, maybe if the US wasn't there, the attacks would have just been against other countries but then we would have stepped in and then it would have been against us anyway.
I mean, you start playing out these scenarios and it's hard to know what would have happened.
Certainly having troops in Saudi Arabia did provide an impetus to attack the United States, no doubt about that but also Somalia and Bosnia and other places where we were attacked.
Well, in Bosnia though, the Clinton administration helped or at least looked the other way while the Iranians, which this is kind of a funny one, right?
The Iranians helped arm the Mujahideen.
Thousands of Mujahideen came to help the Bosnian army and Bill Clinton said it was okay.
I was just reading it in the Washington Post the other day, a 20-year-old article about it.
Yeah, the Iranians did help to arm them.
Was it okay?
I think there's more to that story but I'm not entirely sure.
Hey, let me ask you this too, I'm sorry, as long as I got you on the phone.
For some reason, I can't fathom, well, I think maybe I know, the Khobar Towers attack in 1996 was blamed on Iranian-backed Saudi Hezbollah.
And in fact, in Jawbreaker, Gary Bernstein says, yeah, that one was Hezbollah but then the embassies, that was Osama.
And yet, I'm actually reading Atwan's book right now, The Secret History of Al-Qaeda, where Osama brags that he did the Khobar Towers attack to this Palestinian journalist based in London here.
Yeah, I mean, Khobar's interesting.
It was definitely Saudi Hezbollah, no doubt at all, with some backing from Lebanese Hezbollah.
That's very clear.
Really?
But, yeah, oh, absolutely, the intelligence is incontrovertible.
But there are elements of the plot that might have, I mean, to the way I look at it, might have had some Al-Qaeda participation.
That's interesting.
But I don't know, yeah, I think it's possible, but I don't know for sure.
You know, were you aware that William Perry and Michael Scheuer both said that they doubted that and that they thought Osama bin Laden did it too?
Oh, well, no, but that's okay.
I mean, I saw the intelligence.
The problem with Khobar is that- What was the intelligence?
I mean, is it all still classified?
I mean, the part I know is that the Hezbollah or Iranian agents were seen surveilling the site at one point.
But that was- Yeah, some of it still is classified, of course.
Can you tell me any more of what the intelligence was?
No, I don't, you know, without having cleared that first, I don't feel comfortable doing that.
I understand.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't want you to go to jail or nothing.
Thank you, I appreciate that.
I just wanna know, you know, as much as I can, but I don't wanna get anybody in trouble.
One of the things I forget is that Khobar isn't the only, that's not the only attack on a barracks in Saudi Arabia, well, on US forces in Saudi Arabia during that time period.
The office of the program manager of the Saudi National Guard was also bombed and that I do believe it's Al-Qaeda.
So, yeah, go ahead.
But you discount, or, oh, but you don't discount his confession, but you just think maybe he worked with the Hezbollah group on it?
I think so, yeah.
And I know that sounds very strange, but at the time, Bin Laden's, one of Bin Laden's big messages was that we, that they, you know, get rid of the head of the snake first, you know, deal with all the US and all the other folks, and then, and only then do, should they tackle the Sunni-Shia divide?
So, and they actually had members of Al-Qaeda who either were Shia or had been Shia and were kind of doing an interface with other people in London.
It was a really interesting time in the organization, and I think it's possible that there could have been some cooperation.
Well, you know, as we were just talking about, the Iranians were helping arm them in Bosnia.
Yeah.
Well, so let me ask you this, then, as long as we're at it, I'm almost afraid to ask, but there's not anything to this nonsense about Iran really working with Bin Laden's guys in the era of the 9-11 attack, helping the hijackers, or any of this stuff, the way Frank Gaffney and them say, right?
No, not that, not that any of us have seen.
In fact, the way the Iranians acted, have acted afterwards suggests that that's, to me, that they weren't involved.
Even when Bin Laden left Sudan, was kicked out of Sudan to go to Afghanistan in 96, there are multiple accounts of, you know, people in Bin Laden's entourage saying that they were afraid, that they were truly afraid that if the Iranians spotted the plane, because they had to fly over Iranian airspace, that they would be shot down.
So something had changed, I think, in that relationship during that time.
And then after the war in Afghanistan started and all these guys fled to Iran, is it not the case that they were just all rounded up and arrested?
I guess Zarqawi somehow made it to Iraqi Kurdistan, but the rest of them seemed to all be rounded up, right?
Yeah, and there's still debate about the extent to which the Iranians let them kind of do their thing while they were under house arrest.
So I don't know the answer to that one, honestly.
Okay, all right.
And now what about, this is a political question for a debate going on right now, is whether they're going to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization.
I wonder what you think of that.
I think that's the worst possible idea.
I'm sure you're not surprised.
Well, explain your reasoning, if you could, please.
Okay, sure, of course.
The Muslim Brotherhood did start as a militant organization.
Even in its first years, the leadership was conducting acts of terrorism.
But over the decades, the organization pulled back and they became, at various points, either more social-oriented or sort of insurgency-oriented, and occasionally you would see terrorism.
