04/10/17 – Reese Erlich on the Syrian gas attack and Trump’s missile launch response – The Scott Horton Show

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Okay.
Introducing Rhys Ehrlich.
He is the author of Inside Syria, and man, I swear I'm going to read that book soon.
It's on my shelf.
I'm waiting to get my Afghanistan book out of the way, and then you're near the top of the pile there.
Make sure you have the paperback edition.
I'm a few years behind.
It's updated.
Oh, no, I don't have the paperback.
Well, you'll definitely have to get it, as well as all your listeners after.
Now on sale, everyone.
The paperback edition of Inside Syria.
Yeah, no, that's fair.
You deserve to be paid for your work.
Hey, Rhys doesn't sit in California and write this stuff.
He goes to the war zone.
He knows all about Syria firsthand, don't you?
Absolutely.
And Iraq, and Iran, and Lebanon, and Jordan.
I've been to all the countries talking to Syrian refugees, and militias, and government supporters across the board.
Cool.
All right.
So what the hell happened in Syria last week?
Is that a general enough question for you?
Well, obviously, the two huge events was the use of chemical weapons, some kind of a nerve agent, possibly sarin, on a civilian population that killed at least 72 people, injured many more.
The Western media, and the US in particular, immediately blamed Assad and his regime, and secondarily the Russians.
And of course, then a few days later, the US bombed the air base, allegedly, where the planes had taken off that dropped the sarin gas.
And we're now in a situation of a serious escalation.
Trump had already escalated the war by sending 500 more troops into Syria, and putting them into combat roles.
And I think this is yet another serious escalation.
All right.
So, yeah, I mean, and the thing is, we've been bombing Eastern Syria, and I guess a little bit of Western Syria here and there, but mostly we've been bombing Eastern Syria since at least 2014.
That's correct.
I was there when that all started.
I was right out the border of northern Iraq and Syria when the Yazidis and Shia Muslims and others who were Christians and so on were fleeing the Islamic State takeover.
And I was there and saw the direct impact of the bombing in both Iraq and Syria, and that serious escalation in the war by Obama.
And your listeners may remember, there's going to be no boots on the ground.
We're going to knock out the Islamic State with bombing.
And sure, I predicted at the time that there would be indeed boots on the ground.
And of course, there are now some 5000 plus in northern Iraq, and Mosul area and so on various parts of Iraq, and 1000 plus in Syria.
Yeah, and as you said, now, regular infantry, not just SOCOM, but Marine Corps infantry on the ground.
Artillery, and artillery defense personnel, combat helicopter pilots, and even if they're telling the truth about 1000 troops in Syria, which I doubt, I think there's more, you've got 1000s more having to back them up in various capacities in the region on aircraft carriers and so on.
And for every helicopter that flies, you have to have a backup crew to rescue them in case it's shot down.
So it's a major military commitment.
Now back to the West here and attacking the Syrian state.
Well, you know, we could rehash the last five years of history and all that.
But let's just focus for a second here on this gas attack, and or whatever it was, and the reaction to it.
First of all, I believe, in your press release that you had sent out, or maybe it was just in your email to me, you mentioned that not only do you know about Syria, but you know a little something about chemical weapons, too.
Is that right?
Yeah, I'm a journalist.
I'm not a scientist, or military man, but I've been studying this issue for quite a few years and have a reasonably good grasp on what's going on.
Okay, so what does your experience tell you about the various claims from any and all sides that you've heard so far about what happened with this attack?
First of all, you can't jump to conclusions.
That's what all sides do in this situation.
But you need experienced, neutral chemical inspectors, weapons inspectors to go in, evaluate, take soil samples, take blood samples from the victims, see where the gas emerged from, what directions it went in, how it was delivered.
And you can only do that with on-the-ground inspections.
And frankly, all sides in this conflict have lied.
They've used chemical weapons at one time or another.
So there's nobody that comes out of this looking clean.
I have to say, however, having said that, that the official Assad Russian version of events has a lot of holes in it.
