7/16/18 Reese Erlich on Syria

by | Jul 18, 2018 | Interviews

Foreign correspondent Reese Erlich comes back on the show to discuss Syria, the deep state, and President Trump’s foreign policy so far. Erlich explains how the war in Syria has devastated the lives of the Syrian people, and that there are basically no good actors there—the U.S., Assad, Russia, and the rebels have all committed horrible atrocities. Still, lots of Syrians are glad to have Assad’s forces regain territory from the rebels, just because it means an end to the fighting. In this regard, reports of Aleppines happily “celebrating Christmas” have some truth behind them. Erlich goes on to describe an ideological split in the U.S. government: is the main enemy of the U.S. Sunni extremism, or is it Iran? Under President Obama the answer was Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and ISIS—but for Trump, and more importantly the people he surrounds himself with, it seems to be Iran. This has consequences for United States policy toward Syria, because if you see Iran as the main threat, then pulling out of Syria and allowing Assad to reassert control in the region, as Trump has shown inclinations of doing, isn’t such a bad thing.

Discussed on the show:

  • “Netanyahu, Putin, and Trump — Jockeying for Power in Syria” (Common Dreams)
  • “Military to Military” (London Review of Books)
  • “Clinton: Arming Syrian rebels could help al Qaeda” (CBS)
  • “Obama to Iran and Israel: ‘As President of the United States, I Don’t Bluff’” (The Atlantic)

Reese Erlich is a nationally syndicated columnist and the author of Inside Syria: The Backstory of Their Civil War and What the World Can Expect. Erlich’s revised edition of his book The Iran Agenda will be published in 2018. In the meantime read his work at his website and follow him on Twitter.

This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Zen CashThe War State, by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.comRoberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc.NoDev NoOps NoIT, by Hussein Badakhchani; LibertyStickers.com; and ExpandDesigns.com/Scott.

Check out Scott’s Patreon page.

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Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the wax museum again and give the finger to 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 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 us, he died.
But we ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like say our name and say it, 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 Reese Ehrlich.
He is the foreign correspondent, writes that syndicated column which we run at antiwar.com and he's the author of the book Inside Syria and The Iran Agenda Today which comes out in October which is an update of his previous book The Iran Agenda.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing Reese?
I'm doing well, thank you.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show here and when I say foreign correspondent, I really mean it.
You cover all the wars and from the ground and actually put the work in that I wouldn't dare do.
So when's the last time you've been to Syria anyway?
Last time I was right on the border in 2014, six trips to Syria, six trips to Iraq, 10 trips to Iran.
So I've been covering the area for about 30 years.
Good times.
All right, so the latest one at antiwar.com is Netanyahu, Putin and Trump jockeying for power in Syria.
Don't tell me Donald Trump is Vladimir Putin's mind control slave and he's going to give away the whole store to the evil Russkies.
Well yes, of course.
I'm sure that's coming out in tomorrow's New York Times headline along with MSNBC and CNN.
Yeah, I mean it's interesting for all his criticisms of Obama Trump has basically got a failed policy in Syria, Iran and Iraq.
If anything, as bad as Obama's policies were, it's even worse under Trump.
In Syria, the Assad government is reasserting control around the country.
The US has 2,000 plus troops in the north, mainly in the Kurdish area, although not exclusively.
And it's not doing any good.
So the Russians, the Iranians and the Syrian government are on the offensive.
And the US is on the losing end of the war and trying to scramble to get some kind of pressure on Putin that at least so far has not done any good.
Well now, so a year ago Donald Trump called off CIA support for the al-Qaeda terrorists and their friends, Raed Javad al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham and those guys.
So that's pretty good.
Yeah, despite the logic and the lying and the twisting around, to the extent that Trump actually wants to pull US troops out of these bases around the world, I think that's great.
And the problem is he talks out of two sides of his mouth.
On the one hand, he sounds kind of like a isolationist, kind of like someone who opposes US wars abroad.
And then he's a militarist and he wants to turn over all decisions to the military to do whatever they want.
He said that's what they would do in Syria and Afghanistan and so on.
So you don't know from day to day what his policies are or if he's even decided on a policy.
Well, yeah, I mean, never even mind him being Pat Buchanan or anything like that, because he clearly doesn't have the education to be that kind of isolationist ideologue.
I mean that in the best way about Pat.
He doesn't have it in him.
But turn it over to the military is different than just turn it over to the think tanks and the establishment center overall, because there are sometimes divisor.
