For Pacifica Radio, January 20th, 2019.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the author of the book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and editorial director of antiwar.com.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 4,800 interviews now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org.
All right, you guys, introducing the great Gareth Porter.
He wrote Manufactured Crisis, the truth behind the Iran nuclear scare, and he writes for Truth Out, Truth Dig, the American Conservative Magazine, and of course, antiwar.com, and all over the place, you can find all this great work.
Most importantly, he wrote this thing at TAC, How Trump Thwarted Calculated Israeli Effort to Keep U.S. in Syria.
Well, I sure like that headline, but so, well, I don't know, is it really as good news as you say here?
Well, I think it is good news, but of course, there's always a caveat involved in any writing about Trump's policy, which is the relationship between Trump's intentions and what finally comes out of the administration after his aides have continued to work him over, and have done their magic, or whatever you want to call it, and gotten him to partially or wholly backtrack from his intentions.
This is a pattern that we've seen repeatedly, and so certainly one cannot rule out the possibility that this can happen again.
I'm clear about that, but I mean, I don't talk about that in my piece, but absolutely, I think that's a danger that we have to take account of.
But at the same time, thus far, nothing has happened that clearly substantiates the notion that he has reversed himself or is not going to go ahead with a withdrawal of the ground forces from Syria over some period of months, as opposed to years.
At this point, there is no public statement or public decision about a timeframe, a timetable for withdrawal.
There is reason, however, I believe, to think that there is such a timetable, for one thing Pompeo gave an interview to Newsmax in which he did in fact say that there was a timeframe, a timetable for withdrawal, but he was not willing to reveal it, supposedly because they did not want the adversary to know when the United States would be out.
But I think that in light of the fact that Trump has repeatedly, from his own public testimony, Trump has given the Pentagon six months or so to get the job done, and they said we'll get out after six months, and Trump gave him the six months, and then they said we need six months more, and he gave them another six months.
And then the third time when they asked for six months, he said, no, I'm pulling the plug.
That suggests that this probably is indeed a situation where Trump has imposed a deadline of six months or less.
There has been some change, right, a discrepancy between weeks or months.
And I know you're still saying, hey, leaving within months, that counts as winning over the previous policy that the Hawks are trying to foist on him, but that's sort of a separate argument.
But I just mean, since the announcement, the Hawks have got him to announce a longer timetable.
And is it true or is it not true that John Bolton started adding conditions?
So address that part of the story first, please, if you could.
Okay.
Well, first of all, Scott, I think we have to distinguish between two different phases of Trump policy towards Syria and a withdrawal from Syria.
The first phase really was from April of 2018 up to December 17th, 18th, 19th of 2018.
And that's when Trump first declared that he wanted out of Syria.
He wanted to withdraw, intended to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria quickly.
And there was then a strong reaction from his aides, including Bolton, who really worked hard on him to get him to agree to give the military more time.
And he did, in fact, then relent.
We don't know the exact details of that.
There's never been a clear account, except for the account that Trump himself gave more recently, which was that he gave the military six months to withdraw, that I assume he's talking there about the decision that he had announced in April of 2018, that the military then said, we need six months more.
And Trump says he relented and gave them six months more.
And that takes us to roughly September, October.
And then he said, the military said, oh, well, we need six more months.
And that's when he now says he decided, no, he wouldn't give them more time.
He wouldn't give them another six months.
Definitely, there was this play between Trump and his advisers during that period from April to December over a timetable.
Now, you know, after he made the announcement on December 19th that he wanted out again, there was a whole question that came up about whether there was a timetable.
And what we do know is that there were a series of leaks.
The initial leak was that he had given them one month to get out.
Now, that's possible that there was talk about one month.
But of course, it's physically impossible even to get equipment out, let alone troops, or maybe I should put it the other way around, in 30 days.
And that's, you know, that's simply not logistically feasible.
So if he did give them 30 days initially, then he quickly changed that.
The leak from the Pentagon said that they had four or five months.
But in other words, to you, this is tactical, not strategic.
This amounts to nothing, essentially.
That's right.
I mean, the question of whether there was 30 days or four or five months is clearly not an indication that Trump had changed his mind about getting out quickly.
