Adam Johnson from FAIR discusses his recent articles about biased media coverage of the anniversary of the 1967 war and its aftermath for the Palestinians, as well as feigned media amnesia of previous intervention every time the U.S. attacks national or allied forces in Syria.
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Alright, y'all.
Introducing Adam Johnson from FAIR.
That's Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
And hopefully you guys follow him on Twitter.
Great stuff there all the time.
And at FAIR.org.
Welcome back to the show, Adam.
How are you, man?
How you doing, Scott?
I'm doing good, man.
Great to talk to you again.
Listen, you do really great work.
I always liked FAIR, even before you worked there.
Always, you know, just solid media analysis.
It's the inverse of the old Malcolm X quote.
If you stand for nothing, you'll fall for anything.
I don't always agree with where you guys are necessarily coming from on everything.
But the fact that you do have principles sure does work.
Because you don't fall for a damn thing over there, I don't think.
Even when it's, you know, in a left interest to believe a certain bad thing about the right or whatever.
You guys don't fall for it unless it's actually true.
Then it's true.
That's different.
And so I always appreciate that about the entire organization and all of your great work there as well.
Good stuff.
Yeah, thanks.
Well, yeah, we're decidedly left-wing.
But we're not partisan.
I think that's kind of the difference.
That's exactly what I'm trying to say in way too many words here.
No, it's cool.
Yeah.
All right.
So listen, I want to talk to you about a few different things that you wrote here.
First of all, can we talk about the 1967 war and the 50th anniversary there?
You did a great little piece here at, again, FAIR.org.
It's called on—oh, pop-up ad— On 50th Anniversary of Israeli Occupation, Palestinian Opinions Largely Ignored.
And it's really worse than that.
I remember you highlighting this on Twitter the other day where the poor Israelis, they've been having to deal with the consequence of conquering the West Bank ever since then.
That was the New York Times take on it, I guess.
Yeah, the ratio of voices that we counted was 23 to 2.
23 either pro-Israel or Israeli voices versus two Palestinian or pro-Palestinian.
And then there was like two or three that were sort of in the middle, kind of ambiguous.
So the coverage of the Six-Day War, which was the war in which Israel, for those that don't know, captured the West Bank, which religious radicals in Israel were called Judea and Samaria, and the Sinai as well as Gaza, which is, of course, closer to Egypt.
So they gave Sinai up to the Egyptians and then kept the West Bank and Gaza, and that's been a major source of tension.
So the 50th anniversary, which is effectively the 50th anniversary of the occupation of Palestine, the direct military occupation, as opposed to the Nakba, which was, for lack of a better word, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians off in certain cities, in certain areas within Israel proper, is considered a day of – it's called the setback in Palestine.
It's considered a major defeat for the cause of Palestinian liberation.
So I just went by and looked at whose voices they were highlighting, and they highlighted the voices that supported, I guess, the more pro-Israel bent, largely because America, obviously, is a major ally with Israel and was instrumental to the creation of Israel.
And, you know, I just pointed out that I didn't think that was particularly fair.
It's rare that you get the Palestinian perspective in general.
It's, I think, more rare when you have these anniversaries, especially since it was considered good for Israel.
It's considered a kind of – the capturing of Jerusalem is considered, I think, by people who are more religious Zionists considered a major victory.
And obviously there's still 300,000 Palestinians still in Israel occupied – or I'm sorry, in Jerusalem occupied by Israel.
So, yeah, I don't know.
It's pretty much par for the course of the coverage of Israel.
I think the ratio of 23 to 2 or 23 to 3 is about normal.
You know, you'll get the token Palestinian voice now.
And then the New York Times will – I wrote an article a few months ago about the New York Times not having any pro-BDS campaign, the Boycott, Divest, Sanction Israel, and their coverage for, I think, two and a half years.
They had people who defended the principle of people's right to practice BDS but not any BDS opponents.
And then I think a month after we published that, they did publish a pro-BDS piece.
I don't think it was necessarily related at all.
So, you know, two and a half years is a pretty long spell.
Meanwhile, of course, they have very anti-BDS writers as a matter of course, Bret Stephens, Roger Cohen, Thomas Friedman, and Nicholas Kristof.
So, you know, like I said, it's pretty much par for the course.
Yeah.
Well, so, I mean, that's really the bottom line that I want to highlight is that when it's par for the course, it's a really long course.
And we've been on it for a long, long time here.
And it's not just a biased narrative, right?
At this point, this is straight Orwellian double think all the time about how the Palestinians are the subject people there and yet somehow they're the threat.
They're the conquered.
They're the occupied.
And yet somehow they're the terrorists.
They're the ones who the Israelis have to defend themselves from all the time.
And the only way that that narrative can be successful, because it's not just that it's biased.
We only hear their side of the story.
Their side of the story is based on a lot of serious untruths.
And it's only by blocking out the Palestinians version of the story that like, hey, we still live here and we're under a military occupation that they can go on.
You know, it's to me.
Yeah.
I mean, everything, everything Israel does vis-a-vis the Palestinians is is ripped off directly from the playbook of the United States.
The in the in our in the way in which white settlers in the United States dealt with native populations.
It's it's I think a longer timeline.
But, you know, the idea of acting like you're you're negotiating peace and good faith while colonizing land is something that we you know, my ancestors and I assume yours perfected.
They do that.
You know, this idea of the peace process in Israel while settlements skyrocket.
At the beginning of the Obama administration, there was roughly 100000 settlers in the West Bank.
The number is almost close to a million now.
Meanwhile, they're supposed to supposedly a peace process, which, of course, is a joke.
The peace process and the two state solution are marketing mantras.
They're not serious things that anyone takes seriously.
Palestine right now looks like, you know, Swiss cheese.
It's divided up with remakes, you know, McMansions and homes that look like what you'd see in the suburbs of Phoenix or Las Vegas.
They're not going anywhere.
Everybody knows they're not going anywhere.
And this, again, this was a similar tactic to what to what white settlers did for hundreds of years in the United States.
