Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and get the fingered at FDR.
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 hacked.
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 us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN, like, say our names, been saying, saying 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 Charmaine Narwani.
She writes regularly for the American Conservative Magazine, and check out this one.
Are Al-Qaeda affiliates fighting alongside US rebels in Syria's south?
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well, Scott.
Thank you for having me.
Very happy to have you on the show.
I've been reading you for years and years, and I'm not sure why I haven't ever talked to you before, but I'm very happy to have the opportunity to do it, and especially for this very important article here.
So if people are picturing something like a map of Syria in their head, we're talking about the deep southwest of the country now, correct?
That's right.
The south and southwest.
Okay, and so I guess I'll ask you about the east in a little while, but this is not so much ISIS territory, but more like the Al-Nusra Front, or whatever they call themselves this week, and the Free Syrian Army, is that correct?
Yes, this is an area that has been dominated by what they call Free Syrian Army fighters, who are, you know, it's never been a very structured organization.
There's been a lot of fungibility, fighters from different groups moving in and out of various militias throughout this conflict.
So Free Syrian Army is kind of a generic term for opposition militants these days, or as they call them, moderate rebels, in quotes.
And what was interesting about my trip to this area is, in fact, that what Western media portrays as an area full of Free Syrian Army fighters and moderate rebels is an area, in fact, filled to the brim with Al-Qaeda or Al-Nusra Front fighters, who are deeply embedded alongside the FSA.
And the FSA, in this case, are grouped together under the name Southern Front and have been since, I think, early 2014.
And the Southern Front has been funded, supported, armed, trained by a U.S.-led operations room based in Amman, Jordan, called the Military Operations Center, or MOC.
And although we've heard this year that the Trump administration has washed their hands off support of opposition militants inside Syria, when I was in the South just a few weeks ago, all we heard was the MOC.
You know, the MOC is supporting us.
The MOC is paying us.
So I think it's very active, actively still continuing.
I don't know if it's still U.S.-led.
Perhaps Israel takes a greater role these days in the MOC because, as you can imagine, the southwest of Syria is where is the area that borders the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
And so that's a very tender spot for the Israelis.
OK, so, well, let me ask you this now.
Charles Lister, the very pro-rebel analyst and supposed expert, back a few years ago wrote a thing in The Washington Post saying there was a room, he called it, in Turkey, where the U.S. ran at that time what was called the Army of Islam, which was, as they admitted, it was part of the official story, was that, if I'm not confusing it at the time, that Jabhat al-Nusra was sort of pretending to no longer be al-Qaeda, even though they never did renounce Zawahiri or anything like that.
And they were going to join in this larger effort with these other so-called moderate rebel groups and that the whole thing was being run by the CIA out of Turkey.
So I wonder, what's exactly the difference in the roles between these two rooms?
Does the room in Turkey so-called still exist or it's all being run out of Jordan now?
Or what's the deal with that, Dina?
I have to be honest, I don't know a lot of detail about this.
And I'll tell you why.
Because during the Syrian conflict, we've watched a lot of groups emerge.
We've watched a lot of rebranding take place.
We've watched a lot of control centers, command centers, leaders change over.
And it's not been something I've watched.
I'm writing mostly commentary and analysis and sometimes investigative pieces on Syria when I get a chance to go there.
And these are not the things to watch.
I feel like there's a whole industry of mostly young males who have cropped up in this conflict, and I'm sure other ones like Iraq.
It's just I've paid more attention to this one, who become instant experts on various things that they weren't experts on before.
And one of them is just getting really deep into the weeds on what these various groups are, what they're called, what their inspirations are.
And it hasn't really mattered because, as I said earlier, they're entirely fungible.
You know, one moment you're FSA, Free Syrian Army.
The next moment you're ISIS.
One moment you're al-Qaeda.
And the next moment you're Ahrar al-Sham, you know.
So I don't see that it's mattered so much.
Yeah, I do know that there was a control room in Turkey, as there was in Jordan.
