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.
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.
Aren't you guys on the line?
I've got Daniel Lazar again, writing for ConsortiumNews.com.
This one is called The Memo That Helped Kill a Half Million People in Syria.
Welcome back to the show.
Daniel, how are you doing?
Very good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Happy to talk to you again, man.
And well, I like it when people write about the important true history of the beginning of the Syrian war.
And that's certainly what you got here.
So which is this memo in question, please?
Well, the memo was written by a guy named James Rubin, who was a very high-ranking State Department official under Hillary Clinton.
He happens to be the husband, or he was until recently, of Christiane Amanpour, the CNN news host.
And the memo simply just urged that the U.S. take concrete action to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
And it outlined what it thought the consequences of that action would be.
And those consequences were all uniformly wonderful.
Peace would spread throughout the Middle East.
America would be hailed as a liberator.
The Syrian people would be so grateful they'd enter into peace negotiations with Israel.
The lion would lay down the lamb.
A rainbow would spread across the entire region.
It would be just wonderful.
And needless to say, that's not quite what happened.
Well, it sounds to me like you're just jealous because you don't have access to the really good drugs that this guy is taking.
Precisely.
Exactly right.
That is so true.
Oh, man.
How dare you?
No, seriously.
So, yeah, no, this is a real thing.
And so I like the background story here about how this came out.
It's, you know, of course, in the WikiLeaks.
And I just happened to be trolling around on Twitter one morning, as used to be my exception.
Pardon me, my obsession before I kicked the habit cold turkey.
And I was watching David Kenner, who was at that time the publisher or editor of ForeignPolicy.com, accuse Julian Assange of plagiarism for stealing this article and putting it out as some kind of fake State Department thing and accusing Hillary Clinton of writing it.
And he essentially says, well, but I did no such thing.
And they say, well, why is the date wrong?
And he says, because the date was wrong on the document.
All I do is print these things.
I don't have anything to do with anything.
And I certainly didn't plagiarize anything.
And I demand you take that back, sir.
And this kind of thing.
And I sat there and watched this happen.
And then I forgot where I found that there was a separate link to a separate page.
That's Jamie Rubin's actual text of his email to Hillary Clinton saying, here's this article I wrote.
Here's this thing I want you to see.
And really the entire frame of reference is because this is what's good for Israel.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
I mean, I don't want to be a conspiratorialist and say that Israel runs U.S. foreign policy.
This is not entirely true.
But nonetheless, since 1948, the U.S. has made protecting Israel's security its top priority, no matter what the consequences for the rest of the region.
So this is a case where the U.S. was just thought nothing of taking out a national leader like Assad, because Israel wanted it to do that.
And it assumed that everything would be hunky dory afterwards.
And I just must stress that everything was not hunky dory.
More than half a million people died in the ensuing civil war.
Something like $200 billion worth of war damage was done.
This in a country where the per capita income is around $2,500 a year.
You know, massive, massive, you know, retrogression in terms of social conditions.
Six million people driven overseas as refugees.
It's just a horror show.
And to see, to think that this is the kind of logic that was that was resonating in the Clinton State Department is extraordinary.
Thank God we didn't know she did not make it into the White House.
Well, you know, that's the thing of it, too, is never mind a reasonable person.
But I just mean, I can understand why a Washington, D.C. person might buy into something like this at the dawn of the terror war era, caught up in all the consensus over the threat of Saddam Hussein.
I mean, after all, let's be honest, the whole thing was laughable to 150 million Americans who knew better at the time.
But anyway, just in terms of D.C., I could see how all of those people went along with this thing.
But after Iraq War II, supporting Sunni based insurgencies, just like the kind that we just finished fighting with bin Laden nights as the radical edge of it in Iraq War II for years, that killed 4,000 out of 4,500 of the American soldiers that died in that war, died fighting that Sunni based insurgency.
And for them to turn around and support such things directly in Libya and then in Syria is you can't just plead, you know, kind of naivete, just Jamie Rubin style on that.
These guys all knew better.
They had to have known better.
Well, they were they were they were they were hooked.
They were addicted.