Act like you're negotiating in good faith.
And then meanwhile, you're settling their land.
And then you say, oh, no.
Well, we're already here.
You guys have to go.
So that's what that's what's happening to the Palestinians.
Maybe a slightly slower timescale, but it's it's it's what's it's what's going on.
So the I think that's a real important metaphor or analogy, too, because I don't know if it's true anymore this day and age, Adam.
But at least it seemed like in my lifetime, people largely regret that, that the Indians were treated so unfairly.
I mean, yeah, of course, we had to steal the continent, etc.
We I mean, my family all came here after 1900.
But anyway, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Had to be done.
And too many Europeans come in and no way to stop them.
But she's we didn't really have to give them smallpox and hunt them all down.
You know, the California anyway, the million examples of the different wars and some of the atrocities.
Yeah.
And so but that's the whole thing is if people made that metaphor a lot more often and said, yeah, exactly.
What's going on here is that the Israelis are basically the whites and the Palestinians are the Indians.
And they're being treated absolutely unfairly and including reservations.
And and, yeah, I mean, it's not my take their side.
See it because they could understand that because they know the history of the Americas.
It's you know, it's not a one to one comparison.
There are obviously differences, namely that that Jews, Jews were a persecuted, you know, minority in a lot of Europe.
And a lot of people, a lot of people came to Israel, especially people that I've met went to Israel because they actually really had nowhere else to go.
And I and I. That's true for America, too.
That was also true of America.
It doesn't really matter.
But even from the Palestinians perspective, they don't really care.
But it's kind of a rolls downhill thing.
Right.
Europe, Europe hates its Jews.
It kills its Jews.
It perjures Jews and then sends them off.
You know, it says, oh, well, you know, they can all go to the Arab lands where where, you know, they themselves end up becoming the Arabs become the victim.
So it's kind of a a goes downhill kind of thing.
And it's something that I think is is part of a broader conversation, how we manage that situation.
But from a media critic, from a critical media perspective, the way in which people talk about Israel and Palestine is is very far removed from what's really going on there.
And frankly, it's quite to the right of how the conversation takes place in Israel itself.
I don't know.
You know, you've had the opportunity to go there.
But if you ever go to Israel, the way it's talked about there is, I think, a little bit more honest than it is here.
And I think it is because, you know, there's a huge contingent of Christian Zionists in this country that that support Israel in a very, I think, perverse way.
They support it because it's necessary for it's a necessary antecedent to the end times.
You know, I grew up in Pastor Higgy's church, John Higgy in San Antonio.
Oh, that's a whole interview we're going to have to do sometime.
And, you know, this is very common, right?
This kind of end times prophecy.
So, you know, you have a very radical contingent of of of of Christian conservatives who view Palestinians as as acting.
And I think Arabs in general, obviously, it translates to other anti-Muslim bias that they're that they're sort of in the way of this prophecy and that they are sullying the purity of Jews in the state of Israel.
And so, you know, it's it's a it's a there's propaganda coming from all sides.
You know, a lot of people, I think the way people talk about Israel, I think, especially on no offense, but a lot of the kind of libertarian right, for lack of a better word.
I think they kind of take on a kind of tail wagging the dog mentality that Israel somehow influences America unduly.
Whereas I as a leftist, I take a more Chomsky model, which says that Israel is while it does have some undue influence in certain capacities, it's fundamentally a client state of the United States.
And that it and that it doesn't it's not as if it's not as if Israel didn't exist.
The US would be this benevolent, you know, egalitarian farming country.
Right.
We would still be an empire.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, that's kind of the argument at absurd.
And but the real truth is it's both.
Right.
I mean, America is an empire.
Empire.
We were an empire long before there was in Israel.
Well, but that's the whole thing, right?
That's why Israel has an interest in maintaining a massive influence operation inside America is because America is an empire and they need us.
In fact, Phil Weiss has great quotes from Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz both saying, hey, I don't care whether it's China or whether it's El Salvador or whether it's anything.
Our goal is to keep America engaged in the world no matter what, so that it's available for Israel if we need it.
And those are two major founders of the neoconservative movement.
So that doesn't mean that they created the empire, but that means that they're very clear about why they're interested in maintaining it at all costs.
Yeah, I think it's a it's a it's a very mutually beneficial relationship for the people who are the the I would argue the the power within those respective countries.
It's not very advantageous to probably you and I, but to the U.S. war machine.
I mean, for example, the U.S. is dealers for sure.
Right.
I'll give you an example.
The U.S. gives three and a half to four billion dollars a year.
There's always a supplemental package.
It comes out to a four billion dollars a year in arms to Israel.
And people say, oh, that's you know, that's giving four billion dollars to Israel.
That's true.
And those are four billion dollars in weapons that Israel doesn't have to buy.
But what you know, it's oftentimes buried is that 75 percent of that money has to be spent on American weapons manufacturers by law.
So it's it's it's both a handout to Israel and also a handout to the weapons manufacturers stateside.
And all that money goes to the same, you know, three or four weapons contractors.
So it's it's it's a mutually beneficial relationship that that I think is is, you know, I don't think that tailback the dog at the same time.
I think that I think that it is true that there are there are there is a deep seated ideology about the about the longevity of Israel.
That does that does exist, I think, somewhat separate from that broader imperial framework.
But, you know, again, that's also exist in a lot of Christian threads as well.
Right.
There you know, there's there was more Zionist at Cornerstone Church on a Sunday morning than there is probably in the totality of of the entire county of Bexar in Texas.
Well, so now back to the narrative about the occupation there, because and the Christian Zionism part of it is something that I don't pay nearly enough attention to.
I guess I've done some interviews about that in the past.
So I'd love to talk to you all about especially growing up in the Cornerstone Church.
That just blows my mind.
Very interesting.
But so just the overall thing where you grab the average American off the street, if they know anything about Israel at all, it's poor little Israel.
The Muslims are always trying to kill him in this kind of very basic sort of thing.