What we see now is that, and I've seen this in multiple countries, when people in the Muslim Brotherhood get frustrated, so we're talking about that radicalization progression, right?
And the Muslim Brotherhood generally sits, it's a big conglomeration, I should say, but it generally sits in that, trying to change the world through proselytization and social action, that kind of stuff.
And they do support defense of Muslims who are being attacked by other people, which is why you saw them very active in supporting Afghans against the Soviets, in supporting Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
They consider that defensive, just like there are Americans who want to support African Christians against other people, right?
There are Americans fighting with the Kurdish YPG right now against ISIS.
Exactly, exactly.
Civilians and special forces, I guess I should say.
Whoever they are, there are people out there fighting, yes.
So what happens now is that generally, and I said it, like I've seen this all over the world, when generally the younger set wants to be, they get frustrated with the political path for whatever, social path and the political path for whatever reason, and they want to start blowing shit up, they actually have to leave the Muslim Brotherhood and form their own terrorist organization.
Like Ahrar al-Sham?
Yes.
See, this is what I think is interesting about the whole Gaffney, Michelle, Pamela Geller, not Michelle Geller, that's somebody else.
The Pamela Geller and all these kooks, Robert Spencer and all them, that actually they hate all Muslims so much, and anything with the word Islam attached to it, actually it's prevented them from being warmongers on Libya and Syria.
Now they were against what I think was a peaceful and democratic revolution in Egypt because it had the word Muslim on it once the Muslim Brotherhood got elected there, but also they sounded like libertarians and anti-war leftists saying, wait, why are we fighting a war for the Libyan veterans of al-Qaeda in Iraq?
And why are we now doing the same thing again in Syria when these guys are bragging to us in the media starting in 2011 and 12 that, yeah, we're veterans of al-Qaeda in Iraq, but now we're here to free Syria from Assad, and why would we be involved in that?
And so you have these horrible bigots who instead of going along with the rest of the neocons and saying, yeah, get rid of Assad because he backs Hezbollah, they're saying, uh-uh, because the replacement, I think correctly, the replacement would be much worse.
Yeah, I mean, obviously there's a big element of realpolitik going on in here, right?
What's better, the enemy you know or the enemy you don't know that might be worse?
The enemy I know, because the enemy I don't know that might be worse is worse because they're sworn loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri.
They've got, this guy Jolani has sworn by it to Zawahiri, the butcher of New York City.
So what else do I need to know?
Well, and these guys have sworn by it to, actually, it's not all about Zawahiri.
There's a divide in Al-Qaeda where the Islamic State split off.
They're a separate organization.
They're rivals, and they're worse.
Well, I was just talking about al-Nusra, Jolani and Nusra, but yeah, so this is interesting.
Go ahead about the Islamic State, because this is another great discussion we can have here.
Yeah, so there's this divide between al-Nusra and the Islamic State, and the Islamic State guys, they split off from al-Qaeda.
So look, we think as scholars that there are sort of generational patterns in terrorist organizations like there are in every other kind of organization, right?
First generation, really thoughtful guys and gals who tend to be married and well-educated and that sort of thing, because they have to come up with the ideology and a plan and all that stuff.
Second generation guys tend to be hangers-on.
They're people who came in after the thing was established, and so this is where you get your young punks who just like to blow shit up.
And then after that, there's been sort of less clear understanding of what happens in an organization after that.
So we certainly saw this with al-Qaeda.
We had that first generation of very considered guys.
Then we have a bunch of guys who came in, and this includes Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was older, but who wanted to like blow up shopping malls and stuff like that.
And then there started to be a debate in al-Qaeda about which way to go.
And bin Laden was the glue that kept them going in the direction of being more strategic in terms of only picking certain types of targets and that sort of thing.
But so when he was killed, I really do think it's because he was killed.
I could be wrong, but that's my analysis.
The ones who were impatient, and now they had a leader in Iraq, they broke off, went their own direction.
And they have a strategy behind what they're doing, and their strategy is to terrorize people into doing what they want.
Yeah, imagine that.
Truly terrorize people by killing everybody, huh?
A decapitation strike that didn't quite work out, even though it was the one that the American people wanted this whole time if we were gonna have decapitation strikes.
This was the guy that we wanted to kill.
But even then, as you're saying, that set Baghdadi free.
Because he still claims bin Laden's legacy, right?
He just doesn't like Zawahiri.
Right, so- He says he's doing what bin Laden would have had him do.
So, but here's what I think is funny though, is just like when America and Saudi helped the, or at least, you know, come on, wink-nudge and gave permission and allowed the military coup in Egypt to cancel the democratic election of the Muslim Brotherhood to parliament and the presidency there, in destroying the Islamic State in Western Iraq and Eastern Syria, in both cases, the USA is still bin Laden and Zawahiri now's indispensable ally, proving him right.
That one, the Americans will never let you come to power elected, you know, peacefully as part of democracy like they say, and we see what happens if it ever happens.
It actually happened, miracle of miracles.
They had elections in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood won, the military canceled it.
Which is obviously, even if it's not true, which I think it is, it sure looks like America is behind that anyway, so it makes him look good there.