So I know the one in Jordan is called MOC.
I think the one in Turkey's acronym was MOM.
I don't know if it's still operational, but I suspect Turkey's taking the lead on whatever is going on there because, in fact, we have a Turkish dispute with their NATO allies on how the Syrian conflict should proceed, mainly because of NATO support for Kurdish militants in the north.
So my focus on this trip was in the south because the northern battle, I believe, is going to be the last one.
And before we even get there, many things are likely to change.
This is a geopolitical battle.
It's not really been one for freedom and democracy, as we're told.
So everybody will be lining up their leverage as we move into the new theater.
And this is what's interesting, actually.
When I got there and I had a chance, this is my first time speaking to a front-line Syrian Army commander general for the south, and, you know, there was a sense that actually most of these big battles are, I guess, their outcomes are determined prior to them commencing.
So when we know that a battle is going to take place, a certain percentage of the fighters are going to reconcile with the Syrian government, a certain percentage of them are going to agree to be bussed over to Idlib or other areas, and a certain percentage of them will fight to the death, right?
And all of this depends on their sponsors from foreign countries, right?
So the same with Daraa.
And we've seen in the last week the entire, let me say, northeast pocket of Daraa province, which is the main one we're looking at in the southern front.
The entire northeast pocket has folded, okay?
How much of it was fought?
How much of these people struck a deal to leave?
It's hard to say.
Militants were willing to strike a deal a few weeks ago, and that suddenly came to an end, very likely because of U.S. and Israeli interference, encouraging them to fight.
And yet again this week that position has changed.
We've heard that the U.S. has issued notices from their embassy in Jordan telling fighters, you make your own decisions based on your family and your own needs.
Don't expect us to come to your support.
So a lot changes there, and everyone's usually jostling for leverage, maximum leverage on the ground before they get into negotiations.
And this is how the battles in Syria are being fought.
Yeah, now as far as the nuts and bolts of which all militia, and you list a bunch in here by name as being part of the so-called Free Syrian Army, I agree with you about the fact that even as the U.S. government has admitted since at least 2012, I think even 2011, that the battlefield is dominated on the so-called rebel side by the al-Nusra Front, and Jabhat al-Nusra is just al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Syrian faction of al-Qaeda in Iraq from Iraq War II, Zarqawi's guys, and who got new life breathed into their movement by American and allied intervention in Syria starting in 2011 there.
I don't think there's much question about that.
What I was really getting at about the room in Turkey was about Trump's involvement.
Like you're saying, there was this huge story in the Washington Post about a year ago that said that Trump has called off all CIA support for al-Qaeda and their friends there.
And I love it.
In fact, the Washington Post says, in a move sure to please Putin, they said that.
And then that's been the question all along.
Is that really right?
And it sounds like you're throwing quite a bit of doubt on that.
And that was why I was kind of bringing up the Turkish role there and that so-called control room up there, is I'm wondering just how closely the CIA, as best as we can tell, has still been involved in this policy all along.
Maybe they just ratcheted up the secrecy a little bit.
That's all.
I mean, it could be.
I do think if I was an American policymaker or a military planner looking at Syria, I would be looking at the South quite differently than the North because my allies to maintain territory in the South are different than the ones in the North.
Completely different political interests.
My goal, let's say, as the American military planner is just to weaken Syria.
So sometimes I don't even care who wins and loses, as long as I've caused enough chaos and destruction to put off a strength in Syria for at least another decade or two, to push that down the road.
So I don't know.
In terms of what you're saying about Jabhat al-Nusra and these groups just morphing and rebranding and stuff, it's true.
I call them in this article al-Qaeda or the Nusra Front because I just sort of decided, gosh, am I really going to go through all their renditions and all their rebranding efforts?
We know what they are.
They've never changed.
They've never really renounced what they were.
And how essential is this group to actually fighting the Syrian government throughout this conflict?
Absolutely essential.