And under that sort of basic presumption, which I believe most Americans, you know, that's basically what they think they understand about it.
The BDS movement that you mentioned there, it sounds horrible.
What is this whole terrible anti-Semitic thing of boycotting the Jewish country in the world?
I mean, these horrible Nazis and Islamist extremists ever leave these poor people alone.
And boy, I mean, if you start with fake premise number one, then a conclusion to their sounds pretty reasonable.
Sounds pretty obvious.
In fact, you know, I follow Roseanne Barr on Twitter.
You know, that's what she thinks.
So and it's again, if you if you beg the question, start with the false premise, then I mean, look, most people are seeing that way, right?
Most people.
I mean, there's a broader Islamophobia industry that is that is heavily that overlaps heavily with with, I think, Zionist propaganda.
You know, things like things like memory are run by run by Israelis.
Things like site, which is the terrorist overwatch group, is run by a former Israeli intelligence officer named Rita Katz.
There is a obviously Sheldon Adelson funds the the a lot of the terrorism monitoring groups, the one that is working with Google and Facebook.
And, you know, this is why you get these kind of goofy scenarios where where groups like Hezbollah are lumped in with groups like ISIS, despite that being kind of ridiculous.
Right.
And so there is a I do think there's yeah, there's there's a broader interest in conflating the Palestinian liberation cause with like Muslims in general.
I think this is how most probably most Americans perceive that.
When I go home and have the obligatory arguments with my conservative relatives, they don't know the difference between Sunni, Shia, Hezbollah, Hamas.
They don't really care.
They're all just a bunch of brown people.
They're all mindlessly anti-Semitic and anti-American.
And there isn't any kind of rhyme or reason to that.
And the idea of a Palestinian liberation is not something that or the idea of occupied Palestine is something most people don't even know.
Right.
You know how I didn't know growing up.
Right.
And until I actually went there and went to Palestine, I didn't actually have a sense of the scope of it because you're just not really exposed to that narrative.
You're exposed to a there's sort of two narratives.
There's the right wing narrative of the of the of the permanently anti-Semitic, angry Muslim who just hates Jews for the sake of hating them and has no legitimate grievance.
And then there's the kind of liberal, I sort of say, John Stewart narrative of of, oh, they've been fighting for 5000 years.
This is a common trope you hear.
Right.
When, of course, that's not true.
They've been fighting for for, you know, 70 years because that's when that's when that's when the settler colonization began.
Now, of course, there was always, you know, sectarian dustups before that.
It certainly wasn't perfect, but there was there was certainly not this level of tension and violence until the there they began settling the Zionist colonies in the in the late 19th century and then expedited in the 1930s and 40s.
So, you know, it's it's hard for people to parse.
You know, people sympathize more with with American, you know, with with Western Jews, European Jews, American Jews than they would with Arabs.
You know, I personally have more Jewish friends and people who have gone to Israel and have relatives in Israel than I do Palestinians.
So it becomes kind of abstract.
You know, they're obviously they speak English.
You know, Palestinians mostly speak English, too, but not, you know, not the same way.
There's not as much travel between the two countries.
There's not as much.
Obviously, you barely have any Palestinian voices in American media where you where you do have very pro Israel voices in U.S. media.
So it's it's it's a hard thing to really unpack because there is a lot of anti-Semitism in this world.
There's a lot of, I think, anti-Semitism, frankly, in a lot of the criticisms of Israel that I think are hard to kind of divorce.
Maybe not a lot, but I think it's a sizable amount.
When it goes back to this tail wagging the dog theory, there's there's a certain point where I do think you cross from from Israel's influence to a kind of, you know, the Jews are running the government way of looking at things.
So, you know, as far as BDS goes, it's a hard thing to get across to people about why people do why people do support BDS.
And of course, the reason is because they don't have any other choice.
There's really no other mechanism to change Israel's behavior than BDS.
The U.N. can't do it because they have an automatic veto with the U.S. Obviously, the U.S. isn't going to really do anything other than slap their wrists every 15 years or so.
There is no international mechanism.
Israel, Palestine is a is a completely conquered and demoralized population.
The P.A. is corrupt.
It has basically no legitimacy.
Hamas is a is a is, you know, is basically a dead end.
So, you know, they they said they said don't promote violence.
So they went they went the nonviolent route and decided to do an organized boycott divestment sanction strategy that has seen some success.
I think it's seen quite a bit of success.
I know that groups are coming out in support of it.
It's becoming more popular for journalists and writers and pundits such as myself to openly support it.
I think that I think the DSA is going to come out and support it in August, which which would be good since they're kind of increasingly popular on the left.
So the Democratic Socialists of America, the kind of soft socialist organization that's supported Bernie Sanders.
I see.
Well, listen, I want to push back on one thing that you said there.
Are you really think there's much of a gray area between people who have an honest criticism of Israel and people who actually just hate Jews and pretend to?
I think I think I think that it can.
I said there is there's overlap.
I'm not I guess I'm asking how far that that Venn diagram overlaps in your mind, because I mean, frankly, frankly, frankly, I do think that some of the criticism of Israel on the I guess the far right can deviate to that, because I think that it's it's the it's the presumption that America sort of is.
It's like my article about people, you know, America being drawn into war.
You see this a lot with Syria, that somehow the U.S. is involved in Syria to kind of carry out the will of Israel, when, of course, America has its own interests that are that, of course, completely overlaps with Israel, but also is is is has its own ideological reasons to be there that are not.
You know, there wasn't there long before there was an Israel.
America was a was a was a colonial power, maybe not long before, but, you know, decades before.
And I think that the idea that you need you need this kind of this grand theological pretext to be in the region is hopeful.
But I don't think it's I don't think it's essential.
And obviously, there's a lot of there's a lot of overlap.
But I do think sometimes criticism that paints Israel as being uniquely threatening.
You see this also with Saudi Arabia, the kind of Michael Moore thesis.
He advanced in Fahrenheit and 11, where Saudi Arabia was somehow manipulating.
Bush is a kind of similarly goofy way of looking at it, I think.