They claimed that the, so they had a warehouse that had both a chemical weapons lab and conventional weapons stored in it.
If that's the case, then you would expect to have seen a blown up building, secondary explosions, a fire, something like that.
Chemical, the kind of chemical weapons we're talking about here are usually binary.
That means they're stored as two separate components and only combined at the time of impact when they're, for example, fired in an artillery shell.
And separately, you drop a bomb on them if they're stored separately.
They're not going to result in a huge plume of smoke or gas that's going to kill people for miles around.
But the key thing is, if the Russians and the Assad government want to make a case for what happened, they have to show aerial photos of that compound, that building, that warehouse.
So far, a reporter from the Guardian newspaper in London has been on the scene and reports there is no such thing.
There was no bomb that landed on it.
There was no weapons depot.
There was no explosion in the building.
And that leads to very serious doubts about their version of the story.
Yeah, I saw that Guardian report as well.
And he says, well, here's a picture of a warehouse that obviously is empty.
And nothing like that happened here recently.
But I guess I'd like to see another reporter say, yeah, that's true.
There is no other warehouse in question here.
That's right.
You want to make sure I know Al-Qaeda led him there and said, this is the warehouse.
But I don't know that, you know.
No, you're absolutely right.
I want to see other independent reports, ideally chemical weapons experts, but at least independent reporters who can travel in the area.
And apparently only four bombs fell and one of them had the gas.
Yeah.
So now, so let me ask you this.
As far as binary this and that, I mean, is it a safe assumption that we're definitely talking about sarin or even literally definitely chemical weapons here?
Because couldn't it have been a storehouse full of industrial chemicals of one kind or another and they bombed it and then a cloud of poisonous gas killed a bunch of people?
I mean, that could happen.
Well, it's not clear that it's sarin, but there was some kind of nerve agent gas that you wouldn't get industrial chemicals causing your pupils to dilate and foam at the mouth and that sort of thing.
I just actually witnessed chemical weapons, just industrial chemical effects when they burned, for example, by accident and fires.
And it looks nothing like this.
The effects of nerve agents are very specific and it may or may not have been sarin.
The Turkish medical authorities are now saying that in the patients that they examined who were brought from Idlib province into Turkey, they're saying it was sarin.
That's the only medical reports we've seen.
Again, we need additional medical reports from verified parties who don't have a stake in political propaganda.
But so it's possible it was other kinds of nerve agents.
But this was not a result, besides which there were no chemical, I mean, chemical explosions or you'd see some kind of results of that.
If there was a toxic chemicals that blew up, you'd see some burned buildings.
Apparently, they certainly ought to be able to prove it, if not by now, any day now.
Yeah, that was really what happened.
I mean, that's the whole thing about it, right?
Every accusation here is supportable, right?
I mean, they're saying you mentioned the four bombs and they're saying, well, one of them was the gas bomb.
And then the pictures I saw, the same Guardian report, I think, was, yeah, here's the small crater in the street.
It's kind of out here in the middle of this industrial district somewhere.
Well, that is possible.
If you have a, you know, it's a binary bomb.
It lands, it explodes, the gas, the two components combine and let off a gas and the wind carries the gas.
So that's plausible.
Again, I'm not saying that is for sure what happened, but it's plausible.
And then, and then just kind of blew into town.
I mean, they say there was some kind of all this smoke, just sort of this fog settled over the whole village and that kind of, except there doesn't seem to be any pictures of that.
Right.
All we see are the pictures of people in the hospital and so on.
I mean, the other side of this argument is, you know, all the, with the exception of the Guardian report, much of the information we're getting is from the rebels.
The rebels in that particular part of Syria are Al-Qaeda affiliate.
And there's another group called Ahrar al-Sham, which is another extremist group calling for an Islamic caliphate.
These folks are liars.
Is it possible that they would kill their own people in order to discredit Assad and have political purpose?
Yeah, it certainly is.
Is it possible there was some kind of an accident that they were using chemical weapons?
