Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites 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 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, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, y'all, introducing Giorgio Caffiero.
He is CEO and founder of Gulf State Analytics.
And he writes for, well, in this case, Lobe Log, also the National Interest, the Middle East Institute, and Al-Monitor.
And this one is a Jim Lobe's blog.
It's from a few weeks ago.
Baghdadi's alive, and so is Islamic State's narrative.
Welcome back to the show, Giorgio.
How are you doing?
Scott, I'm great.
Good to be back on your show.
Thank you so much.
Very happy to have you here.
And I really appreciate you writing this piece.
For some reason, it seems like everybody has just lost interest in Iraq War Three and a Half.
But it's pretty important to me.
Pretty important to the people of Western Iraq and Eastern Syria.
I know that.
So let's talk about this video that came out of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi that was published at the very end of last month, right?
Yes.
And so what did we learn?
Well, there's a lot to take away from this video that, as you mentioned, came out just at the end of last month.
This video dispelled a number of myths and rumors.
There had been reporting claiming that the Russian military killed the caliph in some of the Russian military operations.
Some claimed that the American military had done the same.
Some folks had claimed that he was injured or disabled or that he got plastic surgery.
And for all we knew, he was somewhere in Miami drinking pina coladas.
No shortage of conspiracy theories.
But this video demonstrated that he is alive.
Health experts who watched this video came to the conclusion that he seemed to be healthy.
The room he was in was not being jolted by bombs.
He seemed very relaxed, confident, and he seemed quite optimistic about his cause and his movements.
The video also raises some questions, though, about where he is.
Where was this video recorded?
It seems that some experts are speculating that he is still in some part of western Iraq.
You know, in western Iraq, the influence of Baghdad, the government in Baghdad, is often quite weak.
There's still a lot of lawlessness in western Iraq.
Since the Islamic State lost its last Syrian stronghold just literally right across the border in Syria, there's been an influx of at least a thousand of these ISIS terrorists into Iraq.
So what we can conclude is that despite the fact that Iraqi security forces were able to kill and capture many ISIS forces and topple the caliphate from its strongholds in Iraq, there is still a crisis in terms of the remnants of the Islamic State in that part of the country, as well as in eastern Syria, too.
So we can certainly conclude that it is very premature for people to say that ISIS has been entirely defeated.
So now, western Iraq.
We'll get back to eastern Syria in a second there.
But when we talk about the Islamic State or ISIS, it's essentially Zarqawi's old group, al-Qaeda in Iraq, which had grown up during Iraq War II.
And they traveled across the line into Syria to fight in that war.
Now they're back again, starting in 2014.
And of course, the state, their caliphate, has been destroyed.
But as Obama, they all look alike to me.
As Donald Trump said in his statement last week, that yeah, smash the caliphate, but then he made sure to disclaim and say, I'm not saying I killed every last ISIS member.
That's impossible.
As long as there's a Sunni with a rifle who wants to fight, you can say that the fight's still on, essentially.
But then that's really right, isn't it?
As you said, the Baghdad government has whatever degree of influence in western Iraq, but not real dominance, it doesn't sound like.
And so there are a thousand places for these guys to hide and to keep fighting.
American Marines and other special operations forces and spies and whoever are still in Iraq fighting against what's left of essentially AQI to this day.
You're absolutely right.
It's important to note that with the fall of Mosul and with ISIS losing control of its important strongholds in Iraq and also Syria, the de facto state that ISIS built was destroyed.
And when I say de facto state, I think it's really important for people to remember that ISIS was not only just making barbaric propaganda videos and waging terrorism, but ISIS also, they collected taxes, they had a postal service, they were responsible for many social services in the areas they controlled.
A lot more than just a state in name only, it was effectively a state apparatus.
That state apparatus, as you mentioned, was destroyed by the host of state and non-state actors that waged war against ISIS.
Now the extremists are resorting to insurgency, a kind of guerrilla warfare that we saw during the AQI period in Iraq.
If ISIS will ever be able to restore the kind of state apparatus, as they put it, a caliphate that was in place for a number of years up until relatively recently, remains to be seen.
But I think the important point that I hit on in my article and you alluded to a few minutes ago is that as long as there is lawlessness, chaos, and a lack of effective government in Western Iraq, there will be situations and new grievances on the part of many Sunni Iraqis that ISIS will be able to take advantage of in the years ahead.
