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 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, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Hey guys, on the line, I've got John Schwartz from the tiny revolution.
Used to be.
And now writer for The Intercept.
And he's got a couple of important pieces here.
One of them about the Democrats and the empire.
And another one about betraying the Kurds.
Good old Kurd betraying.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Well, I'm great.
I'm so happy to be back.
And I like to think of myself as now participating in a slightly larger revolution.
Oh, well, that's good.
Yeah.
You know, it's a medium sized revolution.
At least.
Yes.
Thank you.
Thank you.
That's very generous.
And I'll try to come through on that.
Yeah, man.
Listen, I always did like your writing.
That's good stuff going way back to Bush years, at least.
So anyway, here's the thing about the Kurds thing.
I do kind of wish that you had said in the first paragraph, look, we got to leave.
I'm glad we're leaving.
I ain't saying that.
I'm just saying, because there sure was a huge pile on in the media.
And I'm sure as you're aware, a unanimous vote on the part of the Democrats in the House of Representatives to condemn Donald Trump for pulling troops out of Syria.
A war that Congress never authorized in the first place.
They're condemning him for ending one small part of it or something.
And I know that you didn't mean to say we have to stay and you don't say anywhere in here.
No, we should stay.
But anyway, it's a somewhat small criticism of an overall great piece about the history of America screwing over the Kurds here.
And I think we both obviously agree or I don't know how obvious it is that I agree with you.
But I do agree with you that the way this was handled was pretty bad.
They could have negotiated a peaceful exit instead of causing a two week long war.
But anyway, what do you think about all that stuff?
I just didn't want to bring that up because I didn't want to get into the whole morass of that question.
The most important thing for Americans to understand is that this is just standard U.S. behavior.
The only difference with Donald Trump is that he does it on Twitter.
There just wasn't an Internet for people to talk about how we were viciously betraying the Kurds back in 1963 when the Kennedy administration did it.
Yeah, I mean, and there's so much to this history and it is so important and all of that.
But it's just when we're living in a time where the consensus is that our Russian traitor, unpatriotic usurper president keeps doing horrible stuff like trying to end American engagements anywhere, trying to negotiate with Kim, you know, refusing to bomb Syria on one occasion or another, backing down to the Ayatollah.
And these are all supposedly the worst things about this guy, according to our media.
And I just always like to, you know, of course, admit as much as is true about, you know, the criticism and what's fair about it.
Well, at the same time, making sure that we're not just piling on and saying that, yeah, the worst stuff that the American government ever does is when it pulls troops out of somewhere.
Because you know what?
If you were just a regular TV victim in this country, you might think that.
Yeah, no, that is absolutely true.
And, you know, obviously it's great that you're around, you know, making this point.
Like we were eventually going to betray the Kurds because that's what we do.
But like the fact is, being there in the first place is the core of the problem.
You know, the fact that we want to run an empire all over the world means that we're going to be continually betraying people everywhere.
You know, like we've betrayed the Kurds eight times by conservative count.
I heard from a lot of people who said, you know, actually, we've betrayed the Kurds many more times.
I couldn't really argue with that.
But, you know, we've also betrayed allies in a zillion other countries and we're going to betray more people in the future.
So if you're angry about this kind of thing, then just get rid of the U.S. empire, because that is the issue.
Right.
And, you know, to put it in economic terms, we don't all have to agree on every single thing about economics, but it's like blaming the crash as the problem instead of the bubble that had to pop.
It's the correction hurts like hell, but it was the bubble of the artificial prosperity that was the problem.
So when we leave Afghanistan, there's going to be a crash in the amount of power that the groups we've been propping up have.
There's going to be a correction there.
You can call it a betrayal.
When we pull out of Somalia, Al-Shabaab is going to come into places where U.S. forces have been keeping them out.
And you're going to be able to say, well, we're betraying everyone in Somalia who's not on the side of Al-Shabaab.
And in every case, we always we're going to hear on TV.
I don't mean you.
Pardon me.
You understand what I mean.
They, TV and the common narrative, they're always going to leave out the part where George Bush gave birth to Al-Shabaab and it's all America's fault.