Al-Qaeda or Nusra is the same group, basically, as ISIS, as you said, came over from Iraq.
They have a long-term fighting experience.
They're battle-hardened.
They know how to do this.
They have command structures.
They have leadership, whereas many of the Syrian newbies didn't.
So whenever these Syrian groups sprung up, they were useful, but they were sort of ad hoc groups.
And so al-Qaeda provided the backbone for a lot of these groups, the training, the experience throughout this conflict.
And what Western media and punditry has sought to do over and over again is to kind of obscure where this group starts and that group ends.
At the same time, they've tried to, you know, I pursued a few years ago very much this line of, you know, what is a moderate rebel?
And I asked a lot of U.S. officials, and I never got one answer.
I would literally beg and say, name a moderate rebel group, just one.
The reason they won't is because they know that group tomorrow could commit an atrocity.
It'll be videoed, and that's the end of the program.
You know, so of course al-Qaeda has been embedded alongside these U.S.-supported groups throughout the conflict.
Two years ago when I interviewed a CENTCOM spokesman because weapons provided by the Pentagon's train-and-equip program to the fighters they trained ended up literally a day later in the hands of Nusra.
And I said, how can this be?
And he pretty much said, you know, our job is to train and equip.
It's not to, I put the quote in my article.
I can't remember it.
It's not basically to control and command, okay?
What they do once they get in theater is not really our business or problem.
So it's very much a don't ask, don't tell policy by the Pentagon because they know that their trained and armed rebels are working alongside these groups all the time.
When I was in Syria on this trip, what was interesting for me once I got there learning how present al-Qaeda was in southern Syria was to get up a map that showed where they were in the key areas because basically all the Western maps on southern Syria today are showing you red for the Syrian army, green for moderate rebels, and black for ISIS.
Then where the hell is al-Qaeda in this formula?
Right.
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Thanks.
Okay, so let's go ahead and put a finer point on this treason here.
Because I do have the quote in front of me here.
Lieutenant Commander Kyle Raines told you, quote, And the second point, of course, is it's not just about, well, what they look like, what they say they believe, or whether even they commit atrocities or not.
It's that their commander, Abu Jalani, Abu Mohammed Jalani, I guess, is sworn by it, which is blood oath loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the butcher of New York City, who killed 3,000 innocent American civilians on September 11th.
So they're the enemy.
That's it.
Doesn't matter any other political this, that, or the other thing.
Israel hates Hezbollah more.
It's treason for Americans to back al-Nusra.
Al-Nusra is al-Qaeda.
So, yeah.
And it's amazing that they've been able to get away with this all along when we've known since 2011.
I mean, it was in, I believe it was first reported in McClatchy newspapers in 2011 that the State Department tells us that al-Nusra is just al-Qaeda in Iraq.
So we've known that all along.
In fact, I'm going to go ahead and keep ranting for a second.
When George Bush gave all of Western Iraq to Zarqawi to be his, you know, jihadi university for eight years there, it was the greatest miracle and stroke of luck in the world, right?
That the local Sunni tribal militias got sick and tired of the Zarqawiites and killed them.
And marginalized them down to the tiniest little bit.
And took back sovereignty over their own towns.
And they were pretty much dead and gone.
Until Obama, right at the time he's killing Osama bin Laden, he's taken Osama bin Laden's side.
And then, most importantly, in Syria.
Leading to the saving of al-Qaeda in Iraq from oblivion.
And not just saving them, but in fact blowing them up so big they became the Islamic State.
Literally, the Islamofascist caliphate of Osama and George Bush's propaganda dreams came true for three years there.
We're just talking about the aftermath of that right now.
I mean, this is unbelievable.
It sounds like I'm crazy, except obviously I know what I'm talking about.
You're just the same as you.
You know, I mean, what was astounding is just watching, once we knew al-Qaeda was in theater, just watching Western pundits just try to explain why, you know, we can work with these guys now and we can figure it out later.