I mean, I mean, bear in mind that the that the the role the Clintons played beginning in the mid 80s when I when Bill Clinton essentially broke right to the Democrats and supported the Reagan administration's aid to the Nicaraguan Congress.
I mean, the Clintons have seen their their mission as essentially stiffening up the spine of the Democrats, of essentially doing away with the Vietnam syndrome and and making the Democrats, you know, embrace war once again.
For a brief period, the Dems had emerged as the as as the Peace Party.
But Clinton, the Clintons thought that was a disaster.
That was disastrous politically.
So their goal was to put the U.S. put the Democrats on a more martial footing.
So essentially, essentially, that meant that Clinton, both Clintons, would embrace every war, domestic and foreign, that came down the pike.
The war on crime, the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, the invasion of Panama, the Balkans, the Persian Gulf War, you know, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc., etc., etc.
Hillary could not say no to war.
She spent the better part of her adult life fighting in favor of war.
This is how she lost to Barack Obama, plain and simple.
And she knew it.
And then she joined his administration the whole time.
She pushed, got to escalate in Afghanistan, got to do the regime change in Libya.
It was clear that Libya, especially before Syria, was supposed to be the centerpiece of her 2016 campaign.
I mean, that's how she pretty much bullied Obama into letting her do it, was she was going to run on this muscular foreign policy.
And you can see how, even after the disaster there and she stopped playing up Libya, she quit bragging about Libya pretty quick there after the real results for 2016.
But she still had this one-dimensional, not even two-dimensional mindset about this, where she thought up until the day of her defeat, she thought that by being a worse warmonger, she was appealing to all the moderate Republican Robert Kagan's out there.
And Robert Kagan really likes her and gives her positive feedback about this.
And she says this is how she can appeal to Republicans, is by being a warmonger.
Even though Republicans, all of them, no matter what she says about any foreign policy, Republicans just hate Hillary Clinton.
There was no way she was going to flip Texas, flip Arizona to blue by being a more Kaganite hawk.
She thought that was going to work in the summer and fall of 2016 and only still found out the hard way and maybe still doesn't understand that's why she lost.
Because here she is on Twitter attacking Donald Trump for wanting to get out of Syria.
And she was also in the summer of 2016 still calling for the imposition of a no-fly zone over Syria, which would essentially have been a Libya too, in which the U.S. would have launched an air war not against ISIS but against the Syrian government.
Now, she just couldn't say no.
She can't say no.
And then after her campaign floundered, I just read and went through literally dozens of campaign slogans, each one emptier than the preceding one, she finally hit on the one issue she felt comfortable with.
And what was that?
Ratcheting up tensions with Russia.
So this is a one-trick pony.
This is a woman who knows how only to sing one tune.
And that is an increasingly bellicose foreign policy with regard to whomever or whatever is the enemy du jour.
So it's Bashar al-Assad one year, it's Vladimir Putin the next.
Now, the phone lines are jammed, but they have a pretty good email system there at whitehouse.gov.
Email me, scott at scottwharton.org when you do.
And Derek Sheriff at Listen and Think Audiobooks will give you two free ones for your effort.
All right.
So back to her actual time in office as Obama's Secretary of State and particularly on Syria policy here.
2012 is regarded as early in this thing.
Although 2011 is much earlier.
The beginning of 2011 is when the Arab Spring broke out and the big protest movements in Syria, which quickly turned violent and all the rest is history there.
So she was still in office through 2011 and 2012.
She didn't leave until January 2013 in the beginning of the second term there.
But so I have this clip and people who listen to this show regularly are familiar with this from the opening montage there.
And it's Hillary Clinton being interviewed in February, the end of February 2012 on CBS News.
And we all know and she's bragged since, of course, as we talked about that she had the more hawkish position here.
But she's defending Obama's position from the CBS interviewer who is taking the more hawkish line that why aren't we doing enough to overthrow Assad in Syria?
So this is only going to take up about a minute of your time.
But I think it's worth listening to here real quick.
It's not even it's like half a minute.
We know Al Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria?
Hamas is now supporting the opposition.
Are we supporting Hamas in Syria?