And so shut up.
They're never going to say that.
They're never going to say Barack Obama is the one who inflicted the Islamic State on the Kurds in the first place.
So then he had to turn around and help the Kurds to fend them off at the last minute after thousands of them had been killed already.
You know, they're never going to explain that.
They're always just going to say that the withdrawal and then the accountability for the quizlings that comes later is the problem.
Yeah.
And I mean, for people who have a hard time understanding this when it's America, you know, when the Soviet Union pulled out of Afghanistan, the head of the Soviet-installed government was murdered.
I think he was like castrated and dragged through the streets, if I'm remembering correctly.
And, you know, like, well, that was bad, but wasn't the problem the Soviets invading in the first place?
Right.
You know, that's why he ended up dragged through the streets, if indeed that's what happened.
He definitely died.
And so, you know, if you're going to invade another country, probably somewhere down the line, you're also going to leave.
And all the people who helped you along the way are probably going to die.
Yeah.
Or at least be punished somewhat.
You know, it's important, too, that in Vietnam, for example, when the communists took over the South, they didn't murder everybody.
You know, I mean, the people who were the closest sock puppets of the Americans and the French and whoever in the regime, they were imprisoned and all of that.
But they didn't just go on a campaign of massacres, certainly not like what happened in Cambodia next door.
So it could have been much worse.
I'm not saying it was great.
There are plenty of refugees from Vietnam and all of that.
But it could have been much, much worse.
And I guess much, much worse was feared was going to happen that didn't actually play out.
That is true.
I would say it's like it's not it's a close analogy to what's happening now with the Kurds.
You know, one of the things that really is true is there is a sort of institutionalized loathing of Kurds in the Turkish government, and they have a long history of massacring Kurds.
And so, you know, it's probably going to be pretty awful, although there may be enough world attention on it now that Turkey holds back a bit.
Hang on just one second.
Hey, guys, I ever tell you about LibertyStickers.com?
It's just nothing but anti-government propaganda for the back of your truck.
I invented most of them, the good ones anyway.
Anti-war stuff, anti-cops, making fun of all the candidates in the upcoming election.
LibertyStickers.com.
Hey, guys, check out the great lineup of podcasts we've got going on over at the Libertarian Institute.
There's me, Foreign Policy in Focus with Kyle Anzalone, Free Man Beyond the Wall with Pete Guinones, a.k.a.
Mance Rayder, the Liberty Weekly podcast with Patrick McFarlane and Keith Knight, and our newest edition, Jen the Libertarian with Jen Monroe.
Check them all out at LibertarianInstitute.org.
Hey, guys, don't you think it'd be cool if you could go to college, but Tom Woods was the dean of the thing?
Yeah, well, something like that.
Check out LibertyClassroom.com, where Tom Woods went and had his pick of all the best professors to teach their courses in the real history and economics that you didn't learn when you went to college the first time around, or maybe you didn't learn because you skipped your higher education altogether.
But here's some real American history and some real economics, the kind of stuff that you've been missing.
It's all at LibertyClassroom.com, and make sure to click through the link in the right-hand margin of my website, ScottHorton.org.
All right, so, well, I was ranting.
You can give your best recap if you want about the current one.
I think we should really go over the current situation.
Then let's go back through this history, because I think these examples are really important and instructive, too.
But in the current example, it really is worth mentioning, isn't it, that the Islamic State is just al-Qaeda in Iraq, and that they were essentially dead before Obama gave them billions and billions and billions of dollars and weapons and worked with all of our allied states in the region in order to help them to fight against Assad, which only backfired when they ended up creating the Islamic State and even conquering western Iraq.
It was only then, in 2014, in the summer of 2014, that Obama launched Iraq War III to then destroy the Islamic State that he'd created.
Right?
You know, I mean, I was in New York City, about a mile north of the World Trade Center in September 2001, and I thought I understood U.S. foreign policy pretty well.
But if you had told me at that moment, well, you know, it's not going to be too long before we're collaborating with al-Qaeda again, just as we did with the proto-al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Yeah, ten years.
Ten measly, stinking years.
2011, and it's on.