And we've seen in Syria, for example, that the DC consensus in the CIA is to support Ayman al-Zawahiri's men against Assad because he's friends with Iran and Hezbollah.
And we've also seen how the military has not liked that and has not wanted to go along with that.
As Seymour Hersh reported in his article, Military to Military, Mike Flynn, when he was still running the DIA, was outright insubordinate under Barack Obama and was funneling intelligence to Assad through the Germans to go ahead and target the CIA's terrorists.
Well, I think that the not to get too into the weeds on this, but both the military, the think tanks, the State Department, the Defense Department, they have different factions, and they don't line up one institution against another.
But within each institution, there's competing efforts, ideologies, practical plans.
But I mean, really, or am I wrong?
Or has there really been any any side in the Pentagon who's really favored the support al-Qaeda in Syria approach?
Well, you remember, the Pentagon was funding the rebel...
Ash Carter did, I guess.
Yeah.
Yeah, they've out of the north and coming across the border from Turkey.
And that was a mixture of different groups the US basically created, and then also groups in alliance with the terrorist groups like the al-Qaeda affiliate.
So the Pentagon was up to their ears in all of this as well.
They were all scrambling to find somebody they could back, that would give a credible opposition to Assad.
And it really didn't matter what the group was doing ideologically, what their religion was, if they could put up a credible fight, and weren't shooting at the Americans.
That was the bottom line.
Yeah, I guess there were special forces or special operations forces training the guys in Jordan for the CIA.
Yeah, for the CIA in the south and for the Pentagon in the north.
So yeah, like I wrote in my column, everybody's hands are dirty in Syria.
There's nobody who isn't involved in human rights violations and horrific attacks on civilians, whether it be the US or Assad or the Russians.
Let me ask you something.
This is kind of hypothetical here.
But so what if in 2011, Obama had given a big speech and then had also made it clear through private channels or, you know, I mean, government channels, that he really meant it.
If he had just said, listen, you know what, Assad's a bastard, etc, etc.
However, America only has one priority in the world.
And that's preventing the outbreak of more Iraq-like Sunni-based insurgencies with al-Qaeda and Iraq-like affiliates among them.
And so therefore, we're going to have to insist that our Israeli, Turkish, Saudi, Qatari and Kuwaiti and UAE allies refrain from backing al-Qaeda terrorists in Syria.
I know you don't like Iran.
We don't like Iran either.
But we forbid you from supporting these groups.
Would that not have just been case closed?
I mean, would Saudi have gone ahead and supported al-Qaeda over America's dead body there?
Into the mix, you have to throw Israel and Turkey as well as- I did.
Yeah, no, I mean it.
Yeah, he would have had to include them all and just say, al-Qaeda and Iraq is our enemy, and we don't give a shit about y'all's interests.
That's our interest.
And we're not going to provide them the space to fight here.
I think it would have been a great idea.
But if Obama had actually done that, he would then have had to back it up.
Because each of those powers has economic and political clout inside the US and in the region.
And they would have fought back.
And in fact, they did.
Saudi Arabia started backing groups that the US didn't necessarily want backed.
They didn't put up a strong objection to it, but they did.
So it would have meant the US would have had to have started serious pressure on Israel, serious pressure on Turkey.
And it would have been a real battle.
But I think it would have well been worth it and lots of lives would have been saved and the people of the countries of the region would have been better off.
Yeah.
And I mean, after all, the Americans have more or less gotten along with the Assad family for generations, right?
I mean, they even fought in Iraq war one with George Bush, Sr.
So has the Israeli government.
Netanyahu and his conservative cohorts in the government have noted that Assad presented the most peaceful of its borders from 1967 onwards, or 74 onwards anyway.
And so the, you know, that's why the Israelis now have basically accepted the idea that Assad's going to reassert control in Syria.
And they simply don't want Iran to be too close to their borders.
That's their fallback position.
Right.
So that was the big point.
They didn't make it explicitly today.
But in the press conference between Trump and Putin in Helsinki, they talked about how, well, first of all, they, I think they mostly emphasized some sort of new humanitarian project to help the people and as they put it, to prevent them from going to Europe, you know, as refugees as migrants.
So that was one thing.
Then the other thing was, and they weren't very explicit about what the plan was or anything.
But Trump said, Look, we're talking with Netanyahu.
Putin's talking with Netanyahu.
Netanyahu is talking with us.
We're all talking together.
We're making sure that Israel's security is of the highest importance.
And that's what we're going to do.