So I think why, you know, despite the great pleas that we hear from those people who are being ruthlessly assaulted by Assad, if you're a military planner or if you're a secretary of state and you're trying to figure out do you have the elements of an opposition that is actually viable, we don't see that.
So there you go.
She knows from the beginning of 2012 at least and we know from the other emails and I forget if these were the WikiLeaks or the ones that Jason Leopold got from the Freedom of Information Act from the State Department or which.
But there's another one of her flunkies.
It's not Ruben.
It's I always get the State Department guys names mixed up.
Sullivan, I think it's Jake Sullivan, sends her an email and says, look, boss, AQ is on our side in this one and it has a link to a news story about that.
And this is actually approximately two weeks, I believe it is, earlier in February before that interview.
So it's a reasonable assumption there that she had exactly that email on her mind, that news from that story on her mind that Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of Al Qaeda, the butcher of New York City, that he wants us to overthrow Assad for him.
And then she turns around, right around and explains, we really don't have anyone to stand up that could stand between these Al Qaeda guys and the future if we got rid of Assad and created a new regime.
So, geez, what do you expect me to do, CBS man?
And so that should have been the end of the argument and she's the one making it.
Sorry, but what's the dang deal?
Well, what happened is she overcame her scruples and decided to overthrow Assad despite the bad company that it meant she would keep.
But look, I mean, the U.S. essentially has been on the side of Al Qaeda since Afghanistan.
I mean, America's partners, or chief partners, are Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Saudi Arabia is kind of Al Qaeda-lite.
And Israel, which sees Hezbollah and Iran as its primary enemy, has always tilted toward Sunni fundamentalism and regards that as the lesser of two evils.
So the U.S. finds itself in the same bed with Al Qaeda time and again.
It started back in Afghanistan in the 80s and it continued on into the aughts and the teens.
This is just simply the way U.S. policy has worked out.
All right.
Well, I'll go ahead and ask it because otherwise we're just arguing all the way around it.
Was there or was there not a break there?
Obviously, Bill Clinton was supporting Al Qaeda's side in Bosnia and in Kosovo in the 90s.
And there's some mucking around with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group against Gaddafi at the very early 2000s there.
But what about the Africa embassies and the coal and September 11th?
Is that all an American-Saudi plot too?
Well, no, I'm not a conspiratorialist.
I don't believe that the U.S. rigged the Twin Towers, the CIA rigged the Twin Towers with explosives or anything crazy like that, or that Assad somehow blew them up in some kind of Zionist plot.
I don't believe that.
I think that what happens is that 9-11 was a serious case of blowback where the U.S.'s policies exploded in its face.
But the U.S. response was not to reconsider those policies in any fundamental way.
It was sort of try to cover things up and to sort of try to restore the status quo ante as best it could.
I mean, the CIA and FBI covered up Saudi Arabia's role in 9-11 with, by the way, with Robert Mueller playing a leading part in that cover-up.
Robert Mueller, the same man who's pursuing Russiagate right now.
The U.S. did its best to cover up the Saudi role, to put U.S.-Saudi relations back on a good level.
I mean, George W. Bush practically begged King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to visit him at his ranch in Texas, which the king finally said yes to in April 2002.
And when some reporters were brave enough to ask Abdullah about the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, Bush angrily cut the reporter off.
So the U.S. is very protective of the Saudis and very unwilling to get to the bottom of the Saudi-al-Qaeda-Israeli relationship.
Well, and this really goes right to—it's the most obvious thing to people who know anything about this, but to people who are kind of new around here, this gets right to the point, right, that the reason that we got attacked here was because these same groups that America and our Saudi government allies had been backing hated us for being too close to their government and supporting their government that they wanted to overthrow and replace.
And so they were taking it out on us and trying to get us to replicate the Russian war, bleed us to bankruptcy, and force us all the way out over the long term to accomplish those goals.
But then that means that none of the hijackers were from Iran, Iraq, or Syria, the axis of evil.
They were all from America's allied states, primarily Saudi and Egypt and other—UAE.
And so—but that means, as you're saying, ironically, in the whole terror war and in the whole sectarian war over there, that's put USA on the side of the Sunnis generally and the al-Qaeda suicide bombers specifically in many cases.
