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Sorry, I'm late.
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We know Al Qaeda Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like say our name, been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing the great Eric Margulies.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
And he writes regularly, of course, at ericmargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis, ericmargulies.com and unz.com and lourockwell.com as well.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, man?
Thank you, Scott.
I'm, as always, happy to be back with you.
Great, great.
Man, I'm really anxious to talk with you about this, I guess, or something like that.
It's horrible and everything, but very important.
And your analysis, of course, is, you know, basically can't be beat here.
The Syrian madhouse gets even crazier.
So maybe if we start with Tillerson announcing we're staying in eastern Syria, and then that'll take us to Afrin and the back to the zoo story we talked about a year ago.
Okay.
So, right.
Well, our Secretary of State Tillerson announced that the US is staying in eastern Syria, where we have no business at all.
We're not invited.
We just barged in from Iraq.
And we are now setting up bases in eastern Syria.
He also just said last week that we would be we, the US, would be forming a 30,000 man strong Kurdish militia to, quote, watch, unquote, the border.
This made the Turks crazy, because the Kurdish militias are allied with the Turkish secessionist movement, the PKK, with whom the Turks have been at war for 20 years.
So it's a very messy situation.
And the US is interposing its troops and bases and aircraft right in the middle of an area where the Russians are at the invitation of the Syrian government and where Syrian troops are operating.
So it's a big mess.
So is it possible that this was deliberate that they I mean, obviously, this is going to come to a head at some point.
We've been talking about this for years.
Geez, how soon till we stab the Kurds in the back here?
How soon till the Turks go full scale after them after we help them gain a victory against our Frankenstein monster, the Islamic State that we've turned on now that it's an actual state kind of thing.
And so now that we're at that point, it seems like the Americans almost were deliberately provoking Erdogan.
Yeah, we're going to stay and create this mini state here or, you know, consolidate it.
They seem to be announcing.
And then he announced it was over not only his dead body, but a bunch of Syrian Kurds, too.
Scott, you're you're absolutely right.
So often the Trump administration, I believe, has it out for as it in whatever the expression is for Turkish leader Recep Erdogan is a Muslim.
They don't like him.
He's too independent minded.
And the Israelis don't like him.
And that's the kiss of death in Washington.
So I believe very strongly, but I can't prove it, that the U.S. was behind the 2016 coup, army coup attempt against the Turkish president was then prime minister.
And the the Turks certainly believe the U.S. was behind the coup.
And so we're in a very strange situation where our NATO ally is also becoming our enemy.
And of course, the Russians are in the background clapping away.
They're delighted.
But so I mean, but do you think they were they just underestimated what his response would be to carving out this Syrian?
I mean, I don't know.
In other words, they're in the rock in the hard place where they want to the Americans say, oh, no, Iran is the enemy.
So now that we have this place in Syria where we happen to be, we're going to stay there so that we can pressure Iran and pressure the Assad government.
And yet that place where they happen to be is this new pseudo independent Syrian Kurdish state, which, as you said, is allied with the PKK, the Turkish state's enemy.
And they know all that.
Right.
So they just thought that they were just going to throw this in Erdogan's face and he was going to have to take it or or what?
Well, the guys who knew all that state senior State Department officials have been fired.
You know, the State Department has been gutted under Trump.
Hardly anyone has noticed.
But all the people who understood the Middle East to a certain degree, they used to be called Arabists, have been dismissed, fired and not replaced.
So you have these senior politicians who know nothing about the area, but want to overthrow the Turkish government and be replaced by a more obedient government in Ankara.
All right.
And then, well, so now.
The Americans are just betraying the Kurds again, right, because they're not coming to blows against the Turks, they're just withdrawing and letting the Turks slaughter the Kurds.
It remains to be seen, Scott, I think the U.S. is mobilizing and arming and financing this large Kurdish force, as it was doing before in the fight against this funny ISIS movement, which was started by the U.S. and the Saudis.
And they feel they're useful.