So the fight against ISIS is not only about trying to achieve a military victory, for sure that was an important part of it, but the military victory alone is not going to solve the problem.
What Iraq really needs is a new social contract where more of the citizens of Western Iraq will no longer see ISIS as a preferable alternative to the government in Baghdad.
Achieving that goal will be very difficult, to say the least.
Yeah.
Well, and I shouldn't be right.
I mean, taking the Baathists back or having just the tribal leaders in charge would be one thing, but preferring the Islamic State to Baghdad, that's pretty extreme.
And yet that's the situation that Baghdad has put the Iraqi Sunnis in, and this all just goes back to George Bush.
There's no way really to undo that war.
So what you're describing here, this crisis of Western Iraq, is welcome to the history of the rest of our lifetimes.
This is not going away.
There's nothing that the Sunnis can do to take the capital back, and yet without it, they have no power, no money, no real influence.
You got a guy from the Supreme Islamic Council, not even the Dawah Party, but literally a guy from the Hakeem faction is the Prime Minister right now, who might as well be the Ayatollah Khamenei.
And he doesn't give a damn about the Iraqi Sunnis, other than protecting the Iraqi Shia from them.
And so, yeah, a new social contract.
I hope you got a time machine, Giorgio.
Yes, I share your gloomy assessment, and I also think it's very important, this point you make about the blowback.
There is no doubt that many people around the world, but obviously the Iraqis more than anyone else, are still dealing with the crisis that resulted from the power vacuum in 2003, that of course occurred after the destruction of Saddam Hussein's regime.
This situation in Iraq will take a very, very long time to fix, and obviously Islamic State has high stakes in preventing such a new social contract from coming into place.
ISIS will of course continue to be a benefactor of the lawlessness and the lack of trust between the various communities in Iraq.
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You know, I read this piece.
I couldn't get the guy on the show for some reason, I'm not sure, but there were a couple pieces like this, but one of them I think was in the New York Review of Books where he talked about how the Shia militias and the Iraqi army, which is a Shia militia essentially, how they're making no bones about it.
Whatever the Islamic State did, that's what we're going to do to you now.
And so, beheadings and torture and refugee camps full of women where all their husbands have all been executed for being ISIS, whether they were really guilty or not.
So, you have refugee camps just full of women and rape babies from when the Iraqi army comes every night to rape them as their punishment for being Iraqi Sunnis in the era of the Islamic State, essentially.
So, it didn't sound like much of a reconciliation going on over there.
It was more like Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome kind of thing.
Yeah.
You know, I had an opportunity to meet some Sunni Iraqi refugees from the Tikrit area.
Of course, this is a Sunni part of Iraq, and they explained how the conduct of Shia militias impacted their lives.
And I think they would say that your description is quite accurate.
They describe PMU forces, popular mobilization units.
Just so your listeners can have a reminder, these are the Iranian-financed, Iranian-sponsored Shia militias that played a big role in crushing ISIS caliphate a few years ago.
You might remember before that they were Donald Rumsfeld's El Salvador option, using them to hunt down and kill the leaders of the Sunni insurgency, which of course only made it worse and drove them into the hands of al-Qaeda.
They were trained up and armed by St. David Petraeus, sent here by Jesus to lose two wars and then take credit for winning them both anyway.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, no, I was just going to say, from the perspective of these Sunni Iraqi refugees whom I met, they basically described PMU as being a Shia version of Islamic State.
I'm emphasizing those are the words from them, not myself necessarily claiming to have witnessed any of this.
But they essentially told me that these forces will kill Iraqis just because of their Sunni identity.
And naturally, one can understand how a force such as ISIS is capable of making some of these Iraqi Sunnis feel protected and dignified.
And it's a very unfortunate state of affairs that these dynamics are still in play.
As I said before, and I'll say again, unfortunately, I think those dynamics will probably continue defining the landscape in Al Anbar province, probably for a long time to come.
Yeah.
You know, so I forget the guy's name now, I'm sorry.
But back when the Islamic State was first rising up, there was a Twitter friend of mine, who I think he was from Lebanon or something, but he was a really educated guy.
And he wrote us this thing for antiwar.com, explaining about Iraqi Sunnistan, and about how there are three major, you know, legs on the stool of Sunni power, essentially, the Ba'athists, the tribal leaders and the jihadis.
And how, you know, the balance of power essentially, at this point had tipped to an alliance between the jihadis and the Ba'athists against the tribal leaders.