Yeah, manipulation part.
I'm with you there.
I mean, any any argument that says that, oh, yeah, all of a sudden the people that run the empire in D.C. and Virginia all of a sudden aren't grown adults anymore and they don't know what they're doing, that they're just you know, you call George.
Someone calls George Bush stupid.
It's true.
But don't let that acquit him.
It doesn't mean he's not a premeditated evil doer.
It just means that also he's really bad at it.
That can be true, too.
And I'm reminded, for example, of the New York Times piece that was put out by the Obama White House.
It wasn't some scoop.
It was their version of what was going on here.
And they said, well, the reason that we're helping the Saudis bomb Yemen is we got to placate the Saudis because we're doing this nuclear deal with Iran.
And so they're fearful about their place in the American order in the Middle East.
So we're going to do this thing for them.
That's really not in America's interest at all.
And I think, yeah, the Americas, the Americans have had their sights on the Syrians for a while.
There was a time when Ehud Olmert was trying to negotiate with them and Condoleezza Rice stopped them.
Right.
Remember?
Yeah, I mean, let's let's let's.
But on the other hand, you know, you hear Michael Warren tell it.
Boy, did Likud want to take the opportunity of not of 2011 to turn this into a regime change?
Oh, yeah, of course, of course, of course.
And of course they did.
And and they've been pretty explicit about their goals, especially in South Syria.
Although I think their goals are probably more limited to wanting to fight Hezbollah and to get rid of Hezbollah as a safe space than to than to per se get rid of Assad.
I think at this point, at least.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, the last few years, for the last few years, they told you you want to see both sides lose and continue to lose.
The only meaningful threat to Israel or the United States in in is in the Middle East is Iran.
And Iran has always been the last kind of remaining meaningful challenge to U.S. hegemony in the region.
And that's precisely why we're ratcheting up tensions with them.
And it's and obviously they're they're, quote unquote, proxy Hezbollah.
It wasn't really a direct proxy, but they're an ally is is the closest enemy is the only is the only military to defeat Israel.
It's the only meaningful threat to Israel, second to a nuclear armed Iran.
So, yeah, I, I, I don't know what the.
You know, as far as Syria goes, I think that the end game is to is to prevent.
Is the, quote unquote, Shia crescent from gaining more power?
That's that's that's what Trump's doing now.
That's what that's what Center for American Progress said Clinton should do.
It's what Clinton said she was going to do.
It's it.
This is one of the this is one of the times where I don't think there was much meaningful difference between the two candidates.
People who got duped into thinking Trump was somehow going to be pro-Russia or pro-Assad.
I think I think I don't understand that.
Like, that's not the way politics works in this country.
So now we have now we have James Mattis, whose his whole career has been dedicated to hating and bashing Iran.
He's now killing Iranian troops and blowing up Iranian drones.
And they say, oh, it's defensive.
I don't think anyone really takes that seriously.
So, yeah, that's where that's where the situation is at right now in Syria.
Israel is, of course, carving out its its its base in this and the Golan Heights and in southwest Syria where they have their own kind of agenda, which is to create a kind of buffer between them and Hezbollah.
And they were actually I think a Wall Street Journal report came out saying that they had they had been arming and funding rebel groups in South Syria for some time.
So that was not good PR for the for the FSA crowd.
Yeah, it's a bad look in that part of the world to to be a look like a CIA stooge.
It's an even worse look to look like a Mossad stooge.
Right.
Not not not.
It's not good for the for the for the home team, as they say.
Well, that's something we got going for us then since Israel's been doing so much to help al-Qaeda there, you know.
All right.
So so now in regards to your piece here about the stumbling into war and how America always means well and geez, this this war in Syria might just start to happen to us.
Now, this is something that you've been writing about for a long time is not just obvious.
I mean, not even really covert.
Right.
Quote, clandestine somehow.
We've all known all along since at least summer 2011.
We've known for sure that the CIA was and NATO allies were intervening in Syria on behalf of the so-called revolutionaries and et cetera like that.
And and really, for those of us who've been watching all along, we've known this and covered it all along.
And yet it's perpetual amnesia in the media.
So if they ever do report that the CIA is helping the rebels there, it's the first time ever that we've ever found this out, everybody.
They say every time over and over again.
And you always try to gently remind them that, yeah, we already knew that.
And we also knew this in this part, too, as far as working with our allies, Turkey and Qatar and Saudi and and all of these things.
And yet, as you're saying here, we have the Madison administration outright taking it to the Syrian state.
Was it three or four attacks now against Syrian state forces there?
Well, it's what is what they kind of generically call pro regime forces, which is which is usually some combination of, well, they'll say Shia militia.
But usually it's the SAA and then Iranian Iranian troops or Hezbollah.
I think they're deliberately vague about what is exactly.
Typically, if they say pro regime, it usually means it's some kind of some kind of Shia fighter, probably foreign, probably not Syrian or or probably.
Sometimes it means the SAA, but usually it means a non SAA militia.
And I think they say they blew up an Iranian drone and they've killed some, quote unquote, pro regime forces.
Four times Syrian jet.
Yeah, four times in the last month.
And they shot down a Syrian jet, which is obviously they are shooting down a jet is a meaningful escalation.
So, yeah, that's you know, they're all they're all saying we're slipping, sliding, drawn into war.
This, of course, is part of a broader strategy that I think has been pretty obvious and I'm paying attention, which is that the US wants a foothold in that region to prevent what they call it, whatever.
I think they're calling it like a Shia corridor now, which is between from Tehran to Beirut, because obviously Iraq is generally is majority Shia.
And they're going to be they've been sort of loosely aligned with Iran.
There is meaningful differences, but that's the way that the power brokers see it, just as there's meaningful differences between Hezbollah and Iran.
But they kind of paint them all with one brush because the way if you read American media, it appears that every Shia on Earth takes their orders directly from Tehran.
And so, yeah, America wants to they're now opening military bases in East Syria, which they're euphemistically calling desert outposts, which I thought was kind of cute.