It's all part of a greater plan to splinter what's left of the the Mideast to carve up Syria into different little cantons.
The Israelis are pushing this very hard because they would be the beneficiaries.
And to keep Iran, which is really under American, I'm sorry, Iraq, which is really still under American occupation, keep them quiet and to get ready for a punch up with Iran.
Yeah, I mean, that much was so obvious.
Even if you read the D.I.A. memo, they're saying, you know, look, you're carving out or America's allies.
It it it couches it carefully.
America's allies are carving out this Islamist emirate in eastern Syria here.
But the danger is that it could blow back into Iraq.
And that was what Patrick Cockburn was warning on the show was that, hey, Western Iraq is not really ruled by Baghdad.
They sort of had just been cast off and are drifting now.
And and it's wide open.
The Iraqi army really has no presence or very little presence there.
And as the the Shia government in Baghdad is complaining, American support for the jihad in Syria is re-energizing the Iraqi insurgency here.
And you guys are playing with fire big time.
And we saw this coming from 2011 when the likes of you were very first reporting American intervention in the Syrian so-called uprising there all the way through 2014 when they finally rolled into Mosul.
I mean, just because it's twenty eighteen now makes it seem like, you know, all this happened in a compressed time frame or whatever.
But it sure was a pretty slow motion train wreck at the time, even as that D.I.A. memo says, like, jeez, guys, we could lose Mosul and Fallujah.
We you didn't want it to go that far.
Right.
And then the proof is, no, they launched Iraq War three for three years to drive them back out again.
It's that's why I use the term madhouse in the title, because the U.S. keeps doing the same thing over and over again, hoping that it's going to turn out right.
It is complicating things for everybody.
Iraq is getting ground down to dust.
And yes, the the western Iraq, which is largely Sunni Muslim, where there was great opposition to the U.S., is now on the warpath again, too.
They're fighting the Iraqi government in Baghdad, which is a cat's paw of the U.S. and local collaborators.
The U.S. is buying or renting the local tribes there, as it did in past years during what was called the Arab Awakening.
All right.
So now, do you know, I honestly am a few days behind here on the status of the Turkish invasion of this enclave, as they call it in the media, of Afrin here.
So this is sort of far western Syrian Kurdistan, basically?
As far as Syrian Kurdistan goes, it's the western edge of it, right?
Yes.
And the nearest big city is Aleppo in northern Syria.
So in itself, it's an unimportant place.
It's just a farm town.
But it's become a pub of Kurdish opposition, irredentism against the Turks, who are spitting mad and have now massed troops and sent their forces into Afrin.
They've been fighting there, as you pointed out, for the last three days.
The Turkish army will obviously take over.
It's very strong.
It has lots of armor and heavy artillery.
But the Turks are moving very slowly and cautiously.
Yeah, well, and they're committing their al-Qaeda allies, Obama and Brennan's moderates there, the Al-Nusra Front, who are fighting for the Turks, have been committing war crimes and posting it on Twitter.
I don't know if you've seen it.
But in fact, you might not want to look at it.
I know you're pretty experienced in this kind of thing.
But there's some pretty ugly stuff going on with the, you know, the, I guess I'll go ahead and say, you know, the disfigurement and just, you know, desecration of the corpses of the women fighters of the Syrian YPG, who've been killed by these al-Qaeda terrorists.
And I don't know, you know, if it was before or after they were killed, what happened to them.
But anyway, it's pretty ugly stuff.
And so, but I want to, you think they're just going to take Afrin and hold it?
Or are they going to keep on marching and just kill as many Kurds as they can?
Because at some point, they're going to come up against the American Marine Corps there.
Somebody's got to be coordinating this, right?
The Americans are saying, look, you can kill this many Kurds, but not that many, or what?
Well, that's an excellent question, Scott.
As I said, the Turks are being very cautious.
I mean, the Turks could, the army could roll through there in hours, yet they've been inching forward and doing a lot of door-to-door fighting.