You know, just trying to sugarcoat everything and then eventually just, you know, obscure these lines.
And we could see the marketing efforts in front of our eyes.
And it wasn't very hard or difficult to then leap to the conclusion that maybe ISIS was being marketed as the badder group, just so al-Qaeda could do the fighting.
You know, because they were good.
They had the experience.
And I mean, these people, these Americans and the intelligence community and military community who have been ostensibly fighting this hard target for over a decade.
What must they have thought, you know, as they watched the prettying up of al-Qaeda in Syria?
So, yeah, all I wanted to do was put together this article just so I could have the map up there, you know, and just this is...
Let's talk about this map a little bit more.
You got this from what, Kimberly Kagan and the Institute for the Study of War, is that right?
Or where does this come from?
No, this was an effort by, well, through information from different sources in Syria.
And these were the most, like, for instance, I mean, I put triangles where we know al-Qaeda is, but actually those are the areas that...
I'm sorry, I was a bit confused there.
So this map is basically based off of what the war party is saying when they're trying to exclude al-Qaeda.
But then you are filling in that here's what they're leaving out.
Is that right?
Right.
But I mean, generally, the war parties aren't incorrect when they sort of define the areas controlled by Syrian government, the areas controlled by ISIS and those controlled by the militants.
So what I did here was I just went in and said, OK, and all these key areas, strategic areas in Daraa and Quneitra, where the southern battle will be fought.
These are the areas where al-Qaeda isn't just present, but dominates.
OK.
Dominates is alongside the U.S. supported and financed southern front militants.
However, I should note that there are plenty more villages and towns where al-Nusra was present, al-Qaeda was present.
They're not, they're just not necessarily the dominant group there.
And these are the southern front that the U.S. supports consists of about 54 different militias, some of them only around 200 people, others bigger.
So we're looking at maybe up to around 20,000 fighters in the south, probably less.
Those numbers go up, but probably less, you know, because a lot of people have seen the writing on the wall and have been trying to reconcile and they were told they can't anymore.
There are a lot of people looking to get out by the time I've gotten into into Daraa to see what was going on in the field.
But yeah, al-Qaeda is everywhere there.
And on your map, you also show some Islamic State fighters as well.
Yeah, that's not my doing in particular.
That's what everybody defines that area.
I think there's agreement, consensus that that's where they are.
By the way, a number of the southern front, the U.S.-backed southern front groups have over since 2014 when the mock was established, have gravitated towards and moved towards joining ISIS and ISIS-affiliated militias.
So again, a lot of fungibility there.
Some of it ideological, but a lot of it throughout this conflict has been movement based on where the money and the weapons are.
Right now, so in the time left, can you talk to us a little bit about the Israeli role here?
So Israel's panicking and has been for a while because the idea of weakening Iran by destroying Syria or partitioning it has fallen apart.
As the Syrian army and its allies goes from strength to strength on the ground.
And suddenly in this last year, you've had the Lebanese army alongside Hezbollah kick out Nusra and ISIS from eastern Lebanon.
You've had Hamas in Gaza come back into the Iranian camp, okay, leaving the sort of very Sunni Islamist camp.
They inhabited just a few years ago.
You have Syria gaining strength and beating down the militants, including ISIS.
Israel's panic started when the Syrian army kind of swayed through ISIS territory last year.
So Israel's goal in this conflict was not just to weaken Iran, but also more territory gains, okay, to have influence over larger areas and to gain a buffer in the south of Syria.
We know this as a starting point.
Who knows what their larger ambitions were.
That's all shrunk very quickly.
There's no way Israel can keep any of this area in the south because the so-called rebels are surrounded, I think.
So Iraq's borders are strengthened, right?
The Syrian army is coming from the east and from the north to push these rebels in more tightly in this southwestern pocket.
Jordan from the south doesn't want anything to do with these militants trickling over their border and, in fact, wants to open the Nasib border crossing, which was a huge source of economy for Jordan.