And it does reflect the lack of communication, of disciplined sort of decision making process within the administration.
No question about that.
But as I said in a previous article, Trump is not solely to blame for that, because senior officials admitted to AP some months ago that, in fact, they had deliberately avoided giving Trump any options for a timetable for withdrawal, because they wanted to prevent him from having that policy.
They wanted to be able to push him toward the choice between something that they argued was irresponsible and impossible to do on one hand, and basically the status quo.
So that's the problem that we've had within the Trump administration over the months.
All right.
OK, now I want to ask you about the Winnett plan and all that stuff in a second, and Trump's triumph over it, as you put it here.
But first of all, about John Bolton and his so-called insubordination here.
This was interpreted right along with the lengthening of the withdrawal period here as a victory by Bolton against Trump.
And a lot of well-meaning people certainly said, you know, he should be fired.
He should resign.
He doesn't belong here.
This is crazy.
There was a companion piece about him pushing for strikes against Iran.
That's even worse, but somewhat a separate issue for argument's sake.
But you have this piece, you wrote up a whole piece about how actually John Bolton was not so much insubordinate as he was trying to defend Donald Trump's position against hawkish media, which is an interesting turn of affairs, considering who John Bolton is.
But anyway, is that correct?
Yeah, that's right.
And, you know, let's start with the fundamental point about John Bolton.
I mean, he is a crazy man in terms of his views on military policy.
That's very clear that he is so totally devoted to the idea of wanting to make war against Iran that he has to be regarded as fundamentally irrational.
On the other hand, he's very clever politically and bureaucratically.
And so I have to begin with the assumption that Bolton understood that he had to defend the president's policy when he was in Jerusalem, a policy which I do in fact believe was a policy of withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria, while at the same time pursuing the existing set of U.S. policy objectives in Syria, which included basically fundamentally defeating ISIS, putting pressure on Iran to remove its forces and Iran-backed forces from Syria, and getting an agreement of some sort or some assurance that the Kurds wouldn't be attacked in the north.
And so what we see Bolton doing here is having a convoluted formula that suggested that this was different from what Obama had done with regard to Iraq and Afghanistan, where it was withdrawing troops without having obtained the objectives that we were after.
And he was saying, we're going to get those objectives done while we're withdrawing these troops, although he didn't put it precisely that way.
So in other words, people thought what he was saying was, yeah, now that I'm here in Israel, I'm adding new conditions to the president's orders.
But what he was really trying to do was say, those wimpy Democrats, when they withdraw from places, they do it on timelines.
But us macho Republicans, when we do it, we do it because it's conditions-based, and we've met our conditions, essentially.
He didn't, of course, use the term conditions-based.
He avoided that.
And that's part of the reason why I think it's clear that he was not saying that this is conditions-based.
He was saying that we are different from the Democrats.
We're going to achieve our objectives.
He didn't make it clearer than that.
And the reason is that he couldn't because Trump had not agreed to a conditions-based withdrawal, meaning that he wouldn't withdraw until everything was completely finished.
Right.
In other words, Bolton was rhetorically trying to split the difference and say, well, all these things that you people wish were conditions have been met anyway, essentially.
That's essentially right.
And Bolton was in his own way true to what Trump wanted.
At the same time, I think that he did not make as clear a statement about this as Pompeo had.
And this is where I really want to emphasize the point that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave an interview a few days before that to Newsmax, which was published by the State Department and is there on the record still.
But the corporate news media completely avoided covering it.
And I think the reason is because Pompeo says pretty clearly that we are going to continue to pursue these objectives when the troops are out.
So, I mean, the implication is very clear that the United States is not going to have completed everything before the troops are withdrawn.
It's not going to it's not going to have achieved all of his objectives before the troops are withdrawn.
But we're going to we're going to get it done.
Hey, guys, check out Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom.
It's everything you need to be an educated libertarian.
You may be long out of college and you have a family and a job, but you really want to know this stuff.
Well, they got all of these classes on history, economics and libertarian theory and all of these things.
Great professors and wonderful credentialed libertarians essentially teaching college level classes about everything you need to know.
Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom.
Check it out at libertyclassroom.com.
Follow through from the link in the right hand margin on my page at scotthorton.org.
All right.
So and now so back to the tech piece, then how Trump thwarted this calculated Israeli effort to keep the U.S. in Syria.
And so and you're not just connecting dots.
You have the Israeli government, as well as the Israel lobby in the form of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
And their guy who was hired by Bolton to coordinate Syria policy.
And these are the different leaks that we've seen, especially in the last, what, two or three months of 2018.
All these leaks and claims that, you know, who cares about ISIS?
Hey, White Obama backed the rise of Islamic State in the first place.
It's all despite Iran.
That's why we're here in Syria and that's why we're going to stay.
OK, I'm roughly paraphrasing, but that's what they that's what they were saying.
We're here because otherwise there will be a land bridge across Saddam Hussein, less Iraq, Syria and to Beirut.
Well, you know, in fact, the Israelis have an even more ambitious aim than that one.
And that's a very ambitious aim that you've just articulated, Scott.
But but as I I hope I've begun to clarify in this piece, the Israelis really want to get Iran completely out of Syria.
And they want that not simply because it's a way for Iran to move weapons across Syria.
It's also because they want to have a victory over Iran.
I mean, it's a it's a matter of who's the boss here in the Middle East.
OK, and this is a very symbolic issue for them and they want to have a complete victory.
So so they they have had this policy.
And here you're right.
I mean, this was very well documented by the Israelis and their advocates in Washington, D.C. themselves.
It's not just, as you put it, connecting the dots.
One thing about the Israelis and their their advocates is that they seem to have a need to to crow about the fact that they have these very ambitious aims and they're going to succeed in it and they want everybody to know it.
So so they, in fact, have a pattern of revealing what one might have thought they would want to pursue secretly in their own in their own words and in the words of of others that are supporting them.
So who is James Jeffrey?
And tell me about this policy paper he wrote for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy here.
Yeah, Jeffrey is, of course, a ambassador, has ambassadorial rank, is still in the U.S. service and or was at least until he went to into into the Washington Institute for Near East Policy last year, I guess it was.
And Jeffrey is therefore a senior member of WINAP, the organization that was founded by the people who started AIPAC back in the 1980s, mid or early 1980s, as a way of getting the Israeli point of view about their strategic interests into a more convincing, more credible form than the usual sort of propaganda that AIPAC wages.
So Jeffrey entered the fray within days after Trump himself had made the original statement in April 2018 that he wanted U.S. troops out of Syria.
Jeffrey came out with a relatively short paper that put forward the idea that, yes, Mr.
President, that's a good idea.
You should withdraw from Syria, but you should do it over time and you should have it be a partial withdrawal.
And at the end of the day, it should be a policy that supports Israeli security interests in Syria and does so by making it clear that the United States will oppose, will demand that Iran get out of Syria.
So those are the key salient points that he was putting forward in this relatively short paper.
But then that was, again, April 2018.
And then in July, just a few weeks later, the entire senior level of officials of WINAP co-authored a long paper that laid out a very detailed scenario that they wanted the Trump administration to carry out as the policy towards Syria.
And that made it clear that what they wanted to do was for the Trump administration to support an Israeli strategy of basically provoking Iran into a situation that would look to the Russians like there was a danger of Israeli-Iranian war in Syria.
And the Russians would be so concerned about that, that they would intervene and do something to put pressure on the Iranians to begin to withdraw from Syria.
That was the Israeli strategy that was underlying the whole WINAP approach to Syria.
And it was laid out in great detail and very explicitly in this long paper that, again, Jeffrey was one of the co-authors of.
So it was right after that paper came out that Secretary of State Pompeo, who was clearly on board with the Israeli viewpoint and the Israeli objectives, hired Jeffrey for the State Department to become the guy who would be in charge of drafting a new Trump administration policy towards Syria.
And that policy, we have never seen the draft, of course, but there was coverage of it in the media.
I believe it was NBC News, if I remember correctly, that did the story.