It sounded like, yeah, they were reaching a consensus that was somewhere along the lines of what you just said.
They're, they're going to try to get the Russians to use their influence to get the Iranians, maybe out of the country, or at least the hell away from the Israeli border.
And then in exchange for that, possibly the Americans will consider leaving Kurdistan.
I don't know.
What do you think?
Well, this is where you get all the speculation and spin from the U.S. side.
But the Russians aren't going to kick the Iranians out of Syria.
The Iranians, first of all, have strong, they built up pro-Shia, pro-Assad militias.
Folks from Afghanistan and Iraq are armed and trained by the Iranians.
The Iranians have their own relations with Syria, with the Syrian government, going back many decades.
And they're allied with Russia, but Russia does not call the shots.
So that's number one.
And it is absolutely true that the country needs economic rebuilding.
I mean, the country has been devastated.
It's been bombed by five different air forces.
And, you know, whether it be Raqqa, where the U.S. came in, virtually destroyed the city to fight off the Islamic State, or in Daraa, where the Russians have been doing the same against the rebels in the south of the country.
The country needs massive rebuilding.
And frankly, I don't think, certainly Israel is not going to do it.
Trump is indicating he's not going to do it, and the Russians can't or won't.
So that's, that is a legitimate concern.
But one, I wouldn't go for all the spin that Trump and Putin are putting on it.
It's a real serious problem.
Yeah.
I mean, they seem to be saying, and you're right, there's no reason to think this really amounts to anything.
But the way that they phrase it, they seem to really recognize that the country is so destroyed that they're going, the population is going to continue to flee to Europe.
And, you know, keeping Europe white is part of Donald Trump's priority, I think here.
Yeah, he thinks he's doing a favor to them or something, keeping Syria.
So they seem to think, and I guess they seem to be recognizing that it would take a really expensive investment to make any kind of change.
So I don't know.
I'm not saying I buy that they want to follow through on that, really.
But they seem to at least tell each other that, yeah, no, really, we should do something.
It's a good thing to say for international publicity.
If they actually did it, that'd be great.
I just don't think there's any way they're going to do it.
If they did, all the money would just disappear, just like in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Yeah, I mean, you need a really strong international rebuilding effort.
And that's not going to happen anytime soon, if it happens at all.
And the migrants are going to still be outside of Syria, trying to find a better life for themselves.
All right, now, so what about the war taking place down in the southeast of the country?
I actually saw a tweet from Elijah Magnier this morning saying that the jihadis are, I forgot exactly how he said it, but they're basically making arrangements to get on the green buses up to Idlib province.
So Dara is taken then, is that right?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's my understanding.
The Dara, which I had visited earlier and wrote about in my column, it was the city where the rebellion began against Assad back in 2011, and was a wonderful city and full of vibrant people criticizing the government, demonstrating peaceably against the government.
And these right wing extremist political Islamists took over a period of time and had been running the show in that part of the country.
Apparently, they've now surrendered, according to news reports at least.
And I always take that with a grain of salt, but that seems to be what's happening, where it's similar to deals they made to the areas outside of Damascus and elsewhere, which is, you give up your heavy arms, we'll put you on a bus to Idlib province, so your life is spared, and you get to keep your AK-47s.
But we, the government, are going to take over the area around Iran and that part of the country.
And hopefully, that will mean people can return to their homes, because several tens of thousands of people have fled to the Jordanian and Israeli borders in the latest humanitarian crisis.
And I just hope, with the surrender of the rebels, they'll be able to actually return to their homes, if there are any homes to return to.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
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Well, in a lot of cases, they kind of made deals, like town to town, right?
To spare the town, you guys flee the town, and that kind of deal.
I guess there's so much propaganda all around, and you always have a great nuanced take, where you're willing always to sacrifice any sacred cow.
No guilty party deserves protection or spin.
They get none from you.
We know that.
I will sacrifice holy cows everywhere but India, because I can get into a lot of trouble for that.
Oh, yeah.
No, I don't want you to pick a fight with the radical Hindu extremists there.
So TV says, oh my god, it's genocide.
The Syrian state is taking Eastern Aleppo back from Al-Qaeda.
Oh my god, it's genocide.
The Israeli government is taking Ghouta, or Eastern Damascus, back from the Islamic state, or the refugee camps.
And then the pro-Assad forces say, hey, look, everybody in East Aleppo is celebrating Christmas.
They all came home, and everything's fine, and there are no suicide bombers.
That's all anyone wanted, was the suicide bombers gone.