And as we've seen, Jordan in the last month or two has experienced riots and a lot of instability.
So they need economy to start up again.
They're not getting that money from their allies in the way they hoped.
And so from Jordan, from Iraq's side, in terms of Lebanon, in terms of Gaza, Israel is in a tighter position than it could have possibly anticipated.
There has been a lot of unforeseen consequences for Israel.
And so while I think Dada will be fought very easily, relatively, as we get closer to the border with Israel, the negotiations will be harder and the fight will be harder.
Because these mock militants, these MOC, U.S.-backed militants, and I mentioned this in my article, among the first rules they must abide by is they are not to go near the Israeli border.
They're not to allow anyone to go near the Israeli border.
Israel's interests are at the forefront of what the U.S. command center is thinking in Jordan.
So we have seen the eastern part of Dada in the last week fall out of rebel hands very quickly.
As we move further west to the Israeli border, that battle will get harder.
We may see Israeli strikes.
We might see negotiated settlement.
Israel's kept its presence in this battle front and center by claiming that Hezbollah and Iran are in the southern theater.
From my impressions there just a few weeks ago, that was not the case at all.
Almost any party I spoke with, including militants, sorry, recently reconciled militants from the FSA, one who had fought with Nusra as well.
Iran and Hezbollah weren't on their minds, and they weren't present in the south.
I did hear from a Syrian army commander that, I mean, we're talking just a handful of Hezbollah consultants operating that theater.
And this lines up with a lot of what different people are saying as well.
I did hear that the Israelis were going to keep harping on about the presence of Iran and Hezbollah in the southern theater so that they could at least try to claim some victory when they lost the south, saying at least we got rid of these parties.
But the fact is they haven't been there.
Yeah.
It sounds like maybe it's half that and half that's their excuse for backing the al-Qaeda, the guys against Assad's army there anyway.
And it does sound absolutely incredible.
I like to show people the little talk with Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States under Netanyahu, and at that time just retired back in 2014.
He just retired in 2013 from that job.
And he told the Jerusalem Post, and then he also says on video in this talk with Jeffrey Goldberg that, hey, if it comes down to the Sunni evil and the Shia evil, we prefer the Sunni evil.
And this is actually in June of 2014, two weeks after the fall of Mosul and Baghdadi declaring the caliphate from the balcony and everything.
And two weeks after that, Michael Oren says, well, from the Israeli point of view, we prefer these guys to those guys.
He refers to the worst.
He doesn't say moderate rebels.
He says ISIS.
He goes, don't get me wrong, they just slaughtered 1,700 Air Force cadets in the field out there in Iraq.
They're terrible, but I still like them better.
Why?
Because Hezbollah's backed by Iran.
And he lies and says that Assad killed every single person who's died in the war so far.
And he lies and says that Iran has military nuclear technology, which they could transfer to Hezbollah.
And so that's his excuse.
And then you have a quote in here better than even the Israeli ambassador.
Here's the defense minister in your article in 2016.
So even two years after that, into the Islamic State, he says, in Syria, if the choice is between Iran and the Islamic State, I choose the Islamic State.
Yeah.
And, you know, as we got closer, I went right to the border with the occupied Golan Heights to a village called Hadar, a Druze village.
And this is a five kilometer strip of the entire border with Israel all the way to Jordan that is controlled by the Syrian army.
OK, so the Israelis and Al-Qaeda control 60 kilometers and the Syrian army only five.
And so Al-Qaeda storms this village.
This is in November of last year.
And the Druze in this village report that they're seeing from the hills around them that is occupied by Israel and the Golan, right?
They're seeing fire.
Basically, Israel is lending firepower to Al-Qaeda, OK, as Al-Qaeda is trying to storm this Druze village.
And it was it was a fantastic story because I went to Suwayda as well, which is further away from the battlefront.
It's been a relatively stable area, very heavily Druze.
People have said in this conflict that the Druze are taking a back seat.
They don't want to be involved.
They're taking a neutral position.