Yeah, I would not have believed that that was possible, but, you know, it makes sense.
It's just, you know, the U.S. is against any country anywhere, but certainly in the Middle East.
Like, the actual people living there, controlling their countries.
And whenever there have been, there aren't very many, like, secular nationalists, halfway decent movements at this point.
Like, almost none at all in the Middle East, largely thanks to us.
But to the degree there ever were any, it was just natural for the United States to ally itself with fundamentalist Islam.
And we did that over and over and over again across the Mid-East.
And, of course, in Afghanistan, you know, as people listening to this show know, one of the biggest, quote, covert actions in U.S. history took place in the 1980s, and all the people who later became al-Qaeda, you know, were our best friends.
And they went to, like, hang out with Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office.
There's a famous picture of him with them.
And they were the good guys, and Red Dawn, I think Red Dawn was, like, dedicated to them, right?
No, it was Rainbow Three.
Okay, Rainbow Three.
Yeah, in Red Dawn, the Americans are the mujahideen, and the Soviets have invaded the USA.
That's different.
Okay.
Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen.
So, you know, we have this longstanding relationship with the groups that either were sort of before al-Qaeda or then actually al-Qaeda.
And as I say, I didn't think that we would get the band back together, but indeed we did.
Yeah, man.
Well, and you know what?
I don't know why I'm the only one who always says this, and I know it must be annoying as hell to my audience that I just say the same thing every time to everyone.
But sort of just like, hey, the Reagan-Bush-Clinton policy is what brought on September 11th in the first place.
This argument, it just doesn't seem to quite take.
Some people know it, but it doesn't seem to be the basis of the narrative.
But to me, this is the narrative.
It's all about the redirection.
In 2006, the Bush administration came to Bush and said, we really screwed this up.
We empowered Iran and the Shia.
And we thought that we would have more dominance over the Dawah party and the Supreme Islamic Council, but it turns out that that was wrong.
Iran has the influence.
We just scored a giant own goal.
The Saudi king is mad as hell.
And what are we going to do?
And the answer was, we're going to tilt back toward the Sunnis.
And Elliot Abrams was in charge of the project.
Everyone has to read the Seymour Hersh article about this in The New Yorker.
Read everything Seymour Hersh wrote 2005 through 2008 or so about all of this stuff, about targeting Iran and how Iraq War II was such a mistake.
Then the answer was, not just because it was bad, but because it empowered the Shia and the Iranians who are independent from us and who the Israelis and Americans hate the most.
And so then the answer was, in order to make up for that, we got to back the al-Qaeda terrorists because Saudi doesn't have an army, right?
They just have al-Qaeda terrorists.
And so just like Prince Turki al-Faisal said, quoted in The Financial Times, saying to John Kerry, as though he didn't know this, Daesh, that's ISIS, is our response to your support for the Da'wah.
Right?
Well, exactly.
Obama's support for Daesh is the response to Bush's support for the Da'wah, too.
And just like he told Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic in 2012, Goldberg says, don't you think if we get rid of Assad that that would help to bring Iran down a peg?
And Obama says, absolutely.
And Goldberg says, so what are we doing to make that happen?
And he says, your clearance isn't high enough for me to tell you what we're doing.
Oh, I forgot about all that.
It's all about Iran.
Barack Obama and Jeffrey Goldberg sitting there just chewing the fat.
That's right.
And so when Obama is backing these terrorists, it's not because he's a secret Muslim from Kenya, of course.
It's because he's a secret George Bush from Connecticut.
He's essentially, he's carrying out the exact same policy that Bush left to him, which is America's on the side of the Sunnis.
The fact that Bush fought a whole war for Iran notwithstanding.
And so now we've got to find a way, a consolation prize to make up for that.
That's why America, that's why the CIA was, especially in the Syria war, back on the side of al-Qaeda.
And the same thing is playing out in Yemen to this day.
Where al-Qaeda is part of the Saudi regime's shock troop force, really the UAE, but they're on the same side, essentially, against the Houthis.
Because the Houthis are friends with Iran.
And so even though it was the Bin Ladenites what knocked those towers down down the street from you.
