11/6/17 Elijah Magnier on the mayhem in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia

by | Nov 6, 2017 | Interviews | 1 comment

Middle East correspondent Elijah Magnier returns to the show to discuss the latest turmoil in the Middle East and his recent article “ISIS into History’s rubbish bin and Iraq neither Iranian nor American.” Magnier shares what he knows about the resignation of Saad Hariri in Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia’s role in the latest Middle Eastern mess. Magnier then discusses the history of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the distinction between the terrorist group and the parliamentary party, which has considerable political power and popularity. Magnier then slams the U.S. media for turning al Qaeda into a moderate rebel group and the fall out from the war in Syria.

Elijah Magnier is the chief international correspondent at Al Rai and a political and terrorism/counterterrorism analyst. Find all his work at elijahjm.wordpress.com and follow him on Twitter @ejmalrai.

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We know Al-Qaeda Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
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All right, you guys introducing Elijah Magnier.
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ElijahM.wordpress.com is his website and you can follow him on Twitter, Elijah M as well.
Highly respected journalist and analyst on especially Levant issues, I guess you could say.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Elijah?
Thank you very much.
Hello, Scott.
Very happy to have you back now.
So I hardly know where to begin, but how about with the resignation of Hariri in Saudi Arabia?
What happened there?
Well, this is a very good question.
Actually, everybody is wondering what's happening to the prime minister, Saad Hariri, because he was in perfect harmony with the government.
He was running a government that is trying to survive despite what's happening in Iraq and Syria and all the pressure around Lebanon.
And just 24 hours before he met the Iranian envoy, Ali Akbar Walayati, and the representative of the Granite Alliance in Iran.
And I have learned from inside information that Walayati said to Hariri, you're a very good prime minister.
We're very happy to work with you.
We're ready to supply Lebanon with hospitals, with electricity, because there aren't electricity 24 hours a day.
And we are ready also to supply weapons if you need, because the US and Europe is not supplying the Lebanese army with adequate weapons to defend its borders, particularly the anti-air missile and guided anti-tank missiles.
And he said we're ready to fully cooperate.
You just need to ask.
And Hariri was extremely happy with the meeting.
He has resisted for over three months the pressure from Saudi Arabia to take away the Hezbollah ministers from the government, saying that in Lebanon doesn't work like in Saudi Arabia.
There isn't a monarchy.
There is a parliament.
And this parliament, Hezbollah is part of the parliament.
And it has been elected by the people.
And they are entitled to have a couple of ministers.
Therefore, I can't just remove them from one day to another.
And it is not possible because there is a balance in Lebanon, where there are the pro-Saudi, there are the pro-Americans, there are the pro-Iranians, there are a lot of pro in the country.
Therefore, this is creating a kind of a balance where everybody's living together.
And everybody agreed to maintain a peaceful, secure Lebanon, particularly when there are more than 30 percent of its total inhabitants as refugees, Syrian refugees.
And another, I mean, between a million and a half Syrians and more or less between 700,000 to 1 million Palestinians in a country where there are more or less 4 to 5 million people living in.
Therefore, we're talking about 2.5 million refugees and 2.5 million to 3 million Lebanese.
Therefore, it's not easy to survive all together according to Saudi standards or American standards or Iranian standards.
So everybody's living together.
So Syed Hariri was in the morning when he was talking to the speaker and saying that we have to think about how we're going to run the parliamentary elections that are due in a couple of months.
And he was called by the Saudis saying you have to come immediately to Saudi Arabia.
And then we saw him on a registered video on a Saudi TV from Riyadh saying that he is resigning because of Hezbollah and the government.
So suddenly after all this time leading the government, he is discovering that there is Hezbollah in the government.
So that was the explanation.
Was that what?
Yes.
Yes.
He just said it is the Iranian arms that need to be cut.
And Hezbollah is present in Syria and present abroad.
And I mean, Hezbollah is fighting ISIS and Al-Qaeda outside Lebanon and is fighting ISIS and Al-Qaeda in Lebanon and managed to liberate the borders and the part of the country that was occupied by ISIS and Al-Qaeda, particularly the north east of the country on the Syrian Lebanese borders.
And then the way the style of the communique he was reading is not a Lebanese style.
It is really a very Saudi style to write a letter because Lebanese don't communicate with each other in this way because they all more or less have supporters.
They all have ministers.
They all have members in the parliament.
So they keep kind of a balance.