And this also, during Iraq War II is the exception to that, when the Americans put the Shiite side in power, and then they've been fighting ever since to make up for the fact that they really lost influence there and scored one for the Iranian side.
But even during then, when the Americans and the Shiites were fighting the Sunni-based insurgency in Iraq War II, the Saudis were backing the Sunni-based insurgency and Zarqawi's guys against us.
Yes.
I mean, U.S. policy is nothing if not incoherent.
I mean, it's amazing.
It's an amazing— Well, no.
I mean, I think we've established it's perfectly consistent.
It's just completely contrary to the interests of the American people.
Yes.
Yes, of course.
But it says one thing and does another.
I mean, I don't even know if the people in Washington are even able to get this straight.
Look, I mean— Yeah.
I think that's right, too.
The war in Afghanistan was a great success.
It not only did it drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan, but it played a key role in the toppling of the Soviet regime.
That made the CIA very happy.
And by the 90s, the CIA was talking about using the same techniques in broader and broader ways, to—in the Caucasus, for example, to roll back Russian power, and in Sinkiang in Western China.
These discussions were quite frank and quite open.
So the U.S. thought it really had hit upon a real miracle cure in this kind of Wahhabist fundamentalist jihad.
You know, Eric Margulies says that he saw CIA training camps essentially alongside or in the same sort of milieu as al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan in the summer of 2001, where they were training Uyghurs for use against the Chinese.
I have no doubt that is the case.
I mean, the CIA, the USA are just wed to these techniques, and that's what happened.
So 9-11, the U.S. is playing with fire and got itself very badly burned in 9-11, but it didn't want to abandon this policy.
So what could it do?
It waged war on al-Qaeda very narrowly, but did its best to cover up the role of its chief allies in fostering al-Qaeda, and that being Saudi Arabia.
I mean, to me, I guess I don't know what else to do, but it seems like this is really one of our very best arguments about this, is just teaching who's on whose side here, and why after the Americans have done so much of this to spite the Iranians and their Shiite friends, that everything that they have done, these same hawks have done, has actually only empowered Shiite forces, such as in Iraq and now in the blowback from the war in Syria.
Syria has strengthened Iran and Hezbollah's position there in the Levant, that no wonder that they're going insane, throwing a temper tantrum now and saying that we have to stay in Syria to pick a fight with Iran and all of this kind of thing, because they're trying to make up for the consequences of the last almost 20 years of their foreign policy now, virtually all of which has played in the hands of the Ayatollah.
Even in Yemen, where Iran has almost no say in what's going on there and virtually no role other than maybe some low-level financing or something, they get credit from the Americans for every one of the Houthis' accomplishments in this four-year war this whole time, and so have essentially expanded their position, at least in terms of public relations there, without spending a dime.
Yes.
So if you were a neocon, you would be going completely nuts, too, right?
Yes.
Which I think explains their recent behavior.
Yes.
I think it's this iron triangle of the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia, which is the key to understanding U.S. policy in the Middle East.
I mean, the U.S. can't in any fundamental way break relations with these two countries.
It's wedded to Saudi Arabia.
It's like a bad marriage, but one you just can't break.
And consequently, it finds itself wedded to Saudi Arabia and to all its emanations, which includes Sunni jihad.
I mean, Saudi Arabia is a jihadi state.
They are surrounded by a ring of fire.
They have engaged in violence against all their enemies.
Syria, Bahrain.
Oh, their neighbors.
Syria, Bahrain, Iran, and Yemen.
There is not one country Saudi Arabia is at peace with.
And the U.S. essentially finds itself dragged into these fights, despite 3,000 dead people in lower Manhattan in September 11, 2001.
The U.S. just can't kick this habit.
Yeah, man.
All right.
And so I want to recommend, because this was just a subject of discussion in my Reddit group the other day, is your article, Is Saudi Arabia the Middle East's Next Failed State?
That's from last October, and that's also at Consortium News.
And this one is brand new at Consortium News.
The memo that helped kill half a million people in Syria.
A great look at the thinking behind Hillary Clinton's policy and Barack Obama's policy in the start of the war in Syria there.
Thank you very much, Dan.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