Not likely, but it's conceivable.
And all of the White Helmets reports and the videos, especially the first day of people and horrible pictures of women and children in hospitals and so on, were taken by pro rebel groups of one kind or another.
So again, you got to remain skeptical.
Yeah, I saw one thing that Bernard at Moon of Alabama pointed out, that all the pictures are from the hospitals and the rescue centers and so forth.
There don't seem to be any pictures of bodies where they were discovered, where people had died because the poisonous cloud of gas had come and snuck up on them.
And there they are at their kitchen table or anything like that.
You know, I've seen some photos of people lying in the street.
Oh, yeah.
Now, yeah, I have.
Now, whether that, again, are these doctor photos, they look real, but you'd want to delve into that.
But yeah, I have seen some, not just from the hospital.
And I guess some criticism was that, well, geez, the White Helmets are touching these people with their bare hands.
And so that's, you know, obviously.
Well, some people died.
So at least they allege that some of the rescue workers who arrived on the scene started to help people and they indeed got contaminated.
Really?
Yeah, that's what they again.
That's the assertion.
Yeah.
Well, and again, every one of these assertions is testable, right?
None of these are things that they say, well, you know, yeah, it happened.
But geez, I'm not sure how it could demonstrate it to you.
Well, hey, I mean, virtually all of these things are demonstrable, assuming that there's an official investigation of any kind, which actually is a good question.
Who all is investigating this thing?
At this point, nobody.
And the Assad government, first of all, they don't control the area.
So you'd have to get the permission from the rebel groups in order to send in U.N. inspectors.
Frankly, I doubt that we're going to see an independent investigation.
I really hope that we do.
But it's not in the interest of the Trump administration or its allies to have an independent investigation going there and raise any questions about the U.S. version.
I mean, we've now we the United States government have now committed to a serious escalation of the war.
And we don't want any messy facts getting in the way of just, by example, Obama's version of what happened in 2013 in Al-Ghouta, where the last famous chemical attack was bogus from beginning to end.
And I detail that in my book.
And so you don't want independent investigations that could muddy the waters.
To clarify that.
And again, I'm sorry, I haven't read the book yet.
I really want to.
I see it every time I go into my living room.
There's insights here.
In your reporting, do I hear you right that you're saying that your reporting coincides with or verifies Seymour Hersh's claims?
No.
What I say is that the U.S. never proved its version of events.
There were too many holes in the story, including where the missiles were fired from that contained the gas.
On the other hand, Assad never proved his version either.
And unfortunately, I have the greatest respect for Seymour Hersh.
And I indeed quote him in the book.
But his definitive article in the London Review of Books was very thin on this question, in my opinion.
The conclusion I reach is that there was not enough information at that time to know the source of it.
There was a sarin gas attack.
It did kill hundreds of people, not the 1,400 claimed by the U.S.
There was a history earlier that year of rebel groups, people that we now know as the Islamic State, who did indeed use chemical weapons, but on a much, sarin gas specifically, but on a much smaller scale.
And it was used against Assad's troops.
He's made a hell of a great company out of it.
And there are thousands of satisfied customers who agree with me, too.
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Well, didn't much of Hersh's case come down to really refuting the claim that these rockets were fired from, and I guess it was just the one rocket that was actually the sarin rocket, that they were fired from this base nine kilometers away.
And then the rocket scientists from MIT backed up Hersh and said, there's no way this rocket flew that far.
It must have been launched from here, here, or here.
And that means rebel territory.
That's right.
And actually, it was the scientists who did that independently in the Hersh investigation.
But what Hersh asserted was that the sarin had been transported into the Al-Ghouta area and used by the rebels.
The problem is, sarin is a very volatile compound.
As I mentioned before, it's binary.
It has to be stored separately.
And it's not something that you can mix in the field.
And to have that quantity of sarin be constructed or assembled in an area that was surrounded by, almost completely surrounded by Assad's troops, it would have been extremely difficult and extremely dangerous for anybody doing it.