And then we're proving that, see, you have to completely bog down and bankrupt the far enemy, the American empire must be destroyed first, otherwise we can never create a caliphate or they're gonna come and bomb it.
So that was his argument all along, is they gotta bog us down and lead us to bankruptcy first.
So in other words, Barack Obama and George Bush and now Donald Trump are still proving these guys right about us, that what they need to do is attack us here in our country and kill so many of us that we finally send a million man army to Iran or something completely stupid to destroy more of their enemies and especially in including us.
Well, and it's even worse than that because these guys are, they're apocalyptic thinkers.
They actually, I mean, if you read Dabiq, you read their magazines and stuff, they actually want the end of the world to come and part of that mythology, it's in Christianity too, and hope I didn't offend anybody with the word mythology, you can call it prophecy, whatever it is, is that there'll be this cataclysmic battle in the Middle East, right?
That's what people believe.
And so that's, and actually the term Armageddon, I learned this on a little trip to Israel many, many, many years ago and it had nothing to do with politics, but it's a valley, Armageddon, and it's where Syria and Israel and all these places come together.
It's very small over there, it's very close.
And so would the ISIS leadership be perfectly happy to have us attack Iran and help the nukes start flying and the end of the world comes?
Well, theoretically, yes.
Practically, I don't know.
I mean, people change their minds about the practicality of things, but it's certainly within their mythology for that to happen.
And I think, so this is where I wanna talk about Obama for a second.
I think, and I'm reading between the lines because I did not serve in the Obama administration, I have no special insight, but from what he has said and from what I've seen them do, I suspect that the caution that the Obama administration showed about putting troops in and doing all these kinds of things was because they were trying to avoid World War III.
It's very touchy over there.
And they were actually trying to get the local powers to take care of things themselves.
And if you think back to, we're gonna use history, you think back to Europe and the end of the huge wars that went on in Europe for so long, it required all the various countries to come together and say, okay, we're not doing this anymore.
Right?
It's a huge shift.
And- I think I agree with that, that he was trying to tread lightly, but the American empire is a 8 million ton gorilla.
It can't tread lightly.
I mean, tread lightly means a billion dollars a year to jihadist suicide bombers in the Timber Sycamore program.
Tread lightly means we're not gonna carpet bomb Damascus, but we are gonna support basically the arms procurement branch of Al-Qaeda in Syria for years.
Yeah, whether we really wanted to support them or not, right?
Yeah, I mean, I really don't, I'm not accusing Obama of saying, hey, hey, hey, we're gonna arm Al-Qaeda, but I am accusing him of knowing all along that they were the ones getting the guns.
Even David Sanger wrote it in the New York Times in 2012.
Hey, everybody, the jihadists are the ones getting all the guns.
And that was in 2012.
And then they kept doing it.
And Obama said, look, the idea we could have an army of moderates that could take on all comers on all sides is just a fantasy.
But he kept arming them anyway.
And he knew that they kept defecting and they kept losing their guns and they kept selling their guns and even their prisoners to Islamic State and al-Nusra.
So at that point, might as well be directly arming them.
I mean, what's the joke?
Where'd they get all those trucks they drove in to Iraq to conquer Mosul?
I mean, the best evidence is that they got them from the State Department.
They had a whole giant article in Public Radio International about how the State Department is working with Toyota to bring all these, and the Saudis, to bring in all these trucks.
Where'd they get them?
So, and I'm not saying that the CIA gave them to Baghdadi.
I'm saying Baghdadi got them from somewhere and somewhere was somebody who got them from the State Department, basically.
And in fact, for that matter, Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, said, well, geez, in fact, I have the clip here.
She said, she was asked, you know what, I'm gonna play the clip because it sounds too crazy.
And then I'll be quiet and I'll let you comment if you want.
But Hillary Clinton, this is from, this is from the very end of February, 2012.
And we now have emails from that period where her aides are saying, hey, look, Al-Qaeda's on our side in this one, boss.
Well, here she is two or three days later after that email being asked on CBS News, why aren't we doing more to help the rebels overthrow Assad?
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.
What do you think of that?
Yeah, I mean, that's the reason for all the endless negotiations among the factions, right?
One of the questions all along is, can you bring al-Nusra in?
Would an Al-Qaeda affiliate actually agree to participate in a government, right?
I'm pretty skeptical of that, but it's certainly been on the discussion board the whole time because when you, you're right, when you fund an insurgency like this, the weapons are gonna go everywhere.
It's one of the oldest rules of warfare.
Never bring anything to a conflict that you don't expect to have turned against you.
Yeah, and John Kerry, of course, is recorded saying that we put massive amounts of arms in there, but of course, the problem is then the other side, they dump in a massive amount of arms for their side too.
So- No, everybody has massive amounts of arms from everywhere.
Yeah.
All right, well, listen, I've already taken up a lot of your time this morning.
I really appreciate it very much, Cynthia.
Sure, thanks.
All right, y'all, that is Cynthia Storer.
She's a former CIA analyst, did 20 years there, and now she teaches at Johns Hopkins University.
That's The Scott Horton Show.
Check out the archives at scotthorton.org and at libertarianinstitute.org slash scotthortonshow.
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Thanks, y'all.