So a lot of the tribal leaders were lined up and shot in the rise of the Islamic State.
And then of course, with Iraq War Three, where America, as you just said, took the side of those Shiite militias again, the same ones they wish they hadn't fought Iraq War Two for, they fought Iraq War Three for, to get rid of all of these guys, to drive the Islamic State back out again.
And so, but now that it sort of leaves open, which I don't know, to whatever degree the tribal leaders had been liquidated, or to what degree the Ba'athist generals who had allied with Baghdadi are still even alive, whether they even survived Iraq War Three, or, you know, never even mind Baghdad, in other words, among the Iraqi Sunni, with all the chaos and disorder of Iraq War Three and its aftermath.
I wonder, is anyone in charge, even in, you know, a de facto sense, like in, in, say, Fallujah or Tikrit or whatever, there's local strongmen taking over, local tribal leaders, former generals, or, or it's the Iraqi army, but hey, they only have so much influence because of who they are and where they are, or what do you think?
It's a very fluid situation.
It's extremely confusing.
This point you make about the tribal leaders is important.
You know, just in recent months, the ISIS terrorists have been targeting some of these prominent tribal leaders, really underscoring how this power struggle is continuing.
I also think we got to see this situation within the context of the current state of U.S.-Iran relations.
As the Trump administration is going forward and intensifying the maximum pressure campaign, the ramifications will be very significant across Iraq.
The PMU forces, we often refer to them just as the Iranian-backed Shia militias, are, of course, loyal to Iran, and they view the Iraqi army as essentially being a puppet of America, whereas the Iraqi army looks at many of these PMU forces as essentially just being Iranian puppets.
So this adds an entirely new layer of complexity to the situation in Iraq.
If there were to be a military confrontation between the U.S. and Iran, which could certainly happen even if neither side desires that scenario, there's always potential for an escalation to spiral out of control based on misunderstandings or misreadings of what the other side is doing.
But in any event, if such a doomsday scenario would unfold, it would be important to see how the PMU forces in Iraq respond.
Certainly, it would have potential to bring the Americans back into Iraq.
I guess we could call that Iraq War 4 or 5.
This kind of situation certainly can't be dismissed as impossible right now.
Yeah, I think this is really one of the things that stopped an attack on Iran back in 2007 was, hey, we're allied with the Shia in Iraq.
And so if we attack Iran, that higher loyalty is going to kick in.
And as one source told Seymour Hersh, Iran could take Basra with one imam and a sound truck.
I don't know how many guys we've got stationed in Basra right now.
But anyway, certainly we have them embedded with the Iraqi army and with the Shiite militias, or at least certainly within range of them.
And yeah, it would be just like Order 66, where all of a sudden you have what?
Like in the days of the British Empire, you have white officers with native troops, essentially.
And all those troops would just stab the Americans right in the back the moment America started bombing Tehran.
There's really no question about that.
And never mind all the guys in Kuwait on the way to Basra or the rest of our assets in the Gulf there.
But having Americans still fighting on Iran's side, essentially, in the Iraq wars puts them in a pretty bad position to attack Iran.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, there was some de facto alignments between the U.S. and these PMU forces and, of course, by extension, Iran.
When the battle, the battles against Islamic State were in full motion, there is no doubt that Islamic State in Iraq and also in Syria would have so much to gain from the outbreak of some sort of a military confrontation between the U.S. and Iran is that would lead to circumstances whereby it would be next to impossible to imagine such alignment between the U.S. and Iran and its regional partners, or maybe some would say proxies under those circumstances.
That's such a good point.
You know, I've been thinking about, in fact, I have a co-author, we've been writing about how Iran would benefit.
I mean, pardon me, how al-Qaeda would benefit so much from an attack on Iran and how, you know, in this, that and the other place.
But I hadn't really focused on and we talk about, you know, the danger to American troops in Iraq, but I hadn't really focused on the benefit to al-Qaeda in Iraq or the Islamic State, as we now call it, no longer loyal to Zawahiri.
But still, the Bin Laden insurgency in Western Iraq, how much good it would do them to see the Americans fighting the Shia, getting stabbed in the back by the Shia as they stabbed them in the back on the other flank there and the chaos that would result.
I don't know if they could get a new Islamic State out of it.
I sure would give them a boost.