Whereas if you have a government or army facility that can safeguard these separate components and then put them into the shell and then fire them, it's much more likely that it's done by a large organized military force.
And that's what pointed to Assad in that case.
But again, I did not reach a conclusion as to who did it, because there are still enough questions on the versions of both sides.
Well, and then, as we learned a year ago, sorry, audience, to keep repeating myself, Jeffrey Goldberg and his, or yeah, Jeffrey Goldberg and his exit interview with Barack Obama in the Atlantic, even though the article begins with, oh, yeah, Assad did it.
And everybody knows that.
Halfway down in the article, we find that during Obama's morning briefing by the CIA, I guess, in late August or early September 2013, that the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, broke in and interrupted and said, basically, Miss Prez, I won't stand by this.
It is not a slam dunk.
You're out on a limb, pal, and I'm not going to hold it up for you, is what he really said.
That's correct.
And it's going to be interesting to see if we, months from now, we hear similar reports out of the Trump White House.
Yeah, man, that's something else.
But in any case, whether or not Assad was responsible for this most recent use of chemical weapons, that's no excuse for U.S. military action.
The U.S. striking, bombing Syria, escalating the war in northern Syria will make the situation 10 times worse.
As bad as the use of chemical weapons is, U.S. military intervention is not going to solve the problem.
OK, but 10 is a lot.
Why do you say 10 times worse?
Well, because the number of the U.S. participation in the war, along with its allies, has prolonged the war and resulted in far more deaths.
We're already seeing an uptick in civilian deaths in both Iraq and in Syria.
In the last month, that is, of March of this year, there were already 1,000 civilian deaths caused by U.S. airstrikes.
A huge increase over previous months under Obama.
And that's because, basically, the Trump administration has given the green light to the military to go after these guys in Syria.
It's after the Islamic State, mainly.
And when you do that, you increase the likelihood of civilian casualties.
And so over time, as horrific as these chemical attacks are, we're talking about in the hundreds, with the U.S., we're already talking in the thousands.
Oh, man.
So now, what do you think about, what do you make of the different signals coming out of the administration about going ahead and pushing for regime change?
I guess yesterday, Nikki Haley was saying, yeah, it's on, the ambassador of the U.N.
And then, but Rex Tillerson said, no, first regime change in Raqqa, then regime change in Damascus.
And this is a big discrepancy.
Yes.
Well, I think there's a fierce debate, as you point out, within not only the cabinet, but within the ruling elite in the U.S.
You know, it was interesting that these Democratic war hawks were all beating the drums and calling Trump, he's finally presidential because he bombs and kills people.
Rather ironic.
And yes, I think there's some in the cabinet who believe that this should be a one-off warning that the Russians will take it seriously, that this will have an impact.
And there's others who say, no, now's our chance to really go after the, play the long game, get rid of Assad, bring in a pro-U.S. regime.
That's fantasy land.
It ain't going to work.
But that's what they believe.
And the danger of these kind of military strikes is you've now kind of set the bar that says, well, now what happens if Assad engages in horrific killing of civilians with conventional weapons, like happened in Aleppo, for example, in the fight over Aleppo last year?
Is that OK?
Because it's not chemical weapons?
Did the Trump administration give a green light to Assad to engage in civilian deaths by conventional weapons?
Or the other side is going to argue, we have to stop him from doing that, too.
So we need more airstrikes.
And sooner or later, you're going to kill some Russians or there's going to be a conflict in the air with Russians.
And as I mentioned elsewhere, it seriously increases the chance of the Israelis attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Your listeners should kind of keep their eyes peeled for that possibility, because Trump has generally been backing Israel on all questions related to the Palestinians.
They would love to see Israel knock out Hezbollah, which is an ally of Assad and has played a key role in fighting in Syria.
And from the standpoint of Israelis, they think that Hezbollah has been stretched thin by fighting in Syria and now might have a chance to go back and avenge their loss in the war that took place in 2006.
So by this bombing and generally escalating the war, Trump has really opened up the possibility for much wider conflicts in the area.