Our government hates Iran and Hezbollah and their friends more.
Simple as that.
Yeah.
So that's why they're willing to commit high treason against your dead neighbors and their survivors.
If you take a step back and look at just the configuration of the Mideast.
The fact is, once you've made the decision, we must control the Mideast.
We have to be in charge.
Nicholas Burns, who is now, I think, Joe Biden's top foreign policy advisor for his campaign, talked, I think, 10 years ago about how we had to demonstrate to Iran that we're not going anywhere and we're the power in the region.
And once you've made the decision, you have an empire and you're going to run the Mideast, you have limited options in terms of what you're going to do.
If you want to knock Iran down a peg, then is there anybody to ally with except al-Qaeda and quasi-al-Qaeda?
Nope.
Pretty much no.
Nope.
That's what you got.
And that's where we've been.
And it's funny, you know, because I get so hung up on just these couple of few narratives.
Like, hey, America started it.
Doesn't mean our enemies are good guys.
They target civilians.
They're butchers and war criminals and terrorists just as exactly as accused.
It's no apology to them to say that Bill Clinton gave them real reasons to want to attack this country.
You know, it's just true.
And, you know, if we're adults here, we ought to be able to face up to the same kind of thing.
And it just seems like, hey, here's a narrative that people need to get their head around.
Iraq War II wasn't just bad, and it didn't just help Iran.
It helped Iran in such a way that the Bush administration itself turned around and took the side of the same damn terrorists that they had launched that war in the name of in order to correct the consequences of their own goal.
And I don't want to call it a mistake like it was an innocent mistake.
It was a premeditated murder plot that went terribly wrong.
So there's no innocence in the fact of the error here.
I don't mean people always hear innocence in error, but it's not necessarily true.
We could plan to rob a bank, and it could go terribly wrong.
And no one would say that it was an accident in total, just that the part where the security guard shot me in the head was not part of the plan.
Anyway.
Yeah, I mean, I think the right way to look at the world is, you know, I don't know if you've ever come across this quote from Thomas Merton, who was a poet and a monk who said, I think this was in a letter just to a friend saying that the world is full of great criminals with enormous power, and they are in a death struggle with each other.
It's a huge gang battle of supremely well-armed and well-organized gangsters using well-meaning lawyers and policemen and clergymen as their front, controlling papers, means of communication, and enrolling everybody in their armies.
And so the fact that the United States is doing this doesn't mean that the world is not also full of other significant criminals.
It just means that, you know, if we choose a life of criminality as a country, then this is the inevitable outcome.
So you can't really be like, you know, U.S. foreign policy is fine.
And also I'm really sad about the Kurds.
So you like supporting anti-war radio hosts.
That makes sense.
Here's how you can do that.
Go to scotthorton.org slash donate, and there's all kinds of options to do so and all kinds of different kickbacks at different levels.
Of course, take PayPal, Patreon, and all different kinds of digital currencies and all of those sorts of things.
And anybody who signs up by way of Patreon or PayPal to donate $5 a month to the show will automatically get keys to the Reddit room, my own private Reddit group that I have quite a few members now and lots of fun in there every day.
So check out all about that at scotthorton.org slash donate.
And thanks.
OK, so now let's go back in time because, you know what?
And I get this a lot from, you know, people say that they really like the show, but sometimes they're just so lost.
They're just starting to try to learn about foreign policy.
And then they land here and they're, you know, up to their eyeballs in weeds and they don't know which way is which.
So what the hell's occurred anyway?
John Schwartz.
And where are they from?
And what's the big deal?
And why have they been?
Why has the United States been so involved in their fate over all these decades that we've even had the opportunity to screw them over eight separate times or more, as you say here?
Right.
Yeah.
Well, it really goes back exactly 100 years to the end of World War I.
The Kurds are like a pretty big ethnic group, like there may be 30 million Kurds or 40 million Kurds.
And it is their misfortune to be located like right at the intersection of Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey.
And what that means.
And Armenia and Azerbaijan, too, a little bit.
Yeah, that is true.
That is true.
And so they're right in the middle of the Mideast.
And there was a sort of rise of Kurdish nationalism during the late 1800s and the early 1900s.