Yeah, NBC News did a story in October that made it clear that it was very far advanced, that the people who were behind it were very confident that it was going to go through, that it had been circulating and it would be finalized within a matter of a few weeks.
Well, of course, that would take you into December.
And it was at that point that Trump announced once again that the United States was going to get out of Syria.
At this time, he would not brook no, he would not take no for an answer.
He would not accept any refusals by the military, by the Pentagon and the State Department.
Well, and, you know, just preceding that, Bolton had said that we're not leaving until there are no Iranians outside of Iran's border, no Iranian forces outside of Iran's borders anywhere.
So that order was certainly countermanded there.
And then Trump, I guess, in reaction to all of this pressure from his own guys, even sort of, I guess they would consider it, you know, he blurted out that, you know what, Iran can do what they want there.
Because as he does correctly understand and as he explained that, you know, ISIS, they're our enemy, but they're also the enemy of Iran.
And I don't know if he mentioned Hezbollah or not, but Iran, Syria and Russia.
So let them handle it.
Why do we have to fight to the very last man?
And in fact, isn't it the fact that America has been de facto protecting the last Islamic state fighters from the Assad government from, you know, by standing in the way and preventing them from going east to finish off the last Islamic state holdouts in the desert out there, while the Kurds under American control, the SDF forces are unable or unwilling to finish the job against the last of the insurgency there?
The answer is very simple.
Yes, you're right.
That is the case, that that has kept the Assad government from finally taking control of the full area around Deir ez-Zor and has basically given something of a lease on life to the ISIS fighters in that part of the country.
And it's the same guy, Jeffrey, who has told the Kurds that they better not be talking to Assad about letting Assad back in to Syria and Kurdistan, where they could be useful in dissuading a Turkish invasion.
Because, you know, by disarming the YPG and re-establishing, you know, autonomy for the Kurdish side there, by an end to their full independence, that then that would take the wind out of the sail of Erdogan to start this war against this newly independent state.
You know, to go back real quick to what you talked about when Trump started saying, let's get out of Syria a year ago, Rex Tillerson came out and said, forget what he said about that.
No, we're not.
We're staying for Iran.
And when he said that, that was when Erdogan went to Putin and said, hey, I'm going to go ahead and invade northern Syria and sack the town of Afrin.
Pull your planes back, please.
And Vladimir Putin said, fine, because he said when Tillerson says that we're staying for Iran, what he's really saying is we're building an independent Kurdish state and we're going to occupy the place to guarantee its independence.
And I'm going to prove that I will not put up with that.
And then that was why he attacked Afrin a year ago.
Just two points of clarification, Scott.
First of all, though, don't forget that when you're talking about Tillerson, you're talking about very early 2018.
This is before Tillerson was replaced, of course, by Pompeo.
And at that point, you're right.
I mean, Tillerson was articulating a much more pro-Israeli, anti-Trump withdrawal policy.
And it appeared at that point that that was going to go forward.
And it was Trump's decision in a sudden decision in April 2018 that upset that apple cart.
But the other point that I want to make is that Trump did not actually say that the Iranians can do whatever they please.
That's fine with me.
He didn't mean that at all.
What he meant what he meant to say there very clearly was that the Iranians have a lot of leeway to do what they want in Syria.
And he was saying, in other words, he wasn't saying they have my carte blanche.
He was saying they have carte blanche from the government of Syria there.
And the reason that you have an important distinction in that statement there.
The reason you have the impression that he meant that is that that was the way it was played by corporate media and the critics of the withdrawal.
They were they were the ones who were making it seem that Trump was now very soft on Iran.
And when, in fact, he had not changed his viewpoint that fundamentally, what he was saying was, however, that although the Iranians could do whatever they please, it looks like they have begun to withdraw or to lower the level of their operations.
And that, of course, is true.
He was he was, in fact, reflecting accurately what the U.S. intelligence reports were saying about the Iranians in Syria, that their operations had really been reduced and possibly they might have withdrawn some people from from Syria.
So so he was taking a bit of credit for the fact that that the Iranians now were were not threatening Syria the way they had before.
He was obviously exaggerating it, or I presume he was exaggerating it.
But in any case, what he was doing was trying to take credit for for what he thought was a sign that the Iranians were less of a threat there.