Man.
So, yeah, I was going to say, so what's the Israeli motive, though?
I mean, I know they hate and fear Hezbollah and they hit him in Syria here and there.
Um, but you're saying the motive is only just the opportunity that basically they want to attack Hezbollah all day, every day, no matter what.
And now is a chance for them to do it.
Yeah.
Israel has for a long time has always blamed somebody else for the lack of problems with the Palestinians.
So for years they blamed Saddam Hussein and Jordan for a while and Iran now.
There's always somebody on the outside that is supporting Israel's enemies that are the problem.
It's never the fact that the Israelis have failed to negotiate with the Palestinians for a two state solution and negotiating peace treaties with its neighbors.
So in this context, they see now Hezbollah and Iran are the new boogeyman.
And Hezbollah is indeed spread thin.
Um, if Israel attacked, they would have to bring back a lot of their troops from Syria to fight on the ground in southern Lebanon.
And the war rooms in Israel are actively considering that.
Whether they actually do it, that's another question that has to do with overall geopolitics.
And they'd have to get the okie doke from the Trump administration for something like that.
Yeah.
So we'll see.
So now on regime change.
I mean, of course, there's all these ridiculous narratives in the media about how poor Syrians Barack Obama just never lifted a finger to intervene in their society one bit for eight years long.
Isn't that sad for them?
And yet, despite all that, I mean, the real answer is, though, he did refrain from carpet bombing Damascus and forcing Assad out of power and outright giving the throne to Ayman al-Zawahiri or his deputy Jelani there.
So I guess that's good, you know, relatively speaking.
But so but Reese, I mean, are they going to double down on this now?
In fact, let me refine this question a little bit and you could maybe start with small and get bigger on it.
Last fall, The Washington Post ran two stories saying, well, Obama told Jay Sock to basically go ahead and get a jump start on what was presumed to be Trump's policy back off Assad and go ahead and start attacking al-Qaeda as well as the Islamic State there.
So, hey, OK, that's interesting, you know, but they didn't really mention the role of the CIA and whether or not they were being called off from their support of the jihadis or not.
And so then there were a couple of reports, though, one in Reuters that said, well, we temporarily suspended some aid because actually the jihadists came and stole it all at once.
And that's embarrassing for us.
So we don't want to we don't want it to look too bad.
So we're going to shut down aid for a little while.
But mind you, no change in policy.
This doesn't represent, you know, a change of the presidency or anything like that.
This is strictly a tactical thing on the CIA level locally.
And don't worry, it's all going to come back again soon.
And then it seemed like there was a thing in Al Jazeera that was saying, yeah, it's already on again, but it was really based more on rebel sources than CIA ones.
But so I guess I wonder, you know, if I can try to wrap this up.
What do you know of or assume or speculate is the current role of the CIA in this program?
Like, how active are they in backing Arar al-Sham and friends and therefore al-Qaeda?
And is the objective now back toward real regime change in Damascus?
Or is it still the let's just go ahead and let both sides bleed to death and keep fighting and fighting and fighting?
Or is there a strategy at all?
Is there a strategy at all or what the hell is going on?
Well, again, as I pointed out in my book, Inside Syria, the Obama administration did indeed intervene in Syria very early on.
It didn't do as much or as successfully as some hawks wanted them to.
But the CIA and the Pentagon spent billions of dollars on training so-called moderate rebels, pro-U.S. rebels who have no popular support.
And that's the that policy continued initially under Trump for the first few weeks.
And that's why we saw when Trump's people announced and Haley and so on announced that they were basically recognizing Assad or they were recognizing the reality that he wasn't going to be out of power anytime soon.
That was simply a formal announcement of what Obama's policies had been for a number of years.
No surprise there.
What that always has included under Obama and as far as I know, under Trump as well, is continued Pentagon and CIA efforts to find rebel groups who are friendly to the U.S. who would, should Assad fall, be able to come to power.
And they've not been able to do so because the Syrian people are not interested in replacing one dictator with a pro-U.S. dictator.