Yeah, I think when policymakers in Washington are sort of weighing their options when it comes to these questions about Iran, I think this point about the Sunni extremist threat in Iraq is often overlooked, but it really should not be.
It's an important variable in the equation.
And, you know, another point, this news about the American diplomats pulled out of Iraq due to security crises is really a big loss for the United States when you consider the billions of dollars that Washington's invested in Iraq security.
You have to ask, what is there to show for it all these years later?
It's certainly a very, very depressing situation, but there should be a lot of lessons for the Americans to learn from all of these episodes.
Hang on just one second for me.
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All right, so, yeah, I mean, that seemed to be, like, Israeli intelligence said that their analysts thought, well, geez, if we were the Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiite militias, this is what we might do, or something like that.
No new intelligence, really, just a new perspective on, geez, if you provoked us this badly, we might, I don't know, use our Shiite militias as a pawn on the chessboard to put you back in line.
So, made sense, but still only in the context of a defensive move by them, and even then, based not really, apparently, on anything of substance.
Yes, I mean, obviously, right now, Iran has to weigh its own options.
As the United States moves forward with maximum pressure, Iran is trying to find out what parts of the region provide them opportunities to apply pressure against the Americans, as well as the U.S. allies in the region who support Trump's anti-Iranian agenda.
Without any doubt, Iraq continues to be one of these flashpoints.
It's an area where the Iranians have many cards to play.
I have no doubt that if the U.S. were to take military action against Iran, there would be blowback in Iraq minutes, if not hours later.
Yeah, all right, now, so let's skip to eastern Syria now.
There's essentially nothing left of the Islamic State, right?
Two months ago, their last villages were taken, and they were scattered to the winds.
I guess you mentioned some of the refugees from the Islamic State went fleeing across the border back into Iraq, or whichever direction they originally came from.
But so, I guess there's that.
So, I'm interested in if you can tell me just what are the pieces on the board there, as far as the Americans at the al-Tanf base, as far as the Syrian Kurdish forces, the YPG and the SDF, and this and that in northeastern Syria.
And for that matter, where on the map is the Syrian state right now?
With the Islamic State gone, is the Syrian Arab Army moving further into eastern Syria to consolidate power there, or the Americans are still keeping them back, or what?
Very, very important set of questions that you have.
Just to put this in a bit of context, there's the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces that the United States backs, and the United States began backing SDF in order to crush ISIS.
This began during the Obama presidency.
My understanding is that today, SDF is in control of about one-fifth or one-quarter of Syrian territory.
The dominant militia in the SDF is the YPG.
Now, wait, in that proportion, does that mean Syrian Kurdistan, or that means far outside of their traditional borders there?
That's Kurdish land as well as some Arab land.
Okay, because I know they lost Afrin in their west.
Yeah.
But so they're still occupying some of what had been considered Arab territory to their south.
Correct.
Okay, go ahead.
I'm sorry.
No, no problem.
The dominant force within SDF is YPG, which is affiliated with the PKK, recognized by Turkey, European Union, and the United States as a terrorist organization.
Perhaps we can talk a little bit more about those dynamics later.
Nonetheless, I think the key question we need to ask right now has to do with the relationship between the YPG and the Syrian government in Damascus.
This has been a very interesting relationship since 2012, which was when the YPG took de facto control of the Kurdish parts of northern Syria.
Now, both the Assad regime and the YPG fought Islamic State and saw many of these Sunni jihadist groups as an enemy to both the regime and the YPG.
These extremists carried out grave crimes against the Kurds, believing that the Kurds, who have historically been secular in Syria, believing that they're infidels.
Likewise, the secular Syrian regime has viewed these extremist forces as an existential threat.
The Syrian Arab Army and YPG, despite a few clashes, agreed to basically leave each other alone.
Some would argue that the two were allied against each other.
I think it might be a little bit of a stretch to say that there was an alliance between the government in Damascus and the YPG.
But nonetheless, they both, as I said, perceived this greater threat from ISIS, al-Nusra, etc., and they gave each other space.
Right.
From the beginning of the war, the Syrian state, I guess, essentially withdrew from Kurdistan because it was the furthest away and, I guess, the least important for them to hang on to.
And they knew that the YPG could hang on to their own.
But the Kurds never really have fought the Syrians the whole time in the whole civil war.
They kind of declared their independent little Rojava state there.
But I think even then they made a point of not sticking their finger in Assad's eye over it, but just saying, hey, for the time being, we have to at least, and that kind of deal.