My God, that wasn't true.
I have to go back because what I heard was so untrue from what I read.
And it's really been an underreported story.
I need to go back to make sure I'm correct.
But the Druze I met were like literally got in their cars and drove across Dara'a, OK, into Quneitra to come fight Al-Qaeda and help their Druze brethren.
Right.
There were so many cars that came they couldn't even get into the hilly town entrance.
On the other side, on the Golan border, you have Israeli occupied Druze who rushed the fence.
OK, just rushed.
Everybody got out of bed, just rushed the fence, threatening to go fight Al-Qaeda.
You know, so Israel's got itself into a real pickle on that border.
They have support Al-Qaeda throughout this conflict.
Everybody who's around there knows it and seen it.
What are they going to do afterwards?
What are they going to do with these people?
You know, they have a huge unintended consequence with the Druze community.
And this really needs to be played up a little bit because the Druze now have pictures of Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, in their homes, in villages in Suwayda.
I witnessed this, you know.
And they're talking about, they're ready to go on back.
I mean, there's fire in their bellies over what Israel's done.
Consequences from foreign policies?
Israeli ones?
I can't believe it.
Yeah, no, and listen, these sound like fantastic claims, even though it's just the plain old truth.
And so the burden is on us.
So we should go ahead and say that anybody can read all about this in Haaretz, or the Jerusalem Post, or the Times of Israel, or the Wall Street Journal, or I'm not sure about the Times and the Post.
But this has certainly been broadly covered by as mainstream journalists as you need.
Here's even, I think, Netanyahu himself meeting with these wounded soldiers, being treated, soldiers, Al-Qaeda shock troops, being treated in Israeli hospitals.
In fact, at one point, I think, some Israeli occupied Druze shot up an ambulance to prevent it from bringing the wounded Al-Qaeda guys back into Syria, and to make a PR event out of it.
Yeah, and one of the interesting things, and I think I mentioned it in this article, it was also my first time meeting with reconciled militants.
And in full, I didn't expect it.
They were talking to Syrian army soldiers, etc.
This is a properly reconciled village, and some of these fighters said, if they hadn't cut our support, or if they hadn't reconciled, if we hadn't been sold out, we'd still be fighting these guys now.
It wasn't all peace, but there was a peace of sorts.
And I got a chance to go off and speak to some of these people, and I heard that one of them told me, in the last year, before reconciliation, we were getting $200,000 a month from the Israelis directly.
You know, it shocked me.
Israel is taking a huge role along that border.
And if there have been any delays in the southern fight, and any propping up of Al-Qaeda, you can bet there are Israeli hands all over that.
But unfortunately, we're not going to get a chance to read about it in the Western media, so look a little bit further.
As these things get sorted out, reporters can go more easily into these areas, and I believe we will have the Al-Qaeda-ISIS story, and the various collusion stories with these terror groups, seeping out over the next few years as the conflict winds down.
And God knows what kind of terrorism we're going to have as a reaction when those survivors of ISIS and al-Nusra go back to where they're from.
I mean, if Al-Qaeda comes from the leftovers of the Afghan war, and the Libyan and Syrian wars come from the guys who came home from Iraq War II, well, what about all the guys who are going to come home from the Syrian war, and Iraq War III?
I don't know if this sounds nuts, but I don't feel like there is such a terrorism threat.
Whereas when these groups started organically, way back when, they had this ideology, etc.
They were largely snuffed out, or beaten down rather, and in that process they became pragmatic.
So their software is different.
There are many parties now in the West, and in the Gulf, for instance.
They know how these groups work, and they're working with a much more pragmatic version of these groups, who are obviously willing to work on the same side as the United States and Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Well, to accept America working on their side.
Let me ask you this then.
I have a theory, and I hope I'm wrong about it, but it seems to me like Iraq War III proves that Zawahiri was right all along.
That you have to attack the far enemy, you have to bog the Americans down in a war, bleed them all the way to bankruptcy, and force their empire out, and only then can you create your caliphate.