They claim to have killed something close to 300 Kurdish fighters.
And it depends how mad the Turks get.
They're restraining themselves, but they are threatening to move south and squash any remaining pockets of Kurdish fighters.
Hey, people keep telling me, man, you've got great show notes on your show nowadays.
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It's kind of amazing that the Kurdish people at large are not the enemies of the Americans at this point.
We ran this article by Ted Snyder on antiwar.com last week, where he reminds us of Nixon and Kissinger's great betrayal when they supported the Kurds against Saddam.
And in fact, the Kurds wouldn't accept the Iranian help and do their bidding without the American guarantee that we've got your back.
But then when Saddam was really beating them bad and they needed help from Iran, the Iranians left them high and dry.
And then so did the Americans and let Saddam kill, I forgot how many tens of thousands of them.
And that was before we stabbed him in the back when Bush senior urged him to uprise against Saddam along with the Shia in the spring of 1991 after Iraq war one, and then changed his mind.
Oops, Iranians are coming across the border.
We better not do that.
And then stabbed them in the back and let Saddam kill another few tens of thousands of them there in Iraq.
And now here we are.
And we've seen this coming for years too.
As long as we're helping the YPG fight against ISIS, that's surely just a temporary situation until the point it comes up against our alliance with the Turks.
Although, you know, Phil Giraldi joked with me one time that, I don't know, man, the Kurds have oil.
We might just betray the Turks.
They're our best friends.
That's the number one way to get yourself killed.
Another Kissinger quote.
In fact, I think that Kissinger quote comes from him defending himself about betraying the Kurds.
Like, yeah, well, that's what you get for being our friends.
When you're our enemy, at least you know where you stand.
When you're our friend, you never know what's coming.
That's what I used, I think, in my last column.
It's more dangerous being an American ally than being America's enemy.
The Kurds, their motto is no friends, but the mountains.
And they're right.
I have great sympathy for the Kurds.
Our president would say, wonderful people.
Oh, and Bill Clinton abetted the Turkish war against them all through the 1990s too.
I remember really only Noam Chomsky talking about that back then.
I was with the Turkish army in Eastern Anatolia.
I saw it.
It was a brutal fight from village to village.
But, you know, it's a shame because the president, who was then Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey, had just about come to a peace agreement with the Kurds, Turkish Kurds, when the war broke out in Syria.
The American war provoked the fighting in Syria.
And that ended the peace talks with the Turkish Kurds.
It was very complicated.
Kurds make up, I don't know, 17 percent of the Turkish population, and they're very ambivalent about the Turks.
So it's a horrible mess.
I have sympathy for the Kurds and their aspirations, but we've used them shamelessly with not a shred of honor, and it'll happen again.
You know, the Israelis have been arming and supporting the Kurds since 1970 as a way of getting at Saddam Hussein.
So this is an old story.
Yeah.
You know what?
Talk a little bit more about that because this was a big deal in just, I think, the first year or the second year of Iraq War II was that Seymour Hersh article, Plan B, about how Israel decided, oops, that war that we recommended in Iraq and our partisans in America did in Iraq actually ended up empowering Iran rather than weakening them.
That was stupid.
I know.
Well, let's just go ahead and go to Plan B, arming the Kurds and provoking Kurdish secession.
And they've loudly proclaimed every time there's any sort of, you know, they've had this referendum that they finally held, but they postponed it for years and years.
Well, for years and years, the Israelis outright on the front page of the Jerusalem Post, hooray for the Kurdish referendum, do it guys, and have made no secret that this is their agenda.
But so what's the big deal there?
Well, the Israelis are very interested in Kurdistan because they felt that there was first oil there.
And secondly, because they felt they wanted to break the Kurds away from Iraq, thus undermining and weakening the Iraqi state, which has happened, and that the Kurds would become their allies, and that they could build a pipeline, there's been a long and Israeli Julian oil pipeline from Kurdistan right across to the Israeli port of Haifa.
And it would have to go through part of Syria or Lebanon.