They attack each other, but it's a soft attack.
It's not a cutting relationship like what Hariri said over the registered video presented by a Saudi television and from Saudi Arabia.
I mean, this is quite unusual for a prime minister to resign through a registered message reading it from another country and from Saudi Arabia saying, I'm resigning.
So therefore, the president has decided to move earth and sky to put pressure on the French president, on the Jordanian king, on the Egyptian president.
They contacted the US administration saying, we want our prime minister back from Saudi Arabia.
We can't communicate with him.
And actually, nobody is able to communicate with the prime minister who suddenly is in Saudi Arabia and can't contact anyone.
And his own party was unaware of his decision.
I mean, decision, vertebrate, and his resignation.
And that was pretty unusual.
Now, well, there's a couple different things here.
I guess I can ask both of them, I think.
I hope I'm characterizing this correctly, but I believe that Moon of Alabama, Bernard, at the Moon of Alabama blog, what he wrote, I think, if I got it right, was that what this means, though, is that Hezbollah and their alliance with the Christians, they will be empowered just by the fact of this Sunni leader resigning, this relatively powerful Sunni leader resigning.
And then that will create a reaction against Hezbollah on the part of the United States and Israel and justify intervention by Saudi Arabia inside Lebanon.
In other words, this is just the first move on a game of checkers, if not chess here.
Is that right?
Well, yes, Bernard is an excellent analyst, and I really read everything he writes, because it's really spot on.
But in the case of Hezbollah here, Hezbollah is is very clever in its presence in Lebanon, aware of the differences and aware of the international and regional struggle.
So what Hezbollah is doing, he really wants a prime minister that is pro-Saudi and an interior minister that is pro-Saudi.
So the security in the country is held by non-friend of Hezbollah, so enemies of Hezbollah, let's say, but by people who want the stability of the country, who are going to, who are Sunni and they are pro-Saudi, who are Wahhabi and are very close to the Wahhabi Takfiri, like ISIS and Al-Qaeda.
Therefore, they are the best to put an end to ISIS and Al-Qaeda in Lebanon, and it will not be presented as a sectarian fight between Shia and Sunni in the country.
So let the Sunni minister and the Sunni prime minister deal with the security of the country and deal with the Sunnis who are extremists, so that nobody is going to talk about the sectarian war in Lebanon.
That's one.
Two, therefore, Hezbollah is not going to take the control of the country, neither the Christians, because there is a balance in Lebanon.
So the prime minister is a Sunni and must be a Sunni and must be accepted by most of the Sunnis.
And Saudi Arabia doesn't control all of the Sunnis.
Saudi Arabia controls part of the Sunnis, but they have the majority.
And the Christians have the president.
The president is a Christian and is not going to replace the prime minister.
And the speaker is a Shia.
So there is quite a balance that the Christian and the Shia are not going to break and they're going to protect.
Therefore, there is a hunt today on a Sunni figure that is acceptable by the Sunnis and the Shia and the Christians and approved by everybody to make sure that the West is not going to consider Lebanon as a hostage to Hezbollah and then say, OK, now we can attack the entire country because it has been kidnapped by Hezbollah.
Well, that's a rhetoric that we hear quite often.
And Hezbollah is very aware of that.
So I spoke to a few people around here in Lebanon and they said, we have no intention to change the balance and bring a pro-Hezbollah Sunni as a leader of the country who leads the government.
But first, we need to know what's happening to Hariri.
We want him back and we want to know what are his intentions and if his intention is to fight politically against any other Sunni leader who's going to lead the new government.
Therefore, the president, Michel Aoun, said, I am not going to take any step before the return of the prime minister from Saudi Arabia.
And Hariri promised the president to return this Thursday.
So in a few days, he's supposed to come back to Lebanon and therefore he will be asked to present his resignation officially.
And the leaders of this country want to know what are his intentions toward the future government.
Is he going to boycott it?
Is he going to fight against it?
If he was instructed by the Saudi to create havoc in the country.
So what are the Saudis' plans now?
And this is what people here don't know.
That's interesting, though, that you're saying that even though the Saudis, they may be trying to provoke this reaction, Hezbollah and their Christian allies, that is the Shia side, Hezbollah and their Christian allies, that they're wise to this trap and they're not trying to destabilize Lebanon by taking over the presidency or the pardon me, the prime ministership from the Sunnis.
They would much rather work it out.