Again, another kind of colonial term outpost that we're using.
So and then, of course, the SDF and our allies, there are which are they say it's like 70 percent Arab.
I think it's probably closer to like 30 percent.
It's mostly Kurdish forces are doing all the heavy lifting.
And it's the creative wedge.
And so now there's there's a land grab.
Right.
There's a power grab since ISIS's days are supposedly numbered.
Who's going to fill that power vacuum?
And everyone's kind of jockeying for it.
I think the U.S. there's there's there's strong elements within the Trump administration, as well as the U.S. military and pro-Israel factions who want the U.S. to be more assertive against Iran.
This was, you know, Clinton's, you know, resistance campaign surrogate Mike Morell, the former head of the CIA, said he thought the U.S. U.S. is one of U.S.'s jobs in Syria should be kill Iranians and kill Russians.
This is something that's was in, you know, that they use a lot of euphemistic terms.
I think the term that Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan said in The Daily Beast, they called it a U.S. protection zone.
Right.
This is the kind of weapon.
This is this is the weaponization of the kind of humanitarian pablum where the U.S. is not asserting itself to to offset Iranian influence and to create a regional dominance in the region.
It's to protect Syrians.
Right.
This is kind of a very clever way of asserting American power and hegemony in the region without under the pretext of protecting Sunni Sunni Arabs.
And this is something you see.
And, you know, to some extent it is true that the Sunni Arabs have been oppressed by Shia governments.
It was certainly true, although they're Alawite, but it was certainly true under the Assad government that Sunnis were disproportionately maltreated.
But, you know, it wasn't certainly wasn't genocidal like what you see on the on from a lot of these Salafist groups and like you see from ISIS.
So America is trying to be this, you know, present itself as this human humanitarian arbiter of the Sunni Arab protecting protection league.
And, of course, that dovetails nicely with their broader geopolitical aims, which is to capture the land that's left by ISIS to to put it under some sort of proxy or direct control of the U.S. military.
And so that's what that's what's happening now.
And so, you know, Iran and Russia have other ideas.
I think, you know, Assad still wants the country back to where it was to be a full under complete control of the Syrian government.
I think the U.S. kind of has given up on revolution for some time and are trying to do a kind of a sort of almost a sectarian partitioning.
This is what's called a Lebanese nation of the Middle East, which is you make you create a bunch of highly sectarian pseudo nation states that are constantly warring with each other.
It prevents it prevents a meaningful threat in the Arab world.
And it also allows you can kind of play off each other.
This was obviously a tactic used by the British when they colonized places.
So, yeah, I mean, I think that's what you're seeing now.
Trump is, again, his policies are basically what what the Democrats were planning to do, because they also knew they were going to win.
John Podesta had an op-ed in The Washington Post a couple days ago laying out laying out what he what Trump's plan in Syria.
And he actually had meaningful criticisms of it.
And there's a reason why, because Center for American Progress's plan is exactly what Trump is doing.
I think they may have used more lofty humanitarian euphemisms, but effectively it's the same thing, which is to assert American power in eastern Syria and to continue to, quote, unquote, decimate and defeat ISIS.
And so his only criticism was you should go to Congress first.
Right.
This is kind of the this is kind of the half fast pseudo kind of criticism.
Right.
Which he obviously did not care about at all if he was the chief of staff in the Hillary administration.
Right.
Right.
And it's not even it's like basically go to Congress to get permission.
Let me ask you this, though, man, and all this to do this.
Yeah, you're doing as much reading as me or more here on trying to keep up with all this stuff.
Has anybody said anything that makes any sense, never mind morality or anything like that, but even short term sense about who they think is going to rule Raqqa?
Because, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, there's no indication that the YPG Kurds want to take over that city and try to rule it.
They'd have to kick all the Sunni Arabs out of it to try to take control of the thing.
They don't have any interest in doing that.
So who the hell they think is going to take it over?
It would be some sort of, I think, NATO surrogate.
The Marines.
I mean, yeah.
Well, they'll just rebrand one of these like light, like Islamist light groups, like they did in Libya.
You go back to 2012, just five years ago, Obama told right around this time, Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg, that's right, Jeffrey Goldberg.
The reason we want to do this is to take Iran down a peg since George Bush helped give their proxies and friends Baghdad, you know, consolation prize.
I'm paraphrasing.
Consolation prize.
We can take Assad out of the chain of Iranian influence in the region or at least, you know, weaken them, etc.
And yet all they did.
So that was really the motivation behind the whole movement to support the insurgency, which I don't want to overstate it.
I don't need to.
People can connect whichever dots in whichever pattern they like.
But it's certainly as Hillary Clinton herself predicted on February 28th, 2012 to CBS News.
Right.
We don't want to accidentally give space and and be, you know, in essence, de facto allies of al-Qaeda if they're supporting the war in Syria.
Well, that's exactly what they did.
And everybody says ISIS, ISIS, ISIS.
But ISIS is just the Iraqi dominated faction of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Whereas al-Nusra is the Syrian dominated faction of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The worst part, the Zarqawiite part of the insurgency from Iraq War II.
And so Obama was the one who gave them the ability overall, him and his allies and their policy to create the Islamic State in eastern Syria and then eventually even into western Iraq.
And what you're talking about now that here come the Shia.
Well, what are they doing?
They're only now correcting that.
So just like George Bush brought Shiite power, you know, 20 miles west and giving them all of Baghdad in Iraq War II.
Now Obama's just giving them a reason, basically, to take all of Ramadi, Fallujah, Mosul and expand the borders of Shia-stan further west.
Certainly their power influenced Shia West.
And now here we are in 2017 talking about, so now what are they going to do?
Are they going to leave the Marines in Raqqa?
Are they going to try to work out a thing with the Kurds?
Because somehow they've got to limit Iraqi and quote Iranian Shiite power from moving any further west than the old Duran line now.
I mean, I'm sorry, Duran line.
I'm in Afghanistan.
The old Sykes-Picot line.