So the Israelis have been working on this for a long time.
And their overall, their big picture plan is to splinter the integrity of the Middle East and turn it into weak little cantons like Lebanon became, and leaving them as the big dog on the block.
Yeah, you know, that's so funny when you, I sometimes forget about that for moments at a time, about the dream of oil and a water pipeline from Mosul or that lake, wherever it is right there, to Haifa, from Iraqi, under the control of the Iraqi Kurds, when they don't really control that land anyway, in Iraq.
And then also, they'd have to go through, you know, Sunni Arab dominated land in order to get it there in the first place.
But this was part of, if people, if you read, and Damon put it in the notes, how Ahmed Chalabi conned the neocons.
And this is part of his pipe dream that he sold Wormser and Wolfowitz and Pearl that, oh yeah, you know, the Iraqi Shia, they just love being dominated, man.
That's why they wake up in the morning.
And so what we're going to do, we're going to give them a Hashemite king, like in Jordan, and we'll give them, you know, the king of Jordan's cousin or something like that.
And then, and they'll just take it and they'll help us lord it over the Sunnis.
And then we'll build an oil and a water pipeline to Haifa.
And you can just see Richard Pearl and Paul Wolfowitz going, hot damn, wowee, that'll be great.
You know, these idiots, like how could they possibly have believed that?
But yeah, that's what they thought.
They did.
That was a neocon wet dream.
Amazing.
Just amazing.
The, the unreality, you know, and it's, I forget if it's in A Clean Break or if it's in the companion piece, Coping with Crumbling States.
They're both by Wormser and they're both written for the same Israeli think tank there.
They go together really.
And it's the one where he talks about, we need to expedite the chaotic collapse in Syria so that, so that we'll control the outcome in the future.
And then he even says in there, hey, listen, you know, and this is 96.
So Kobar Towers attack, first World Trade Center bombing era.
He's going, well, you know, it's possible that this will, you know, increase Bin Laden night type terrorism around the region.
But yeah, certainly these nation states are a much bigger deal than that.
We don't have to worry about that.
It's not that big of a deal, but he does acknowledge that.
Yeah, we could have a growth of those kinds of movements.
If we go around overthrowing Iraq and Syria and, and fragmenting Lebanon and all the rest of their plan in there.
Well, you know, back in, I'm a little weak on the dates here, but when Bush was in power, there was the active plan to invade Syria.
And the problem was that they said after they, after they take care of Iraq, they're going to invade Syria.
But somebody with some brains in Washington asked the Bush administration, who's going to put in power?
And they said, and they said, well, the only cohesive political force in Syria is the Muslim Brotherhood.
And the minute the neocons heard the word Muslim, they suddenly blanched white and said, next plan, please.
We don't want that.
And that's why Assad survived.
Isn't that interesting too.
It's just like when Bush senior balked at the uprising in 91, and then Bush Jr. goes ahead and implements it later.
Here, Bush Jr. balks at the regime change in Syria plan, and then Obama implements the exact same plan in 2000.
Well, in fact, I mean, Bush did support the Muslim Brotherhood somewhat according to that Hirsch article, the redirection, but nothing like what Obama did after 2011.
That's for sure.
In fact, Hirsch, Hirsch himself told me that Obama's support for this coup is not even really picking up where Bush left off.
This is a whole new program.
Bush's thing was over long before the, what Obama started in 2011.
And just for the audience's sake, you know, I just want to say Eric Margulies on this show since, I mean, honestly, 13 years ago, 14 years ago, if you go check the archives, you'll find me and this guest currently talking about, well, geez, if they got regime change in Syria, who would come next?
The Muslim Brotherhood?
And this kind of thing, or me asking that question and him giving that answer way back, you know, that long ago.
And also in the summer of 2011, Eric was one of the very first to report that, yeah, the Americans and their allies are intervening in Syria because he just got back from France where he was talking to all the sources there, military and intelligence sources.