And now everything's totally cool again.
And I got to tell you, it sure seems to me like the truth leans much more toward the latter side there.
But we're seeing these same kind of accusations here about all the people you just mentioned who are having to flee from their homes from the conflict.
I mean, is the Assad government just merciless in their bombing of civilian targets for fun?
Are they, what's the, help us understand.
Sure.
Yeah, I would say neither side is doing things to benefit the people of Syria.
And I absolutely agree with you, there's lots of exaggeration by the U.S. and its allies to show how horrible what Assad is doing.
And by the way, the Assad government does the reverse.
Every rebel, whether they are a civil society activist or an actual member of an Al-Qaeda affiliate, is an evil terrorist who's sponsored by the U.S. So both sides exaggerate for political purposes.
When the U.S. bombed Raqqa in the north of the country and had the Syrian Kurds as their ground troops, there was horrific destruction.
And we're just now starting to see some of the consequences of that as the reporters are allowed in to do in-depth interviews and look at what's happening.
So the U.S. directly, not to mention its allies, have rained horrific damage and civilian casualties in the war.
But when the Russians and the Assad regime and the Iranians decide that they're going to retake an area, they come in and they bomb the heck out of an area.
And it is attacking civilians.
It's not just going after military targets by any means.
It's not genocide.
And that's a very serious accusation.
But we're talking collateral damage in the American system or we're talking about, yeah, kill them all for daring to help support the jihadists or whatever.
I mean, if the U.S. was doing it, it would be called collateral damage.
And that's the argument.
I mean, that is different, right, than the claims.
The claims are that Assad will go ahead and kill everyone on the block because that's what they get for allowing Nusra to be near them or something like that.
Right.
And that's a phony argument.
But I'll give you an example from my direct reporting from the Lebanese-Syrian border several years ago.
There was a fight between the Assad army, the Syrian army, and Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia, were fighting against a ultra right wing rebel group along the border.
And when the Hezbollah troops were fighting, they were basically come out of guerrilla as guerrilla fighters where every bullet counts.
You don't shoot unless you have a target.
And we're very careful in their fighting.
When the Syrian, and I got this from a Hezbollah source, I wrote this at the time, when the Syrian army came in, if there was a single sniper on a building, they brought in the artillery and just leveled the entire building.
So you have to make a distinction with the Syrian army and the Russian air force and the tactics that they're carrying out.
They're simply not trained.
They don't have the equipment nor the political leadership to wage a war that would win the civilians over to their side.
And there's been lots of reports after the Assad government has taken over.
It's not like, oh, welcome back.
Let's reconcile and live in peace together.
It's hunting down people that they don't like.
It's conscripting people into the military and reestablishing the old dictatorship that Assad, that gave rise to the uprising in the beginning.
So I, because the U.S. criticizes Assad doesn't mean that what he's doing is okay.
I think, like I said, both sides have their hands dirty and engage in, not genocide, they engage in reprehensible human rights violations.
Yeah.
Well, so what about the overall take that actually the people of Eastern Aleppo, for example, are perfectly happy to have the Syrian government back and that it was not them that was resisting the Syrian government.
It was just that al-Nusra had taken over their neighborhood and that they were basically hostages and now look how happy they are celebrating Christian holidays, et cetera.
Uh, again, the, yeah, depending on what period the rebels who took over some of these cities early on were popularly based.
They were not the extremist rebels that ultimately ran the show.
By the end of this, by the time the Syrian government came in just in a matter of the last few months and say one year, the extremists had been the dominant force.
And yes, people were happy to see a fighting stop, anybody fighting by anybody.
And two, for sure, they didn't like the extremist groups that were running the show for that time.
Um, so there's some truth in it that people would be more happy to have.
They would have been happy to have any government that wasn't engaging in the kind of horrific, uh, repression that the Islamic state and some of their allies were engaged in.
All right now.
So, but when I talked with say David Enders, for example, um, back in 2011 and 12, uh, at the early parts of the war, he had, you know, I'd known him from covering Iraq war two and he had always distinguished during Iraq war two that look Al Qaeda in Iraq, even as the American military eventually admitted was only ever a small part of the Sunni based insurgency there.
And they'd like to demonize our, they'd like to demonize the entire Sunni insurgency by saying they're all work for Zarqawi and Al Qaeda.
And they're all motivated by terrorism, not simple Iraqi nationalism or whatever kind of deal.