And they're they're basically not going to take the Saudis' bait on this.
Is that right?
Yes, that is correct.
They're not going to do that.
And just to bear in mind that there are between 20 to 22,000 called Saraya al-Muqawama.
So they are a pro Hezbollah and are made of all the other religion, non-Shia.
Therefore, the Sunni, Druze and Christian who support Hezbollah and they've been trained by Hezbollah, particularly to protect their villages and the area they live in against the Takfiri attacks.
We have to keep in mind that Al-Qaeda is still on very close to the Lebanese border from the Syrian side.
So we're talking about all the area between the triangle between Israel, Syria and Lebanon, and that area close to Quneitra and the area on the Beijing in Syria.
This is where there is Al-Qaeda and this is where there are Christian villages.
And these Christians were trained by Hezbollah and were armed by Hezbollah just to defend their villages, not to go and fight Israel or to to use their weapons locally, but to defend it against Al-Qaeda on the borders.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
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How do you like that?
Well, and this is a cause of major confusion in the United States, as you may imagine, because we get endless demonization of Hezbollah.
I don't think I have anything really positive to say about them other than let's all be adults and just talk about the reality of Hezbollah instead of a bunch of, you know, hype and scaremongering.
And of course, our president, he only knows what he sees on TV.
And so he recently, as you may know, he congratulated the Lebanese for beating those terrorists, for fighting against ISIS and against Hezbollah.
Even though he was, you know, talking to, it may have been Aoun at the time or whatever, who's one of the allies of Hezbollah in the Lebanese government, or certainly, you know, they're part of the Lebanese government.
And our president, Donald Trump, had no idea of this at all.
He had no idea that the beating of ISIS in Lebanon had been at the hands of Hezbollah.
Instead, it's the terrorists, and don't, you know, bore me with details.
And so, you know, yeah, I think it certainly seems like if the Saudis could somehow get Hezbollah to grab a bit more power there, that that could serve as an excuse for America to attack, which would in effect be on behalf of al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Well, I think I wouldn't blame too much the US president, because I mean, you can't ask much of his brain when he attacked with 59 Tomahawk missile Syria and was the same evening confused between Syria and Iraq.
And the only thing he could remember was the chocolate cake at that evening.
So actually, I wouldn't blame him if he knows nothing about foreign policy, and particularly the Middle East foreign policy.
But let us talk about where Hezbollah comes from.
Hezbollah is exactly like ISIS, was the unintended consequences of the Israeli occupation of Lebanon in 1982.
Before 1982, there was no Hezbollah in Lebanon.
And in 2003, like President Obama said, the ISIS is the unintended consequences of the US occupation of Iraq.
Therefore, all these unintended consequences are leaving a hundred of thousands of killed and wounded and hundreds of billions of destruction in the Middle East.
And when you speak about Hezbollah as a terrorist organization that needs to be removed, Hezbollah are part of the Lebanese society.
Otherwise, they wouldn't exist in the parliament, and they wouldn't exist in the government.
And Europe would not try to make a distinction between the military wing and the political wing, because they have to deal with the government, and they have to deal with the members of the parliament.
So they can't consider Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.
Otherwise, they have to consider the Lebanese parliament as a terrorist parliament, and the Lebanese government as a terrorist government.
And Hezbollah didn't come from Mars or Pluto.
They come from Lebanon.
They are Lebanese.
There are over a million and something Lebanese living in the country.
And these people are part of the society.
And Hezbollah came and filled up the vacuum that the Lebanese government can't provide a social warfare, and the army can't protect the south of Lebanon and the country from the Israeli attack.
So they have created a small group that managed to create, to give a kind of security to a part of the population.
So if they want to remove Hezbollah, they have to remove about a million person from Lebanon.
I'm sorry, I was just distracted by this report coming in about the confirmation of the death of Abdul Aziz, the son of the late King Fahd.
They say he was arrested yesterday.
And now he's dead.
He wasn't he didn't die in the helicopter crash.
This is, I don't know, maybe overdosed on steak and lobster at the hotel where they're all being held there in Riyadh.
Well, I mean, obviously, Saudi Arabia, the new the prince and the crown prince wants to make sure that there isn't a strong opposition for him to take the lead in the country and to become the new king.
And secondly, he wants to recover the money that Saudi Arabia invested in supporting the destruction of Syria and help al Qaeda and the Syrian to take up arms and supported the terrorist in the Levant, and also the money they are investing in Yemen to destroy the poorest country in the Middle East and the 450 billion dollars that they have the intention to give to Donald Trump.