Yeah, I don't, I mean, you know, what the broader aims of the U.S. military is, is outside of my pay grade.
I think that there are certainly common threads which are pretty out in the open from Cap to Brookings to what the president says, which is that the U.S.'s goal is to offset what they consider to be Iranian influence in the region.
That to me seems to be like the overarching animating factor behind this entire thing.
How specifically what the exact strategy is, I don't know, nor do I claim to know.
What I what I write about is that the media makes broad assumptions about America not having a plan and kind of bumbling around in good faith.
So, you know, I'm not the one making an assertion as to what the overarching organizing model is.
It's the it's the media that does it all the time.
So in my piece, I write about how they say America is getting sucked into a Middle East quagmire.
They're getting advice that America is getting trapped in this conflict.
Brookings said we're sliding into war.
These terms imply a degree of of benevolence and incompetence that I don't think is is really accurate.
I believe that I believe the term that was used by the descriptor that was used by the Atlantic was even as Washington potentially stumbles into war.
It assumes that there isn't any kind of larger geopolitical aims in the region, which is, I think, absurd.
I mean, of course there is.
And I know this because they're pretty much spelled out.
So I think these terms that strip the United States of, for lack of a better word, agency and stripped them of designs are very, very subtle and very effective propaganda technique that journalists have internalized because they believe that the U.S.
So there's sort of two there's two things, right?
There's the there's one side that flatters the flatters the right wing, which is this idea that America is benevolent and it only goes to war reluctantly.
And then there's a kind of thread, what I sort of call the nominal lefty thread, which is that America is actually incompetent.
Right.
They're actually boobish that.
And you see these people, you know, they'll read Legacy of Ashes or they'll read or they'll read Ghost Wars and they come away thinking, oh, the CIA is just a bunch of dipshits.
And it kind of flatters our sensibility that America doesn't know what they're doing.
It's kind of like a hipster liberal belief that empire America became the greatest empire on Earth by accident.
And I think that's incredibly that's an incredibly dubious leap to make.
Well, I think that's true in some kind of micro sense.
I think generally speaking, the U.S. is actually incredibly good at what it does because because they assume its nominal goal is its actual goal.
And I think that's that's a huge assumption that isn't really historically justified.
You know, people say, oh, the aftermath of Iraq was a shit show and the aftermath of Libya was a shit show.
Therefore, America is incompetent.
But you're presupposing that America really gave a shit about building a stable democracy in these countries.
And I think that's a huge assumption.
And I think it's one that assumes benevolence on the part of U.S. policymakers that I see no historical evidence for.
I come up against this all the time because, you know, occasionally people interview me and I try to explain that, you know, why did Bush do so much to enhance Iranian and Shiite power in Iraq?
The answer to that is because he's stupid, because him and Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, they are stupid.
And what they did was absolutely an own goal.
It doesn't mean that they meant well.
I don't think that's true.
I think I think I think I think it's it's it's simple.
It's the objective is to get rid of those who can meaningfully threaten U.S. hegemony.
That's the only that's the only through line.
The sectarianism is irrelevant to them.
It's they know they'll do a kind of Kissinger balancing act thing, but ultimately doesn't really matter.
Saddam Hussein was was, you know, he had his own.
He potentially had a chemical weapons program.
He may have had a nuclear program 10, 15 years down the line.
He was a he was a rogue agent.
He was a threat to American hegemony.
So he had to be taken out.
The fact that the Shia were going to fill the gap was simply, you know, that's how it had to happen.
Right.
So.
So.
And then Gaddafi was the same thing.
Gaddafi was a threat to U.S. hegemony.
They saw an opportunity to take him out.
So they took him out.
Now, of course, before that, they were trying to work with them.
But that's the way these things work.
Right.
It's a carrot and stick thing.
You have these neoliberal reforms.
If you if you if you accept them and you and you and you and you're and you submit to the sort of American way of doing things, then you're then you're then you're allowed.
But the idea that somehow they boobishly overthrew Saddam, I think, is not correct because the the atomic unit is regime change.
The point I was complaining about, though, is how come if they're stupid, that makes them a boob?
And and why does that or in other words, if they're stupid, why does that imply any kind of innocence or less criminal negligent or criminal culpability on their part?
In other words, you could have a premeditated murder plot that you plan to rob a guy's house and you're going to kill him and his family.
But you end up getting your own family's house burned down and they all die in that, too.
So you're a stupid idiot who shouldn't have done that.
Doesn't mean that you're not guilty of being a horrible, premeditated murderer.
Also, it's just that there's a blowback sometimes.
If one if one if one views the primary goal of U.S. policy decision making in the Middle East as the elimination of existential threats, e.g.nuclear or or or chemical or a meaningful air force, then absolutely things have gone pretty damn well.
There really is only one meaningful threat left in the Middle East, and that's Iran.
And by through extension, Hezbollah.
That's it.
15 years ago, you had Iraq, you had Iran, you had Libya.
Now you basically have one country.
I don't think that that's I don't think that it's, you know, again, it's not some perfectly slick executed conspiracy, but it seems pretty simple to me.
You eliminate threats.
There is nothing subversive at all about ISIS to the ruling class of this country.
Forty thousand guys running around in a.
Well, that's not my evidence of failure, though.
The evidence of failure to me is not ISIS.
The evidence of failure to me is Maliki saying to Bush, now get the hell out of my country.
He wanted 56 bases and Maliki and the Iranian backed government.
Basically, it was a race between the Americans and the Iranians for who was going to have the most influence over the government that America put in power.
And the Iranians won and they kicked Bush out.
That's a failure.
Come on.
It's not a perfect science.
I'm not saying that they again, it's not they're not like the bad guys in 24.
They don't sit around, you know, coming up with grand conspiracies.
But broadly speaking, if you're if your criteria at the very least is to get rid of meaningful threats, I think it's gone pretty damn well.
I think, you know, what takes what what what arises in there in that place is debatable.
But I mean, look, America will have its military bases in Iraq.
They're going to be staying there for decades, as it looks now.