Um, and then, but he always said that from the beginning of the Syrian war, it was just the other way around that the entire war was dominated by Al Nusra, which was just the Syrian dominated faction of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
The veterans of Iraq war two from the very beginning.
I disagree.
I was there in 2011, 2012, 2013.
I interviewed the rebels.
I interviewed the civil society activists in exile and all the surrounding countries, as well as inside Syria.
And from 2011 through 2012, roughly, uh, the two dominant forces were the Muslim brotherhood and what we call the civil society activists.
That is the kind of secular, not, um, uh, religiously motivated folks, uh, who ranged from kind of liberals to revolutionaries on the left.
Um, Muslim brotherhood is not, uh, is not Al Qaeda and particularly the Muslim brotherhood as it existed in Syria, had a popular base.
There's this Arar al-Sham or a different?
No, no, no, no.
Arar al-Sham is a completely different group.
We're talking about the Muslim brotherhood, just like the folks that were in Egypt and Hamas and, and Palestine.
They all came out of the same ideological background.
Uh, now you can, I don't agree with them and I certainly wouldn't have never voted for them, but they were not the extremist groups affiliated with Al Qaeda or any of these others.
And they were the dominant force for a considerable period of time when they had demonstrations after Friday prayers and the people marched out of the mosque to confront the Syrian soldiers and so on.
That was Muslim brotherhood or people kind of loosely affiliated with them.
Uh, they were, uh, defeated politically mainly because the U S Saudi Arabia and others and Turks came in and started backing these more extremist groups and gave me, giving them the arms, et cetera.
And they, uh, the Muslim brotherhood was eclipsed by say roughly 2013 by these other forces, uh, which we now know today.
So, um, what had happened in terms of the dominance of these ultra right wing, uh, rebel groups, that it did not have to happen.
That was something that was in play and we can track that back for, for the reasons I just discussed.
Hmm.
Well, and yeah, still 2013 is pretty early on, uh, in the conflict compared to the Islamic state in Iraq and then Iraq war three and all this now.
Yeah.
And the, and 2013 is when the CIA and the Pentagon got serious about arming the pro U S rebels and made alliances with Al Nusra, et cetera, et cetera.
So that unfortunately has been going on for some time.
Yeah.
Well, we were reading about Al Nusra from at least 2012.
It was the state department that said that Al Qaeda in Iraq is back.
They're calling themselves Al Nusra and they've crossed the border into Syria.
We really got to look out.
And even Hillary at the beginning of 2012, when she was confronted on CBS news for why aren't we doing more in February, 2012, she said, well, I'm in Al Zawahiri has endorsed the revolution in Syria.
Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria?
So she knew by then.
And we actually have the email to her from a few days before a week before where Jamie Rubin said, look, AQ is on our side in this one.
And so anyway.
Okay.
No question about that.
Yeah.
The U S was willing to ally with anybody against Assad.
Yeah.
And, and as Obama said to Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic in almost right around the same time, a couple of few weeks later, I guess, in, in early 2012 to Jeffrey Goldberg they agreed that, yeah, this is all to help take Iran down a peg because Syria is friends with Iran and back Hezbollah.
And that goes back to the question you were raising earlier.
There's two opposing viewpoints that within the CIA, within the Pentagon, within the state department, and so on is Iran, our main enemy or our Sunni extremists, the main enemy.
And for a long time, officially the it was the Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, Islamic state under Trump.
It's the folks who believe Iran was the main enemy have now dominated.
And that's that if you think, keep that in mind, then that helps explains a lot of the decision that Trump is making or may, may make soon, which is you upend a perfectly reasonable nuclear deal with Iran and pull your troops out of Syria despite the fact that the Islamic state may continue to be a problem there.
For example you the do everything you can to attack Syria, sorry, Iran in Syria, but cooperate with the Assad government.
So I'm not putting value judgments.
It really is.
It's, it's just as schizophrenic as Obama's policy of making an Iran deal with Syria and trying to make, I mean, with a deal, a nuclear deal with Iran, while at the same time, ratcheting up pressure on Iran's friend in Syria.
Trump's doing the exact opposite.
He, he takes away the CIA pressure against Assad while at the same time cracking down against the Iranians, while at the same time wrapping up Obama's Iraq war three for Iran and their friends in Iraq.
And keep in mind, neither of those policies helps the people in the United States nor the people in the region, right?
Both policies resulted in war and continued chaos in Iran and to oversimplify it.
Who's the enemy?
You know, Hezbollah didn't attack the towers.
Yeah.