They've started to give some of it, but they promised to give all the rest.
So from somewhere, this money needs to come up and they will take this money from the rich Saudi, who happened to be opposing the crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.
So it's a win win for him, if he can manage to survive long enough.
Yeah, well, which is an interesting point.
You know, again, Bernard at the moon of Alabama was talking about how this is, you know, the the Salman clan and obviously, particularly the crown prince, marginalizing what's left of the Abdullah family or they're part of the clan and the naifs.
And then he said, though, boy, you're picking he's picking a fight with a lot of really powerful people, these billionaires and others of the most powerful princes.
In this case, it looks like the son of the former king has now been killed.
So he could be provoking a major backlash.
So it's not necessarily a foregone conclusion that this is going to work out for him.
Yeah, I agree.
I fully agree.
Yeah.
All right.
So can you talk to us a little bit about the current state of the Al-Nusra Front in the Idlib province?
You referred to him there a minute ago.
We know that the Islamic State has been at least scattered from Mosul and now Raqqa.
And yet we don't hear much tell about the Al-Nusra Front there.
Well, it's Turkey took over the de-escalation zone, the fourth de-escalation zone in Idlib.
And that was a deal made in Astana, Kazakhstan, between Turkey, Iran, Russia with the agreement of Damascus.
And what happened, what is really odd is we saw the Turkish army escorted by Al-Qaeda into Idlib, where they were taking into many part of the outskirts of Idlib.
And they just, the Turks said, OK, now we control this city.
And we have to keep in mind that there are between 15,000 to 20,000 Al-Qaeda in that city.
And I don't know how the Turks can control the city, but it seems they are freezing the situation of Al-Qaeda.
And we hear many mainstream media calling Al-Qaeda, moderate Al-Qaeda.
So we have a new group today in the world.
We have the non-moderate Al-Qaeda and the moderate Al-Qaeda.
I know, you know, as crazy as it sounds, I'm sorry, I just have to chime in because you sound all of a sudden like a crazy person to someone who doesn't know about this.
But how could this be?
And yet it's an article this month at the Rand Corporation website, and also in Foreign Affairs, the official journal of the Council on Foreign Relations are again, and this is the third or fourth time that they've pushed a major article about how, oh, so moderate these Al-Qaeda fighters in Syria are, how tolerable they are when they're helping to accomplish American goals.
Yeah, well, this is quite insane, actually.
I mean, how can you speak to the American audience and say those who are responsible for 9-11 today, there are the moderate Al-Qaeda and those exactly same militant, we consider that they have, I mean, I'm speaking in the name of the American administration here, they have the Khorasan group, who are plotting against the West, against Europe and the United States, and we're killing them and we're sending drones to hunt them down, but they're still moderate Al-Qaeda.
So I mean, even experts in the Middle East find it extremely difficult to understand.
So can you imagine a normal American listening to this rubbish?
I mean, it's just insane.
Right.
I mean, today we have a moderate Al-Qaeda.
Of course, and this has been going on this whole time.
It's funny because here we are, you know, at the end of Iraq War Three now, where the Islamic State has been smashed after three years it took to finally undo the creation of the Islamic State.
But then, you know, we always, and we, I mean, me and everybody else, a lot of the time, you can't help it, just for Twitter character limits and so forth, mention that, oh yeah, by the way, of course, it was American support for so-called moderate terrorists in Syria from, at least to keep a long story short, 2011 through 13 and 14 that led to the creation of the Islamic State in the first place.
The whole Iraq War Three was nothing but cleaning up the blowback from the last mission.
Well, I think the world has changed quite a lot.
I mean, if you, I don't know if you remember, I do.
In 1986, we had the Iran gate, the selling of weapons from the United States to Iran during the hostages crisis in Lebanon.
I was a kid at the time, but I remember seeing Oliver North taking the fifth on TV.
Yes, exactly.
And then we have Iran contra for the same reason that the benefit of the selling of the arms to Iran where you was used to provide the contra with weapons.
But today we have a next foreign minister, Qatari foreign minister saying we have been supplying Al-Qaeda with weapons with the American agreement via Turkey.
And that's it.
And nothing happened.
There's no scandal.
There is no hoo-ha about it.
There's no comment and no headlines in the newspaper, but just something that went.
It's just very normal.