But probably knowing that they had to at least leave the option open of coming back under the Syrian state at some point, which is the position they're in now to protect them from the Turks, right?
Yes.
This is a very complicated situation, and it could move in a few different ways.
Let's keep in mind that Turkey has been sponsoring Sunni rebels or, from the Damascus perspective, Sunni terrorists that have been fighting the Assad regime as well as YPG for years.
And I think the Assad regime has believed that YPG can be a lever for the Syrian government to use against Turkey.
Let's keep in mind this is not a new way of thinking.
In the 1990s, tension was mounting between the Syrian government at that time, led by Bashar's father, Hafez al-Assad, and he sponsored the PKK, and that was a lever that he used against Turkey.
While Bill Clinton supported the Turks in their carpet bombing of the Kurds.
Yes.
Which was something that was hardly reported by anybody at the time.
You're absolutely right.
Of course, let's keep in mind those were Turkey's Kurdish citizens in southeastern Turkey.
But you're 100% right to point out that during Bill Clinton's presidency, the U.S. boosted its military support for Turkey to a very high degree when the Turkish military was waging its operations in southeastern Turkey against what the Turkish government saw as PKK terrorists at that time.
And so, of course, this was a lever that the regime in Damascus used to counter Turkey and to gain concessions on a whole host of other issues, whether that be water, the rivers linking Syria to Turkey, as well as the Turkish-Israeli relationship, which was starting to strengthen during that time.
So today, obviously very different circumstances, but this view of militant Syrian Kurds, you want to call them PKK or YPG, the belief that this force can be useful partner against Turkey.
At the same time, we cannot dismiss the possibility of a rapprochement between the Turkish and Syrian governments.
If that were to take place, that could leave YPG in a very difficult situation, which in my opinion would give the YPG no option but to essentially integrate itself into the Syrian regime.
Haven't the Turks and the Assad government already started?
I mean, the Turks have certainly backed off of regime change, at least, but are they still not talking?
They are talking, and there are channels of communication between Ankara and Damascus.
I believe this began not so recently, I think as early as 2017, even if not sooner, but there is still not a peace treaty between the two governments, and Turkey is continuing to take actions that the Syrian government views as an unacceptable violation of Syrian sovereignty.
Yeah, well, and speaking of which, there's the problem of the remaining al-Qaeda and associated forces in the Idlib province there.
They struck a deal, what, last fall, right?
Between the Turks and the Syrians to hold it, I guess, the Syrian army and the Russians were about to attack, and they made a deal where the Turks were going to, I guess, try to reabsorb as many of these guys as they thought they could, and then whoever would be left would be al-Qaeda guys that you can go ahead and bomb, that kind of deal.
But then we're stuck at that status quo.
There were some attacks last week where it looked like it was the start of a new offensive, but I hadn't heard much more about that since then.
Yes, I think the Russian factor is really important to keep in mind when talking about the situation in Idlib.
Of course, just so your listeners can have a reminder, in case that's necessary, Idlib is the northwestern province of Syria.
And basically, this is the last bastion of the anti-Assad rebellion between SDF and the Syrian regime to basically took control of the whole country, except for Idlib, where some Turkish-backed anti-Assad rebels are now concentrated.
So, why does Russia matter so much?
One of Russia's main foreign policy objectives in the Middle East right now is to bring the Turkish and Syrian governments back to having official diplomatic relations that got cut off eight years ago.
This is a very high priority for the Kremlin right now.
In the event that the Syrian Arab Army would launch an all-out offensive on Idlib, just to go in and essentially take out the remainder of the rebels who were based there, would inevitably create a flow of refugees into Turkey's Hatay province.
This would be disastrous from the standpoint of Turkish interests.
This would certainly undermine the prospects of reconciliation between the Turkish and Syrian governments.
Therefore, I think as much as Russia has problems with these groups in Idlib, Russia would also like to continue pressuring Assad into not waging an all-out offensive to take over that province.
So, these dynamics are very complicated, and I think the question of Idlib is going to remain open for quite some time, despite the fact that the Syrian crisis is winding down.
Yeah.
I mean, the thing is that you can't really hold them there, right?
They're surrounded in a sense.
But on the other hand, individuals can slip through, right?
The al-Qaeda state there can't go anywhere or do anything.