And at that time, all the Kurds were within the Ottoman Empire, which people may know, you know, centered in present day Turkey.
It controlled to some degree most of the present day Mideast, including all the countries that were eventually carved out of the Ottoman Empire.
And when the Ottoman Empire lost in World War I, they were on the side of Germany.
There were like lots of thoughts about like, well, you know, who's going to get what part of the Ottoman Empire?
And people probably know what's present day Syria was essentially given to France, including present day Lebanon.
Present day Iraq was given to the British.
And, you know, the question was, should the Kurds get a country of their own, you know, under some sort of European colonial governorship?
Or sometimes it was called a mandate then.
And there were a couple sort of abortive attempts to create a Kurdistan.
Nothing really took hold.
I mean, that was a time when things were really in flux.
This is completely forgotten.
But, you know, Lebanon was supposed to be just like sort of the first country like it carved out of what's now Syria.
There was also going to be a Druze nation.
The Druze are, you know, another much smaller ethnic minority.
And actually, my grandmother and grandfather were living in Beirut at this time during the 1920s when this was all happening.
And our family still has what we call the Druze chest, which is this very nice like fancy chest that we keep blankets in now.
And then some Druze sold this chest to my family for money to like go off and try to establish a Druze nation.
Anyway, the point is the Kurds kind of got screwed at the end of World War I.
There was no place for them.
And instead, they were kind of split up.
All these borders were slicing through where the Kurds lived.
So you had Kurds in all of these countries.
The biggest population in Turkey, but lots and lots of Kurds also in Iran, also in Iraq, also in Syria, as you say, Armenia and Azerbaijan and I think a few other countries.
But that was the main issue.
And so then, you know, the British are trying to run the Mideast until World War II.
Then it becomes clear they can't do it.
We come in and we're like, OK, now we're taking over.
And the Kurds, because of their location right there in the middle of everything, were the perfect tool for any kind of outside imperial power.
So let's say we don't like the government of Iraq, which we did not like during the late 1950s.
There was a revolution in the 1950s, which brought to power the military government, which thought that they should have some sort of control over their own resources and not take orders from us and the British.
So we didn't like the government of Iraq.
It's just natural.
You're an outside imperial power.
What do you do?
Well, you arm this ethnic minority that has been treated badly by the central government, and that causes trouble for that central government.
So we armed the Kurds during the late 1950s.
And then when we were able to help overthrow the Iraqi government in 1963, you can actually hear John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy talking about this in Oval Office tapes.
They knew so little about Iraq, this country that they were meddling in at the time.
Robert F. Kennedy actually referred to it as the Iraq.
But anyway, we overthrew the government.
Now we had a government that we liked.
We didn't need the Kurds anymore.
So we handed over a lot of napalm to the Iraqi government, which they could then go drop on the Kurds in northern Iraq.
So anyway, that's the basic dynamic.
The key problem for us as an outside power using the Kurds is that any time we support them and they begin to gain some sort of independence within the country in which we're helping them out.
So later we kind of helped out the Kurds in the 1990s in Iraq.
What that means is the other Kurds right across the border in countries where we like the government, you know, in the 1990s we hated Saddam Hussein, so we wanted to help the Kurds to make trouble for him.
The Kurds, their relatives right across the border in countries that are our allies are like, oh, well, things are going really great, you know, three miles away.
Maybe we could have some freedom and independence of our own here.
And so then we have to be like, oh, well, we didn't mean that.
Like, we wanted things to be good for the Iraqi Kurds, but not for the Turkish Kurds.
And so during the 1990s, it is incredible.
Like, if you look at how this actually happened.
I'm sorry, I'm really getting into the weeds now, too.
No, I don't mind the weeds.
I only mind that you're skipping the 80s, but go ahead with the 90s and we'll go back to the 80s here because this is such an important point here.
There's also the 70s.
Yeah.
But we'll circle back.
Sure.
During the 1990s, you know, there's a big air base in Turkey used by the Turkish military, used by the U.S. military.
The Incirlik base you're talking about where they keep the H-bombs.
That's right.