They've seen, as some activists in Damascus told me during one of my trips, I said, do you want U.S. troops here to help bring democracy to Syria?
And they said, oh, are you going to bring democracy to us like you brought to Afghanistan or like you brought to Iraq?
You know, they're not stupid.
They know that the arguments the U.S. makes are phony and that, in fact, what they want is pro-U.S., pro-U.S. oil company, pro-U.S. military bases, governments, as the U.S. tried to do in Libya and failed, as it tried to do in Iraq and failed and so on.
So the, I think the Trump administration will likely continue both the overt military intervention that we know of, along with the covert efforts.
And the problem was that, particularly as of December, when Aleppo fell and became under the control of, the entire city of Aleppo became under the control of the government, that demoralized a number of the rebel groups, including the al-Qaeda affiliate, including Arar al-Sham and others.
And they've had serious setbacks politically as well as militarily.
So the U.S., that's made it even more difficult for the U.S. to find allies.
And when they do, they tend to fight with those two extremist groups.
And so it's very hard to sort out and to find an independent presence of some so-called moderate groups versus the extremists.
They're all in alliance together against Assad.
And by the way, speaking of that, you know, I'm always, I mean, whatever, I'm just talking, right?
What can I do?
It's just language.
But I'm always, I guess I admit maybe that sometimes it's just sort of hyperbolic.
I always just say, oh, the mythical moderates, the mythical moderates, they're really nothing but the arms and CIA money procurement branch of al-Qaeda there.
That's all they are, is pretended moderates, because that's how you relate with the West and get your work done.
But meanwhile, the al-Nusra Front and their buddies in Arar al-Sham, they completely dominate the rebellion.
And they always have.
Is that too hyperbolic?
Or that's actually pretty much what you're saying?
No, I think the essence of what you're saying is true.
The U.S. tries and tried to train what they call moderates.
By the way, if you hear the term moderate in the Middle East, that means pro-U.S.
That's for language purposes.
And they've never had a significant military presence from a number of years now.
The extremist groups like the Islamic State and what used to be al-Nusra, by the way, they've split into two groups and they have new names now, but we'll just call them the al-Qaeda affiliate.
They have always had stronger military presence.
They're funded by Turkey at one point and by Saudi Arabia.
But it's interesting, some of the groups that have shown up in Astana in the peace talks sponsored by Russia and Iran, some of the pro-Turkish and pro-Saudi or Saudi group backed, shall I say, and Turkish backed group showed up in the peace conference reflecting war wariness by both Turkey and Syria, I'm sorry, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
And it's an effort to see if they could reach some kind of political settlement, which so far has gone nowhere.
All right, now, I'm sorry, let me ask one last thing here before I let you go, Rhys.
The Sunnis.
There's this former CIA officer that I don't like, man, who I see on TV sometimes.
And anyway, he was saying that, oh, yeah, no, see what's going on here is Assad wants to go ahead and ethnically cleanse or sectarianly cleanse, however you say it, all the Sunnis and kick them all into Turkey.
And I thought, well, geez, that's funny, because I heard that.
Yeah, you know, it's true that it's a minority run coalition type of a dictatorship there in a country that's super majority 70 percent, right?
Sunni Arab.
And yet that at least a plurality or maybe even a majority of the Sunni Arab support the state.
And you're saying, well, these groups have no popular support.
Can you give me a number?
Do you have a way to measure this?
Well, first of all, I don't think that what the CIA guy saying is accurate.
Assad, you can't purge 70 or 80 percent of the population and force them out of the country.
Now, what is the case?
Or wait, in fact, on that specific point, have you seen any evidence of that?
Really?
I mean, is there any evidence that he's pushing, trying to encourage Sunni Arabs to flee north out of the state?
I tell you what does happen, which is there in the areas where rebel groups control.
It's a free fire zone.
It's total war.
And in fact, if not in rhetoric, the Assad government says it's OK to kill civilians living in Idlib, for example, because they're living in they haven't rebelled against the Islamic State or the Al-Qaeda folks or whoever it is that's running things in that particular part of the country.