But individuals can essentially continue to bleed right out of there and on to other locations and other missions, as long as the status quo holds.
But nobody's moving in either to fight them or to arrest them or to do anything.
They're just essentially letting them have a town and a county and a district.
But there is no real plan on any side of how to resolve it.
Is that correct?
Yes, I would say that that's absolutely correct.
This is the sort of the remaining province of the rebels.
And I think for the time being, probably most of the important players in this conflict may have to sort of accept the status quo is as difficult as it is.
And it's possible that the regime will continue to avoid waging an all-out offensive on Idlib.
But at the same time, that also might eventually be what the Syrian regime concludes it has to do.
They may lose patience with the efforts to resolve the crisis diplomatically and just move in to try to crush this last bastion of the rebellion.
But as I said, that would seriously undermine the potential for the Turkish government to essentially re-accept the legitimacy of Bashar al-Assad.
Yeah, well, what a mess still.
They should at least rename Idlib Obama-Stan or maybe Brennan-Stan.
People prefer that.
I don't know.
Why not Trump-Stan?
Well, I mean, he called off support for those guys at least.
You got to give him credit for that.
Yes, it's certainly complicated.
But, you know, there was a bit of a shift.
You're absolutely right in terms of the U.S. relationship with these rebel forces.
As you say, as much as we can criticize Trump, there's at least some degree of realistic thinking on his part when it comes to accepting the fact that whatever we may think about the Syrian government, it is not on the verge of falling from power.
And to pretend that it is would be to live in a fantasy at this point in 2019.
Yeah, well, and he said years ago, and of course, he's willing to change his policy based on all kinds of other incentives.
But just as far as his thinking, if you can call it that, goes, years ago, he said, why are we backing these guys?
We don't know who they are, which is a very nice way of saying we do know who they are.
They're al-Qaeda suicide bomber terrorists sworn loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri.
That's who they are.
And who could imagine that they would create a moderate new democracy in Syria if only they could get rid of Bashar al-Assad when they're head chopping lunatics who murdered Druze just for refusing to convert, for example, or suicide bomb schools full of children, if that fits with their politics.
These are the same guys.
Again, it's al-Qaeda in Iraq.
That's what the Nusra Front is.
It's Syrian al-Qaeda in Iraq from Iraq War II.
They were the bad guys in that war.
They were the bad guys in the last war.
But they're still good guys as long as they're in Idlib province, according to our establishment.
And Trump just saw through that.
What's moderate about these guys?
What's worse about Bashar al-Assad than Mohammed Abu al-Jolani, the leader of al-Nusra?
Nothing.
Not one single thing.
Jolani is worse than him in every single conceivable way.
I was on your show seven years ago in the summer of 2012 trying to express outrage over the fact that the Obama administration was providing support to some of these actors in Syria.
Seven years later, I still think it's my personal opinion that it's scandalous that Washington was supporting some groups that we've accused of terrorism throughout the post-9-11 period.
That was what month in 2012 again?
That was sometime in the summer of 2012.
This is right at the time the DIA memo was secretly being passed around, warning about the rise of the Islamic State.
And I'm curious of whether we go back and listen to that interview of whether you and I talked about the threat of the rise of an Islamic State here, where they would actually go ahead and create a caliphate in this new stateless territory that Bush created in Iraq and Obama had created in Syria.
Because we certainly saw that coming on this show way in advance.
So I bet that's probably part of that conversation then.
Yeah.
From a very cynical standpoint, I don't necessarily think the United States ever had the intention of wanting to make these extremists run Syria after toppling the regime.
Again, very cynically, though, I have to strongly consider the idea that the United States wanted to prolong the Syrian civil war and give these groups not enough power to decisively defeat Assad, but enough power to keep the Syrian Arab army bogged down in an internal conflict to make Syria a weaker state in the region.
Well, and as John Kerry explained on that secret recording or secretly recorded conversation with those Syrian so-called rebels in Britain, that what they were trying to do was something.
I can imagine, I guess, a bunch of Democrats meeting on the NSC and thinking that this is a strategy that will back these suicide bombers, essentially, to pressure Assad to step aside.
But they never say in favor of who.
Who is supposed to replace Assad?
And they didn't ever even seem to grapple directly with the question of, can the Ba'athist regime survive the loss of its figurehead?
Or would it be chaos?
And would Abu Muhammad al-Jalani be the most likely to take over, him or Baghdadi, in the event of Assad being forced out of there?