So, I mean, everything is permitted.
Suddenly we, the Americans can supply weapons to Al-Qaeda and that is permitted.
That is OK today.
Right.
Well, and of course, it's because Iran, Iran, Iran.
So therefore Syria, Syria, Syria.
And look, I mean, after all, what are they going to do?
Reinvade Iraq and give the capital city back to the Sunnis?
You know, Assad was their consolation prize after scoring a giant goal for Iran in Iraq.
War two.
They said, well, at least we can take Assad down a peg and that'll help bring Iran's influence down.
And of course, now they're crying that all they've done is increase Iranian power.
And now you have actual Iranian Quds Force guys and Hezbollah fighters and all these people winning the war in Syria that they started.
And now the narrative is, oh, no, it's a Shiite land bridge all the way from Tehran to southern Lebanon.
A reason to start a whole new war.
Well, let me let me be more precise here.
Hezbollah didn't win a war in Syria, and Iran did not win the war in Syria.
Hezbollah and Iran, the Syrian army and Russia managed to defeat ISIS in Syria.
And they have managed to reduce the power of Al-Qaeda in Syria and managed to stop the regime change in Syria and the occupation of jihadist Takfiri, who are extremist terrorists in the country who would have expanded to Lebanon and Iraq and then most probably Jordan and Turkey and then later on Israel.
This is what they have stopped.
Now, Syria is destroyed.
Yes, that's true.
Hezbollah and Iran enjoyed a special position within the Syrian government when Hafez Assad was around.
In 1982, it was Hafez Assad who permitted the arrival of the IRGC, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, to Syria for the Iranians to establish camps in Zabadani and for them to support the Lebanese against the Israeli occupation in 1982.
Now, what Hezbollah, Iran, Russia, and Damascus and the Syrian army and particularly the Syrian army, they managed to stop the invasion and the occupation of the jihadist extremists to the country.
This is what they have done.
They haven't, they didn't win in Syria.
I mean, they stopped the others from giving the upper hand to the jihadist extremists, right?
The country is divided because there is still the Turkish occupation in the north.
The American, they have more than 13 military base.
And by the way, they say there are only 500 soldiers and officers maintaining 13 military base.
I don't know how they managed to do that.
They must be all iron men.
And they occupy a part of the northeast of Syria.
They occupy Tanaf.
Al Qaeda is still there.
ISIS is still on the Israeli-Syrian borders.
And Al Qaeda is still on the Israeli-Syrian borders south, on the south of Syria.
So therefore, the war is not over yet.
And we don't know what we are going to do with the 20,000 to 30,000 Al Qaeda that are present there.
So what's going to happen to these?
Are they waiting to see how the political negotiations are going to end up?
We don't know what's going to happen to these.
And we can't start talking about the terrorist Hezbollah invading Syria because they were called by the Syrian government as well as Iran.
And Syria didn't call the Americans, didn't call the Turks, didn't call the 80-plus nationalities fighting in Syria and allowed to cross the Syrian borders from Jordan, from Saudi Arabia, from Turkey, from Iraq.
I mean, all these suddenly we speak about Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, who are now invading the country, who are now the terrorists occupying Syria.
And we want to stop the road between Tehran, Baghdad, Damascus, and Beirut.
By the way, weapons arrived to Hezbollah, as usual, via sea, Tartus, Latakia, and also via land from Damascus airport to Lebanon to supply Hezbollah with weapons.
And that is not a secret.
Right.
In other words, they don't need a land bridge.
They have airplanes.
No, this land link is a commercial link.
It links Tehran to Baghdad to Damascus and to Beirut.
And that is for trucks and for an exchange of goods and supply of food and all the other commodity.
It's not for weapons.
You don't go with a missile from Tehran to Beirut and just you have to cross thousands of kilometers in the desert and then go through the Anbar desert and cross the Syrian desert to reach Damascus and from Damascus to go to Beirut.
I mean, that's crazy.
Yeah.
All right.
I'm sorry.
I'm so over time here.
I got to go.
But I appreciate you coming back on the show so much, Elijah.
Appreciate it a lot.
It's no problem.
All right, you guys, that is Elijah Magnier.
Check out his blog at elijahm.wordpress.com.
And you can follow him on Twitter as well at Elijah M. Let's see.
This one is called ISIS into history's rubbish bin and Iraq, neither Iranian nor American.
Oh, I didn't even get to talk to him about Iraq.
Well, soon.
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