Afghanistan.
It's available in paperback, Kindle, audiobook, and now in EPUB in all the different locations online there.
You can get it.
Fool's errand.
And also really subscribe to the show.
If you're not already a subscriber, there's RSS button, iTunes, Stitcher and all that stuff at Scott Horton dot org and also at Libertarian Institute dot org.
Two different feeds.
They're the same thing.
And also I got a YouTube channel, YouTube dot com slash Scott Horton show.
Subscribe there and you'll get all the interviews and check out my Patreon, Patreon dot com slash Scott Horton show.
And you can find out all the details really at Scott Horton dot org slash donate.
Now, anybody donates five bucks or more a month at Patreon or at PayPal will get keys to the Reddit room are slash Scott Horton show.
We got a great little Reddit group going on there.
If you want to join up, anybody donates a one off donation of $50 gets a signed book and for $100 you can either get a QR code silver commodity disc or you can get a lifetime subscription for $100 to the Scott Horton show.
You get a lifetime subscription to listen and think audiobooks.
And yes, we absolutely take PayPal and Bitcoin and all those things.
So just go to Scott Horton dot org slash donate.
Also, the Amazon link is back at the top of the right hand margin on the front of the page there.
If you want to do all your Amazon shopping by way of my link, I'll get a kickback from their end of the sale.
And hey, give me a good review on iTunes or Stitcher if you feel like it or if you read the book on Amazon dot com.
And of course, share, share, share on social media, that kind of thing.
And check me out at antiwar dot com Scott Horton dot org kpfk dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
Should we believe that Assad is just going to be the sock puppet of the Iranians from now on and just do whatever they say and accept, you know, massive permanent Iranian bases from which to help Hezbollah attack Israel and all these things like the Hawks say?
Short answer, Scott, I think is that it depends on what Israel would do.
And that's really the big question mark surrounding this this situation, because, you know, I think you're right that there are reasons to believe that Trump expects to be able to defeat.
Let me put this way, not to defeat, but to further weaken ISIS in the coming weeks.
It's already begun.
There's already bombing taking place.
The plan is that there is going to be several more weeks, possibly months of operations against ISIS, but that then the US is going to pull back and there'll be no more reason to have the military personnel there.
And that has been quite explicit.
And at the same time, I think Pompeo made it clear that we will continue to try to put pressure on Iran, but it's not all dependent on having our personnel in Syria.
We can do it in other ways.
In fact, we can do it in other ways more effectively.
That's referring to their economic sanctions and that pressure.
And so that's going to continue even after the US has withdrawn its troops from Syria.
So that leaves fundamentally the Kurdish problem as the one most difficult not to crack politically for the Trump administration, for Trump himself.
And I'm not sure exactly how that's going to play out.
But but what you just said about the fact that there is an obvious option for the Kurds to make a deal with the Assad government that would protect them from the Turks and at the same time would give the Assad government and the Russians a case for basically telling the Kurds to lay off.
We'll make sure that they're not going to be a threat to Turkey.
We'll have some separation between them and the Turkish border.
They've already talked about a zone there that would separate the YPG from the Turkish border.
There are other ways that that could be handled.
So I think- And hey, is it true or not that the Turkish government and the Russian government that this is what they want, too?
This is the obvious solution to everybody.
Well, I think it is the obvious solution.
I don't know that that has yet taken the form of concrete talks.
I can't say that.
I haven't seen any specific reporting about it, but it's certainly plausible that that will happen.
I think that that's what I would say.
It certainly shouldn't be difficult to talk them into it.
The Turks don't really want a war in Syrian Kurdistan, do they?
Not without Bill Clinton to support them, you know?
Nor do the Russians, I think, want the Turks to go that far into Syria.
That would be a serious problem for them.
And I think ultimately that will be a crucial factor in this situation.
Hey, is everybody, all these different government sides in this thing, in a hurry or are they not in a hurry to finish the battle against the al-Qaeda forces?
Tahrir, Hayat, Al-Sham, whatever they call themselves nowadays in the Idlib province there.