And that's why if Assad did use chemical weapons, that would be the political justification for it.
And for sure, it's the justification for the use of heavy use of conventional weapons.
So I don't think it's ethnic cleansing.
I think it's a political it's a belief that if you're living in the rebel area, you're not doing something to rebel against them.
We're going to bomb the hell out of you and crush your morale and force you back into Syria that we control.
So, yeah, it's it's really an inclusive thing.
He's trying to regain control over them, not just expelled.
Yeah, I don't think he's right.
And in his rhetoric, he believes he has the support of most Sunnis as well as the other minorities.
I believe the country is deep.
No, I think the country is deeply divided.
If there's somehow you could wave a magic wand and all the Syrians in exile and the refugees could return and have free and fair elections, I think Assad would lose.
But there's no way of proving that.
And, of course, what about the Baathist regime?
Would it lose?
Well, probably the Baathist regime.
There might be some individuals from the regime who are not seen as as guilty as others.
But you'd have to have some kind of a coalition, a new government of civil society, activists of non-extremist political Islamist groups.
Well, I didn't really ask that.
I guess I mean, a new government in the sense like when the Canadians get a new government or like a whole new government?
Well, you know, it depends on what happens militarily between now and then.
But I think it is possible to have a politically negotiated government that would be significantly different from the one they have now, but without being a puppet of the U.S. or anyone else.
And then so but I've read reports, though, that say that, hey, the majority of the army are Sunni Arabs.
Well, yeah, it is not Sunni versus Shia.
That's one of the myths spread largely by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia and others.
The Alawites, Assad and his family are Alawites and which split from Shia Islam hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
So it's not Shia versus Sunni.
And Iran is not allied with Assad because of religious reasons.
He's a secular dictator.
In fact, they have a lot of criticisms of him for that reason.
This is about geopolitics and political alliances.
Assad, Iran, Russia, all of whom have different religious views, are united in what they see as an effort to keep in power a government that's being attacked by the United States.
That's what they have in common.
And religion is used to rally the troops on all sides, including, by the way, Assad's people spread all kinds of nasty rumors and call Sunnis nasty names while at the same time proclaiming that they're all brother.
All right.
I'm sorry I'm running so late.
I got to go.
But thank you so much for coming back on the show, Reese.
It's really good to talk to you again.
My pleasure.
I'd love to get the URL when it's up online.
Yeah, it'll be at Libertarian Institute dot org slash Scott Horton show and it's Scott Horton dot org slash interviews.
And it should be and probably tonight or tomorrow night.
OK, and I hope people can post my Web page, too.
Absolutely.
I was going to say it's Reese Ehrlich dot com, right?
That's correct.
I'm sorry, I'm not looking at it, but that was my that's exactly what it is.
OK, great.
Reese Ehrlich dot com.
And the latest book is inside Syria now out in paperback.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Scott.
Bye bye.
All right, y'all.
Scott Horton dot org Libertarian Institute dot org Scott Horton show on Twitter.
You hate government.
One of them libertarian types.
Maybe you just can't stand the president.
Gun grabbers are warmongers.
Me, too.
That's why I invented Liberty Stickers dot com.
Well, Rick owns it now, and I didn't make up all of them.
But still, if you're driving around, I want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are.
There's only one place to go.
Liberty Stickers dot 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.
Liberty Stickers dot com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Hey, all Scott here.
On average, how much do you think these interviews are worth to you?
Of course, I've never charged for my archives in a dozen years of doing this, and I'm not about to start.
But at Patreon dot com slash Scott Horton Show, you can name your own price to help support and make sure there's still new interviews to give away.
So what do you think?
Two bits?
A buck and a half?
They're usually about 80 interviews per month, I guess.
So take that into account.
You can also cap the amount you'd be willing to spend in case things get out of hand around here.
That's Patreon dot com slash Scott Horton Show.
And thanks, y'all.