We're going to have military bases in Afghanistan, probably when my kids' kids graduate high school.
I don't think you know, I don't think that war is designed to ever really end, which is maybe I shouldn't be calling it a war.
I mean, I don't know how many decades have to pass before you just call it an occupation.
But so, yeah, I mean, look, there isn't some master plan that's executed perfectly.
But I think the general the general thrust of eliminating enemies and and now the remaining enemy is Iran.
And that's who we're shooting right now in Syria.
That seems reasonable to me.
I don't think anyone's dumb enough to ever try regime change in Iran, because unlike Iraq, they don't have they really don't have sectarianism.
You can you can divide and conquer.
They're also very battle hardened.
And the government there, I'm sorry to say, is generally very popular, especially if they were under attack by the US or Israel.
I mean, they would completely hand our ass to us.
I don't think anyone really disputes that.
You know, they lost they lost a million people in the Iraq Iran war, which they still blame us for.
And they would probably, you know, they were they it's a world war.
We're talking World War One type war.
You know, people literally just droves and droves of people going in to fight the Iraqis and trench warfare.
And they did it.
And they they're very prideful about that.
They consider that they're, you know, something to be such a great point of pride.
And so, you know, the point is to put pressure on Iran is to put them in other ways.
You know, whether it's sanctioning, whether it's whether it's killing their proxies, whether it's blowing up their drones.
But, you know, I think there is certainly a containment philosophy that's that's taking place right now.
And again, this is not secret.
It's it's the express policy of the Department of Defense.
And that's what you're seeing.
So do I think that these attacks against Iranian or pro-Iranian targets in the past month by Trump have been accidents?
Or rather, self-defense?
I don't think so.
I think they're trying to let them know that they're not around and they'll kill them if they have to.
So that, you know, once you cross the threshold to bombing a country, it's it's at that point it's a it's a formality.
Right.
This is why the bombing on April 6th was so big, because it was it crossed the threshold of formally bombing Syria.
Now, of course, we've been bombing the Syrian territory for two and a half years and killed thousands and thousands of people.
But there was a scope scope to bombing the government directly, which which which has sort of long been the underlying objective.
I think for a lot of people within the CIA and State Department, the military is a little different, though.
The Defense Department, from my reading, is kind of split.
I don't think the DOD actually wants to overthrow Assad and have to clean up the mess, but I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, it seemed like they've been more content to back the Kurds where the CIA wanted to keep back in the friends of Salah Hariri over there.
Yeah, I think I think they literally just kind of ran out of any pretext of moderate rebels.
I think it's probably true that in 2012, there was a sizable contingent of, you know, non sectarian, non Salafi rebels.
And I think that it just got to the point where you couldn't even really fake it anymore.
A couple of years ago.
Well, you know, even when John McCain went and met with the Northern Storm Brigade at that time, there was already a Time magazine interview of the leader of the Northern Storm Brigade saying, yeah, I'm a veteran of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
I fought the Americans in Iraq war, too.
Yes.
You know, it's it's it's messy because, you know, it's not.
You know, I don't like to adopt this kind of war on terror language because I don't think it's very helpful.
And it's it is true that there, you know, there are people who did join Nusra who aren't these kind of cartoon, you know, head chopping terrorists.
And I don't I don't want to act like I'm I don't want to channel Michael Weiss here.
But, like, you know, I I met people whose family was tortured by the Assad government or they, you know, were disaffected from the Assad government.
And it had frankly had nowhere else to go but some of these, you know, dodgier groups.
So on a personal level, I don't I don't necessarily blame that necessarily.
But the question is, where is the money coming from?
Right.
Where is this?
Where are the sources coming from?
They're coming from Saudi Arabia.
They're coming from Qatar.
And Saudi Arabia and Qatar don't care about democracy and don't care about secularism.
They want to seed sectarian tension.
They want to kill their what they view as their sectarian enemies.
And that's, you know, because I actually, you know, I met people.
I'm by no means an expert on the region, but I did spend six months in Beirut.
And I think there's a lot of Syrians there.
And I meet Syrians who say, you know, I support.
This is obviously anecdotal, so take it for what it's worth.
But, you know, I support the revolution or I support the overthrow of Assad.
But I blame the Saudis for for corrupting or polluting the peaceful revolution.
This is something I heard more than once.
So it's you know, it's not simple.
It's it's it's a it's a total shit show.
It's a mess.
And the people that are suffering the most are the ones who who don't you know, who aren't writing the checks, who aren't making these huge arms arms deals, who aren't sitting behind a desk somewhere and and Langley and coming up with designs for Syria or sitting in Riyadh and running, you know, running the calls out of there.
And that's that's the big shame about this.
This war is that the people who who were most affected by it have basically little control.
Well, you know, I just ran a great article on and there are numerous articles really like this along these lines.
And probably some books, too, that I'm not up on.
But I ran a great article on my Web site at the Libertarian Institute by a guy who talked about a lot of the quite large peaceful protests in 2011.
And even in 2012, where there were a lot of people.
But the thing is, there were jihadis would show up to and start killing cops.
And it was getting worse and worse like that.
And the Americans in there, as you say, the Saudis and Qataris had no interest in having a solution to that problem anyway.
But the Americans really had no way of intervening to help the revolution without helping those guys.
Again, that Hillary Clinton interview with CBS News, where the questioner, the CBS reporter is being the hawk.
And he's saying to Hillary Clinton, why aren't you doing more?
And she says, well, look, and we know now the email is there from a week before where her aide says, hey, look, boss, AQ is on our side in this one.
She's referring to that email pretty plainly.
And she says, well, you know, Ayman al-Zawahiri has endorsed this revolution.
So are we supporting al-Qaeda in Syria?
So she's being rhetorical.
I'm not trying to be too kooky about that or anything.
But I'm saying she was recognizing that, geez, if we're helping overthrow Assad, we're kind of helping to butcher New York City.
And that might be a problem.
But then she kept pushing for it anyway.