And they didn't seem to worry too much about that.
But they also didn't seem to have a bunch of new generals in mind to take power, to keep al-Qaeda out.
They didn't seem to have a real plan, as you say, bog them down.
But as far as pressuring Assad to step aside, which mythical moderates were supposed to take over the palace after that, you know?
Yeah, I believe it was a very misguided approach on the part of the Obama administration.
You know, as you described, there was a strategy, but it was flawed.
To think that these kinds of extremists would not turn their backs on the states that give them support is extremely naive thinking.
Yeah, for all of the criticisms we've heard from people have made about Obama, I think some of them are pretty misguided.
But I think this is one area where Obama definitely deserved a lot of criticism and condemnation.
And just so nobody gets it wrong, I don't think anybody would, but just to be clear, I'm not making the case.
I know that you would not say that this has anything to do with Obama being some kind of secret Muslim terrorist from Kenya, usurper, anything like that.
This is American policy.
I mean, in fact, fighting against al-Qaeda terrorists after September 11th, to a degree, is actually kind of the aberration.
Typically, America backs terrorists like this, from Jimmy Carter through Ronald Reagan and George Bush and Bill Clinton.
Even while they were attacking us all through the 90s, Bill Clinton still backed them and their friends in Bosnia and Kosovo and Chechnya.
And then the Brits tried to use him to kill Gaddafi right at the turn of the century, just a few months before September 11th, aligning with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and all these Mujahideen guys.
And then ever since 2006 and 2007 and George Bush's redirection, where they said, oops, we shouldn't have worked so hard to empower Iran's friends in Iraq.
Now we have to tilt back toward the Saudis and their friends.
That meant jihadist groups.
Seymour Hersh's great reporting in that and a couple of follow-up articles, Preparing the Battlefield was another one, where they started tilting back toward these jihadists.
That was the policy that Obama picked up and ran with and continued.
So that makes Obama George Bush.
It doesn't make him a radical Muslim secret terrorist usurper from Kenya in any way.
None of that crazy conspiracy stuff.
It just makes him essentially Bush's third and fourth term.
That's all.
Yeah, and you know what's very paradoxical here is that right now the Trump administration is pushing to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization.
How does that jive with the fact that in 2012 the United States was arming the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood in Syria?
I think this effort on the part of the Trump administration to essentially do a Muslim Brotherhood ban, to recognize the global movement as a terrorist organization, would sort of vindicate the narrative of the Syrian regime that it has been fighting U.S.-backed terrorism since 2011.
Of course, since the Syrian crisis began, the government has killed many Syrians who are not terrorists.
I'm not claiming that everyone who took up arms against Assad deserves to be labeled a terrorist.
But the regime's narrative is that it's been fighting terrorism this whole time.
And if the U.S. government were to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, the Syrian government would interpret this as real vindication.
They would claim that Syria was the first Arab state to take jihadist terrorism seriously.
This brings us back to the Muslim Brotherhood effort to topple the Syrian government between 1976 and 1982, ending with the Hama massacre that essentially crushed the Muslim Brotherhood insurgency.
And then after 2011, the regime has, of course, been fighting the Muslim Brotherhood again.
So I just think it's very important for Americans to sort of see the Trump administration's desires to designate Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization with just a little bit of historical context here.
Yeah.
Well, it seems like the most terrorist branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in the world is in Syria, backed by the CIA, just like in his narrative.
I'm not sure what's the problem with that.
I mean, the global organization itself is kind of a different argument.
In fact, Ayman al-Zawahiri predicted that when the Muslim Brotherhood won the elections in Egypt, that they'd be overthrown, and then they were, by American and Saudi puppets in the Egyptian military there.
And then Ayman al-Zawahiri put out another podcast, that's the leader of Al-Qaeda, boys and girls out there, put out another podcast saying, see, I told you so.
You try to use democracy and Western processes to come to power.
And this is probably the most conservative and moderate-type branch of the Muslim Brotherhood you could find, maybe in Qatar, but same as in Egypt.
It's not like they were radicals.
They were a bunch of rich old conservative guys, right?
They weren't bin Ladenites.
They were Islamists, but they weren't, you know, crazies.
But then al-Zawahiri denounced them and called them damn fools, essentially, for trying to go along with this, and then said that, you know, what had happened only proved that he was right about us and that kind of thing.