And so really on the cutting edge of this story all this time.
And just, you know, look, doing like Einstein, a lot of what Einstein did wasn't hard math problems.
It was just thought experiments.
Well, geez, if we don't have the secular fascist coalition of all the minorities in power in Syria, what do we have instead?
Oh, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Well, maybe that's a bad idea.
Well, they couldn't find another strongman from the Syrian army who was acceptable.
So that would be the normal recourse for the U.S. That's the U.S. You know, the U.S., the first coup staged in Syria by the U.S. was in 1948.
Imagine that.
So far, so long ago, the U.S. cultivated a general named Hosni Zayin, and they put him into power.
And in fact, the Miles Copeland, who was the leading CIA agent there at the time, wrote a delightful book called Game of Nations, recounts in that how they were cultivating Zayin, and he'd come over and drink scotch with the American CIA people.
And they'd go, how you doing, Hosni?
You're a great guy, Hosni.
The minute Zayin took power, the CIA boys came over.
Hiya, Hosni.
And he said, when you talk to me, you will stand at attention and address me as your excellency.
It was a wonderful change.
But we've been mucking around Syria since then and made messes inside of messes, and in the process, wrecked the whole country.
Well, you know, Pat Buchanan likes to point out that Bush Sr. made a deal with Assad, Assad's father, and he actually joined the war in Iraq War One against Saddam Hussein.
I remember.
I remember he was trying to curry favor with America.
He was trying to keep America on America's good side.
And it didn't work.
I mean, this is the important point, right, is that even it seems like from the point of view of the American empire, I'm trying to see it their way, is that, you know, the Assad regime, they were never like Mubarak, where they were basically just a CIA agent sock puppet type, right?
But then again, they torture people for the CIA at the drop of a hat, as Robert Bear said, if you want them tortured, you send them to Syria.
If you want them to disappear forever, you send them to Egypt.
And so, you know, and that was under Bill Clinton and under George W. Bush that Bashar al-Assad tortured people, including innocent people.
So I don't mean that makes him a good guy, but it, oh, and one more thing there.
There have been occasions, I'm sure you know this much better than I, when the Israelis were negotiating with Assad and were ready to even have kind of final peace terms sort of in the nature of what they have with Jordan and Egypt.
And the Americans have intervened and stopped that, which sounds counterintuitive kind of, but you know, the neocons in America, I guess sometimes are to the right of the actual right-wing government in Israel.
But it just seems the point being that this secular fascist murderer dictator in the three-piece suit, we can deal with him.
Whereas it really makes no sense to me really to turn the place into total chaos, because we've already seen what the backlash and the blowback means.
It makes sense to me, I guess, in 1996 for David Wormser to say, well, what are we going to suffer?
A Kobar Towers attack every once in a while?
Screw them, right?
But if you're David Wormser.
But no, we've seen all kinds of, you know, since September 11th, but also all these different attacks across Europe, as you know, direct blowback from the war in the wars in Yemen and Syria, etc.
How can they think that this is, you know, still the clean break policy makes the most sense, when the result is this much chaos?
You know what I mean?
Expedite the chaotic collapse so that we can control the outcome and make it our way.
But that isn't going, the second part never kicks in, you know?
Or else just bomb them flat, which is what we used in Korea during World War II.
And in Mosul and Raqqa more recently.
Yeah, Fallujah, it's always a favorite remedy.
You know, we're actually, we've run low on bombs now, since Trump came into office.
The expenditure of bombs has risen by 100%.
And so factories are now rushing to make more bombs to keep bombing the Middle East.
Bomb the usual Muslims, but do it more.
Mad.
Madhouse is right.
All right.
Well, thanks, Eric.
I sure appreciate your time on the show again, as always.
It's been a pleasure, Scott.
All right, you guys, that's the great Eric Margulies.
The books are War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
And this article is at ericmargulies.com and the Unns Review.
It's called The Syrian Madhouse Gets Even Crazier.
And you know me, etc, etc.com and all that.