Yeah, I mean, look, the degree to which the reality is we have no idea what the CIA has or hasn't done in Syria.
It's a total black hole.
There's basically no reporting on it.
We have a number, which is roughly a billion dollars a year, that The Washington Post arrived at by cross-referencing a DoD source with a Snowden document from 2013.
Now, I assume that billion dollars a year wasn't spent on lunch spreads and Wi-Fi.
I assume it probably was used to arm fund groups.
How many?
We don't know.
The Washington Post puts it at 10,000 for that program alone.
I don't know.
I don't claim to know the extent to which the CIA was involved.
A lot of people in the pro-revolution side say the CIA didn't do anything or that they were negligible.
I find that a bit dubious.
But even if you grant that, what I argue is that the media – or what I've always argued is that the media has completely whitewashed or ignored that fact entirely.
I don't think we should all sit around and speculate the extent to which they're involved.
But I also think it's malpractice intellectually and I think on a moral level to completely ignore the U.S.'s role in that conflict.
And you see it time and time and time and time and time again.
And it's an exceedingly convenient narrative because it assumes that America just stood by and did nothing when, of course, the opposite is true.
And you're seeing that again now, right?
That we're not sure what the U.S.'s goal is, what's their agenda.
I mean look, their agenda has been the same.
It's to offset Iranian influence in Syria.
It's really not complicated.
Part of it is, too, that back in Iraq War II, they never said who was who at all.
They would only ever say, well, so America is helping the people of Iraq defend themselves from the terrorists who are trying to thwart their freedom and democracy.
They never really said, oh, Zarqawi bad and Saud are bad, but not really why other than they're resisting.
But they never gave the context.
And so then the entire aftermath of this thing, nobody really seems to understand who's who or why anybody's doing anything in it, including the people whose job it is to explain it all to us in the news.
Never mind the fact, as you're talking about, their interest in being so short in memory here.
But they never really learned it in the first place themselves.
Well, what they advance is a very moralistic narrative, right?
It's obligatory.
You see it, right?
Assad, the butcher, the butcher, the murderous dictator, bloody dictator, murderous bloody dictator, dictator, bloody dictator.
And you sort of say it enough.
It's like, OK, obviously Assad's killed a lot of people.
Obviously, forget the body count.
We'll just talk about the practice of torture alone.
It's pretty extensive.
They did run a very sophisticated police state.
And so you have this kind of like moral nonstarter with Assad staying in power.
The problem is, was, and will always be, which is, OK, let's assume that he dies of a heart attack tomorrow.
Where does that leave us?
And the nominal goals of the rebels, even the supposed moderate rebels, has always been the complete overthrow of the system of government of Syria.
Not just one person, but the state as such, which, of course, is the whole bath of system, however you define it.
So even if Assad dies tomorrow for whatever reason, nothing really changes.
And one of the problems is that no one who supports that has to really come up with an alternative.
They can just say, oh, well, he's evil.
Therefore, anything's better than him.
And maybe that's true.
But, you know, you still have all your work ahead of you, which is OK.
What does that look like?
And the reality is there's only one option, which is effectively a NATO run government.
Sort of like similar what you saw in Libya, right, where you have a kind of provincial government that relies entirely on a confederation of Western powers.
And I assume that's always been the goal.
It's been the goal since the first blueprints were written up by Michael Weiss in foreign policy.
The goal was to create a kind of NATO vassal state that was, you know, probably more democratic in some ways, to be fair.
But it wasn't really what was not independent of the U.S. broader military apparatus within that region.
So I think there's maybe attempts to kind of create a partition in eastern Syria to create that.
So we'll see.
But again, the cartoon narrative that the media continually propagates or promulgates, I think, is incredibly removed from reality.
And I think the discourse has shifted.
I think people kind of are more open about that in the last year or two.
I think that wasn't always the case because I think people kind of see that it doesn't quite add up to as simple a picture as they make it out to be.
Hey, let me ask you one more thing before I let you go here.
And I'm sorry I've kept you so long, Adam.
But if anybody knows the answer to this, you might be the guy there.
Fairness and accuracy in reporting.
You guys are absolutely meticulous.
But I saw a Republican, almost certain, congressman say on TV in 2013.
Sorry, I know I'm being very vague, but it's a pretty specific quote.
The CNN reporter, whoever it was, TV cable news reporter, said, well, so once they get rid of Assad, well then, so who's going to be the government after that?
And the congressman says, well, you know, we just hope that someone will come to the fore.
And I just thought that that was the perfect answer, right?
Well, whatever.
It'll probably work out.
Yeah, I mean, that's good.
Did you hear that one?
Do you know what I mean?
Because, again, the atomic unit is regime change.
Yeah.
And what comes after that doesn't really matter to them.
It's just an excuse for a further war.
This is why the like— But do you know who it was that said that?
Come to the fore?
Do you remember?
I don't.
I'm sorry.
Ah!
This is why the liberals who say, oh, the war was good, but the aftermath was badly planned are the world's kind of, I think, most disingenuous people or they're total idiots.
Because the reason why the aftermath, quote-unquote, is always a shitshow, and it always is, is because nobody cares.
It's baked into the cake.
They don't actually care about the aftermath because that's not the objective.
The objective is to remove someone who threatens your power.
Now, if the aftermath is, you know, Athenian democracy, then great.
If it's not, who gives a shit?
There's no incentive for anyone to really care about the, quote-unquote, aftermath.
I mean, just pure dollars alone.
One statistic I use is that the United States gives more aid to Israel every year than it does the last seven countries we bombed combined.
So that's how much we care about the people, the countries that we bomb, and the leaders we dislodge.
Right.
All right, good times, man.
Thanks for coming back on the show, Adam.
Good interview.
Sure, you got it.
I appreciate it.
Later.
All right, you guys, that's Adam Johnson.
He does great work there at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
Check him out at fair.org.
This one is the 50th anniversary of Israeli occupation.
Palestinian opinions largely ignored.
And Syria, the latest case of U.S. stumbling into war.