Baghdadi jumped the gun, and look what happened.
Exactly what Zawahiri said.
And so I'm worried that America just really proved him right.
Well, you know, I mean, I don't see why he would be wrong, because actually all empires, don't they fall because of military overreach?
Right, and he's just trying to hasten that process, right?
And he was always saying, you can't create a caliphate because the Americans will bomb it.
So we got to get the Americans all the way out, and only then can we move forward, right?
But for now, fight them and antagonize them.
Yeah, but American policy changed.
It's no longer U.S. bodies, right?
It's native bodies used to fight these wars.
Right, and robots.
But it still costs money, so you can drain empire different ways.
Right.
Which I think Syria has, actually.
And Syria is, I mean, this is an important story.
You don't have to be into the nuts and bolts of what's happening in Syria, but surely people are realizing that the world has changed on the back of the Syrian conflict.
We went from a unipolar world to a multipolar one.
And I believe this is the kind of theater, this is World War III, because the outcome of world wars are a rebalancing of global power.
And that's what's happened as a result of this conflict, whether we've identified it as World War III or not.
Because face it, World War III was never going to be fought in the way the first two world wars were fought, because they're nuclear weapons now, right?
So they were going to be fought in perhaps hybrid situations.
But on the back of the Syrian conflict, the entire balance of power globally has shifted, and there is a new paradigm.
So this is an important conflict for people to watch right through to the end.
Well, it's an important enough scandal, too, that it ought to be, and maybe it's part of the shift of power in America, too.
I mean, Hillary was saying, no fly zone, and basically still pushing regime change here.
And I know most people don't understand it well enough to see it this way.
But essentially, they are committing, they were, especially in the Obama years, it sounds like you're saying it's continuing, committing treason.
And backing those loyal to Zawahiri against Hezbollah, because that's what Israel wants.
And that's the kind of scandal that ought to be big enough to bring down the entire U.S. national security state.
How can these people take a mandate of get Osama dead or alive and use that as an excuse to back Osama against some other country's enemies?
It's crazy.
I don't, you know, is there a U.S. national security state that's on the same page?
I don't know.
I mean, as an observer.
A million employees of it with all of their own interests, that's for sure.
Yeah.
So this is the problem.
I mean, in Syria, you know, sometimes you'd see in the newspaper saying, what is U.S. foreign policy to Syria?
Because it was it was complicated.
State Department, White House, Pentagon, CIA, within those institutions, different thinking.
And so there was nothing coherent.
But I've come to see the U.S. foreign policy and military establishment as a big dinosaur with a small brain.
OK, so now there's it's there are too many inputs, so nothing can get done decisively.
And this is outside the foreign policy realm as well.
Right.
Even in domestic matters, it can't.
There's too many interests keeping the status quo in place.
So the dinosaur plods along to its demise, you know, without being able to fundamentally shift its trajectory.
And and and everyone right to the death fighting for their own interests.
I don't think U.S. interests were being considered in Syria in some way.
Perhaps if Iran was the enemy, OK, let's weaken Syria, etc.
But at a certain point that was gone very early on this conflict.
They needed to step back and and and maybe, you know, do what Obama did, a nuclear deal with Iran.
Asia's rising.
Do we really not want to be part of the economic story?
Just reshift our thinking on things.
And that just didn't happen in seven years of Syrian conflict.
And I still don't see the U.S. getting off its trajectory.
I see no place for it to go but down.
All right, you guys, that is Sharmin Narwani.
She writes regularly for the American Conservative magazine.
This one is called Are Al-Qaeda Affiliates Fighting Alongside U.S. Rebels in Syria's South?
And I'm not sure why the headline was phrased as a question.
But anyway, read her great article.
That's at TheAmericanConservative.com.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much, Scott.
All right, you guys, and that's the show.
You know me, Scott Horton dot org, YouTube dot com slash Scott Horton show, Libertarian Institute dot org.
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