So now this only proves Al-Qaeda's narrative even more true.
That, see, here they want to outlaw the entire Muslim Brotherhood region-wide, world-wide, no matter if they sit in the parliament in Qatar.
And they ran four-in-one elections in Egypt before they got re-outlawed.
And I know there are all different branches of the Muslim Brotherhood in Yemen.
I think the Saudis back them, even though usually the Saudis hate the Muslim Brotherhood.
They back them there while the Qataris are spending more time backing Al-Qaeda against them.
So who knows, right?
It's a wide and varied collection of groups sharing one big name, it seems like.
Yes, the Muslim Brotherhood movement is rather decentralized.
And while historically the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has been understood as sort of the mother branch, if you will, there's not really any evidence that the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, especially today, is controlling the branches in these other countries, be it in Bahrain, Yemen, Morocco, Tunisia, Sudan, wherever.
So as you allude to, the idea of designating the Muslim Brotherhood writ large as a terrorist group, I think would be very messy and could have many unintended consequences.
But let's also keep in mind that there are three branches of the Muslim Brotherhood that the United States government already recognizes as a terrorist group.
Notably, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood is not one of them.
And that's because they're not terrorists or because they're backed by the CIA.
So they've got to keep them off the list.
The definition of who's a terrorist, you know, it varies from government to government, and it's an extremely subjective, well, it's become an increasingly subjective and very politicized decision.
But you're absolutely right.
While Hamas, understood to be the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, has been recognized as a terrorist group by the U.S. government for many years, there's obviously geopolitical factors that led to the U.S. not recognizing the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, because as you've pointed out, back in 2012, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood fighters were killing Assad's forces with support from the CIA and also with support from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey.
Yep.
Well, and then going back to the redirection by Seymour Hersh there, it's Elliott Abrams working for George Bush, Khalilzad and them, they came to Bush and read him The Right Act or The Sad Truth or something, and said, hey, look, we just fought a whole war for Iran.
The king of Saudi is pissed.
We got to fix this somehow.
So here's the policy is the redirection.
Tilt back toward the Sunnis.
Call it a giant oops and an attempted fix.
And one of the major planks was backing the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria.
Starting then in 2006.
Yes.
And according to some sources, when the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood was waging its insurgency against Hafez al-Assad in the late 70s and early 1980s, also some sources claim the CIA was backing those Islamist insurgents at that time, too.
I wonder if that's in Bob Dreyfus' book.
I forget now.
But have you ever read Devil's Game by Dreyfus?
Yes, absolutely.
I don't recall if he addressed that.
But a good source to go to is a book by Patrick Steele, Assad, The Struggle for the Middle East.
Yes, I know of him, but I've not read his books.
But yeah, I know who you mean.
He's he's the renowned British historian of modern Syria, right?
Unfortunately, he passed away a few years ago.
But yes, he is a Syrian expert.
Learned a lot about the country because of his as well as about the Middle East because of his work.
Highly recommend this book, Assad, The Struggle for the Middle East.
I believe it was published in, I think, 1988 or 1989.
So obviously it doesn't cover the last few decades of Syria.
But it's an excellent book that can help one understand the history of Syria from the end of French colonial rule in the 40s up until the late 1980s.
Wow, great.
I know that I've just been lucky enough doing this show that I have two different guys, Patrick Coburn and Eric Margulies, both who were in Syria during the giant crackdown against the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama in, it was 84, right?
82.
82, I'm sorry.
And I think both of them in different circumstances were essentially right up the road while that was going on.
Wow.
And a couple, two of the few who reported it accurately at the time, that kind of thing.
But yeah, anyway.
All right, great.
Listen, I'm sorry.
I probably kept you way over the agreed time.
I just keep asking you things.
Great to talk to you again, Giorgio.
I really appreciate it.
Likewise.
I had a great time coming on your show back in 2012.
I've remained a big fan of your show, Antiwar.com.
You guys do great stuff, and I hope to be a guest on your show again very soon.
So much more for us to talk about next time.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, you keep writing for Loeb Blog or write for Antiwar.com, and we'll be happy to publish it and talk to you again soon.
Thank you so much.
Have a good one.
Really appreciate it.
All right, guys, that's Giorgio Caffiero.
And here he is at Loeb Blog, the great Jim Loeb's blog.
Loeb Blog, Baghdadi's alive, and so is Islamic State's narrative.
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.