I know they had a ceasefire where the moderates, the last of the non-jihadists were supposed to separate away from the others there and closer to the Turkish border.
But then I guess I read that the al-Qaeda guys had defeated them and run them all the way into Turkey or further, something recently.
I think that's right.
Or what do you know about that situation?
I think that's right, Scott.
I have not followed it closely, but certainly the Russians have said quite explicitly that the Turks didn't keep up their side of the bargain and really deal with the jihadists, deal with the AQ.
I don't mean to sound like too much of a warmonger there.
That was meant to be descriptive more than normative.
I mean, in all cases that this can be negotiated peacefully, please, by all means, do so.
Yeah, and I think that that is- I sounded like the National Review for a minute there, crush them.
Well, I didn't take it that way.
I think that there still is a room for maneuver there in the end, but there are different parts to this puzzle that are interactive and some parts take precedence over others.
And at this point, clearly the part of it that takes precedence is the one that has to do with the Turks, the Kurds, the Assad government, and the Russians.
So that's going to be the next play.
That really is missing a big part of the forest for the trees too, because you go back to the beginning of this thing, the major argument against it, of course, was, yeah, but you're taking the side of al-Qaeda.
And if all of our troubles from al-Qaeda in the 90s are blowback for government support for the Arab-Afghan war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and then the Libya and Syria wars are really blowback, all the guys that came home from Iraq War II to cause trouble in those countries, then what about all the guys coming home from Syria, where you had at least in the thousands, maybe tens of thousands, I guess thousands at least of Europeans who traveled there and presumably have the ability to get back to Europe at some point, and at least high tens, maybe hundreds of Americans who traveled to Turkey to go fight with the Jihad in the Obama years on the side against Assad, who, you know, I don't want to scaremonger too much like the Hawks, but this was a real big reason to not do this.
And, you know, the first blowback al-Qaeda attack from the Syria war was in Brussels in 2013 at this Jewish museum that was attacked there.
But then you had all kinds of blowback attacks that have been at least somewhat attributable to that, including the Orlando attack, which he said was motivated by the American war in Syria, as well as Afghanistan, and different attacks in Europe in the meantime.
And how worried are you that maybe this is just the beginning of a whole new phase of the terrorist war against us, which, of course, just quote unquote, necessitates far worse against them back in return again?
Yeah, well, I think that should be our first concern.
That should be the first argument against any policy of military engagement in Syria or anywhere else in the Middle East.
And that, of course, reminds me of the story that I'm sure you remember that I've told more than once, I'm quite sure on your show, Scott, about a conversation with the guy who was then the State Department's coordinator on counterterrorism at a counterterrorism conference specifically about what to do about al-Qaeda.
And he gave a talk for 15 or 20 minutes.
This is in what year again?
This was 2007.
Sorry, I didn't give the year.
He mentioned all kinds of ways in which the United States should try to weaken the al-Qaeda and do something about the threat from al-Qaeda.
The one thing that he didn't talk about, which I approached him and mentioned to him during the coffee break, was that the United States should stop carrying out wars in the Middle East, in any Islamic country, and pledged never to do that again.
I said that to him and I asked him why he didn't say anything about it.
He said, well, you're right.
We should do that.
And then he paused and he said, but we can't.
I said, why not?
He said, well, then we'd have to tell the families of the fallen that their sons and husbands had died in vain.
Wow.
Talk about the last refuge of a scoundrel there.
Exactly.
That's like the sunk cost fallacy to the nth degree.
George Bush used to say that too, that if we leave now, they will have died in vain, which anybody claiming that is admitting already that it's true.
And then what?
That they have to continue to put, never even mind the innocent foreigners, because of course, that's the frame of reference for all of this.
But still, 19 and 20 year old American boys in the dirt, in Walter Reed for the rest of their lives, for what now?
Just so you don't have to admit to their predecessors that the whole thing was a mistake by all you people who were told better in the first place.
That was pretty weak.
That was a moment of, I think the word is pathos.
I'm surprised he didn't just say, but Garrett, the Ayatollah, right?
Everybody knows that.
Who cares who knocked the towers down?
It's all about Iran, man.
Yeah.