So if you ask, you know, some guy whose son died in Iraq war two, you know, there, well, I guess 500 died fighting Saudi and Shiite militias.
But 4,000 out of 4,500 dead in Iraq war two died fighting the Sunni based insurgency.
Ask them if Iran is the enemy or whether it's still Zawahiri's men, you know?
Well, also you have to have an enemy.
What's consistent, whether it's Obama or Trump, is that you've got to have somebody who's really, really scary, who's a terrorist, who's threatening you with all kinds of weapons of mass destruction, and therefore you justify sending troops and setting up permanent military bases.
That's what those two policies have in common and why I oppose them both.
Yeah.
You know, I want to ask you more about Russia stuff in a second, but in terms of America, Russia, Iran, and all these, and the Kurds and all the different players on the chess board in Syria now, do you think, I mean, it does seem like they, Trump wants some kind of resolution here, if only so he can turn toward Iran.
He wants our guys out of Syria.
Do you think that's what they're really working toward is some kind of deal like that?
I don't know, limit Iran, I already asked you this kind of, but you know, limit Iran to stay further away from Israel's border or something.
Well, they're floundering.
First of all, I'm not sure Trump himself knows what he wants to do.
He lies so much and flip-flops on his policies.
It's hard to know.
The U.S. has got 2,000 plus troops in northern Syria fighting with the Kurds, arming and training the Kurds, but then proceeded to stab the Kurds in the back by allowing Turkey to come in and set up its own bases and take over certain towns in northern Syria.
And the Kurds in response pulled their troops back from the fight against the Islamic State.
So if the U.S. pulls its troops out, it has consequences for what's going to go on.
I think the Kurds will then turn towards Assad and negotiate some kind of greater autonomy and kick the U.S. in the teeth for having kicked them in the teeth.
That only makes sense, right?
What else are they supposed to do?
Because if they declare independence, they're going to be outright crushed by the Turks.
I'm saying all this without value judgments.
Right.
Yeah.
No, I understand.
I'm just asking objectively.
So the standpoint, if you're in Washington, you're in the Pentagon, you know, you pull the U.S. troops out and the whole area goes to Assad.
Oh, my God.
So if you're one of these people who thinks Assad's the main enemy, what a disaster that is.
If you think Iran is the main enemy, well, that's OK.
So Assad kind of reasserts control over much of the country.
As long as Iran is pared back, as long as we can use the Russians against Iran, use Assad against Iran, we're OK.
That's the logic.
If you do not see Iran as the main enemy, then you have to keep the troops there to assert, you know, to keep Syria divided so that not, you know, the last thing you want is a Assad-Russian dominated government in control of all of Syria.
So that's the debate that's going on right now within the Washington ruling circles.
Yeah.
I mean, it's just amazing to think that Barack Obama could have possibly figured out a way to be as bad of a president as George W.
Bush, where seriously, all of this, including the rise of an actual bin Ladenite dream, the Islamic State for three years, and then a new war against that, all to take Iran down a peg.
And all he did was raise him up a peg or two in Syria and gave a whole new excuse.
Trump is competing to be worse than Obama.
Well, yeah, I mean, that's the next question.
It's unbelievable.
It's hard to believe that each successive president could have been worse than the last.
I mean, it's starting with Bush Jr., who was the worst since Woodrow Wilson.
So yes, exactly.
We all thought, what could be worse than Bush Jr. with Afghanistan and Iraq?
Well, we found out, and we're finding out again.
All right.
Well, thanks, Rhys.
I sure appreciate your update on this horrible war and what's going on and look forward to catching up with you again soon.
Glad to do it anytime.
And thanks again for running the column so regularly.
I appreciate it.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right, you guys, that is Rhys Ehrlich.
He is the foreign correspondent.
We run him regularly at antiwar.com.
He writes all over the place.
48hills.org is one for another.
And he wrote inside Syria about the Syrian civil war, and his new one is coming out in October, The Iran Agenda Today.
That sounds terrifying.
All right, you guys, and that's the show.
You know me, scotthorton.org, youtube.com slash scotthortonshow, libertarianinstitute.org, and buy my book, and it's now available in audiobook as well, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
Hey, it's endorsed by Ron Paul, and Daniel Ellsberg, and Stephen Walt, and Peter Van Buren, and Matthew Ho, and Daniel Davis, and Anand Gopal, and Patrick Coburn, and Eric Margulies.
You'll like it.
Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
And follow me on Twitter, scotthortonshow.
Thanks, guys!

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