Well, that was the answer.
And I thought it was an extremely revealing one, to say the least.
Yeah.
Well, and we know that at that time, George Bush had already committed to the redirection back toward the Saudis and back towards al-Qaeda, back in Jandala, back in Muslim Brotherhood groups in Syria and Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon.
All that and Seymour Hersh reporting from 2007 and 2008, you know?
Yeah, we're so deeply enmeshed now that that problem continues to be the single biggest problem that we have faced and continue to face.
How to end definitively the connection that we have had with the jihadists, with al-Qaeda and its close allies, because that's become the evil twin of the rationale for all these wars that are supposedly fought for something else.
I mean, the two things are now mated together.
And that should be no difficulty to end that completely and definitively and begin the process of trying to free the United States from this albatross around its neck.
Absolutely.
And by the way, just since I mentioned Seymour Hersh, did you see his new one?
I have not.
Oh, there's a brand new Seymour Hersh.
It's the spotlight on antiwar.com today in the London Review of Books.
And it's about H.W. Bush's vice presidency and about how just exactly like Dick Cheney, he ran the predecessor to the Joint Special Operations Command, lawless outside of the chain of command, highest tier special operations forces, and that they were run by this vice admiral through the Joint Chiefs of Staff office, even though the Joint Chiefs weren't read in on it, and that the whole thing was completely parallel and separate and different to everything William Casey was doing and, you know, apparently doing a whole lot around the world and how they were the ones who leaked the Iran-Contra story to a paper in Lebanon and broke the story about the CIA's Iran-Contra program in order to basically burn what they saw as William Casey's reckless project that was threatening the real project that they were doing against Daniel Ortega down there in Nicaragua at the time.
Wow.
Wow.
Wow.
Wow.
So, and I think, you know, because everybody always talks about, you know, H.W. Bush's real role, the former head of the CIA, he's the extremely competent, at least relatively competent, vice presidential office holder under Ronald Reagan, who was a little bit old and doddering.
And Hirsch makes Reagan out to be way out of touch, that essentially, this had to be done in a way that somebody, not this had to be done, but someone had to take control of something in that government or else no one was driving the boat at all, kind of a situation.
But anyway, yeah, that it was, it was Bush Sr.'s military vice squad operation that outed Iran-Contra against the CIA, which, and then of course was certainly the predecessor for JSOC in the Cheney years.
And I don't know exactly how it works in the Obama years and now into the Trump years with JSOC, whether, you know, how separate they are from the rest of SOCOM or, you know, whether Mike Pence has his own JSOC hit squad outside the law on this very same format.
Did Joe Biden?
I guess Joe Biden probably didn't, but I don't know.
Do you know?
I can't imagine that.
I really can't.
You know, because Robert Dreyfuss wrote this great article years ago called Vice Squad, and it was about, it was Cheney and his friends were having like an alumni meeting of the good old Reagan years and talking about like their real lessons learned about how what's great about the vice president's office is that it's hardly described in law at all.
And so you can sort of do whatever you want.
And if you don't trust the CIA, then you just go around them and do it your own way.
Yep.
Yep.
Well, Cy Hirsch is at his best when he's dealing with those sorts of things.
I was just reading his book, The Price of Power, which talks about another phase of American history in which there was similar sort of rivalries within the national security state and people doing secret operations, spying on one another between the military and the NSC and so on and so forth.
He's got that one down.
That's his specialty.
Well, you'll love this one.
It's a lot of fun, especially, you know, I was a kid back then, but I have read a lot about that era.
But I'm sure you'll have a good time reading that thing and catching up from that point of view.
I'll read about it.
I'll tweet about it.
I'm sure.
All right, great.
Well, listen, I love talking with you, Gareth.
Thanks so much for your time.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, you guys, that's the great Gareth Porter the Great, and he's at the American Conservative Magazine.
How Trump thwarted calculated Israeli effort to keep U.S. in Syria.
All right, y'all, that is anti-war radio for this morning.
Thanks very much for listening.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to nine on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
Check out my full interview archive.
More than 4,800 interviews now going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org.
See you next week.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai Fool's Errand.
Timed and the war in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us