That's why it's in the news right now.
Right.
And so there's reporting at the time, like there's a big article in The Washington Post about this.
Formally, we were enforcing a no-fly zone in northern Iraq to protect our beloved allies, the Iraqi Kurds.
Now, Turkey was very worried about how restive Kurds were getting in Turkey and was carrying out this mass ethnic cleansing campaign that led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people, like thousands of villages were emptied.
It was super ugly.
It was all done with U.S. arms and support.
But Turkey was also concerned about people like Kurds who were fleeing from Turkey into Iraq, generally seen as terrorists by Turkey.
Some of them were terrorists by any reasonable definition.
But Turkey, even as the U.S. planes were flying from this base to protect the Iraqi Kurds, the Turkish military was flying their planes from the same base, often the same type of planes because they bought them from the United States, flying the same type of planes to Iraq to bomb the Iraqi Kurds.
And the U.S. and Turkey had to set up these deconfliction procedures so that the U.S. planes protecting the Kurds didn't get into fights with the Turkish planes killing the Kurds.
Which, by the way, let me ask you, the Turks were targeting the PKK hiding on the Iraqi side of the border rather than the Barzani and Talabani factions, correct?
Or they were actually attacking the Iraqi Kurds themselves, not just Turkish Kurds hiding in Iraq?
Because I know that was going on all through Iraq War II.
There would be strikes by the Turks inside on the Iraqi side of the border.
But they weren't attacking our Iraqi Kurds.
They were attacking PKK guys.
Probably.
But, you know, I mean, it's like from the perspective of the Turkish military, every Kurd is a member of the PKK.
You know what I mean?
So I don't think that they were.
Well, I mean, they have a pretty good relationship with Barzani and Talabani now or the, you know, through in this century anyway.
I don't know about in the 90s.
I guess that's my question.
Yeah.
You know, honestly, I don't know what the answer is.
Like it was such a gigantic mess.
I'd really have to go back to the details.
But, you know, I do.
I notice here you link to Noam Chomsky, who he's the only reason that I know about this.
There is no coverage of this in the 90s.
And I cared.
I was interested in Clinton's no fly zone bombings and this and that and all those things all through this period of time.
And the only source I ever heard say, man, Bill Clinton is arming up the Turks to crush their Kurdish uprising there in the most brutal fashion.
Was that one professor out of every other public voice on foreign policy that I could find anywhere?
I read the New York Times every day, too.
I mean, just keep in mind that only Noam Chomsky, out of all the other professors in America and all the people in the media, like has access to any libraries or the Internet.
So it was impossible for anybody else to find out about this.
You know, he had a library card.
He's the only one who's determined to turn up this stuff, at least at that time.
There's a lot more of us, you know, who grew up on him now.
But nobody else has an interest in doing that, do they?
Embarrassing good old Bill Clinton.
That might help Newt Gingrich.
So so let's let's circle back.
But then when we get back to the 90s, I'm going to tell you another truly horrifying story, which is going to demonstrate to people how bad things are.
So as I say, back in the 50s, the Iraqi Kurds were good because we could use them to make trouble for the central Iraqi government, whom we didn't like.
Then in 1963, we helped install what sort of evolved into a Baathist government.
This coup that we supported in 1963, you know, a small role was played in it by Saddam Hussein, who I think was then 25 years old.
But then, you know, now the Iraqi Kurds suddenly become bad because we like the central government in Iraq.
So we help the Kurds get killed then.
Eventually, Iraq sort of drifts into the Soviet orbit in the 1970s.
And so our then ally in Iran, the Shah, doesn't like them.
We don't like Iraq.
We want to make trouble for the Iraqi government again.
We again arm the Kurds.
We again betray the Kurds when the Shah and Saddam come to an agreement.
This is a very famous example of this, where the U.S. government, Congress, later investigated this and talked about what a shameful episode this was in U.S. history.
Henry Kissinger is famous for saying, well, you know, covert action is not missionary work.
Right.
And this is the one where, if I remember right, it's in Trita Parsi's book, Treacherous Alliance, where he has a kind of extended examination of this, where the Kurds didn't want to do it.
And they were going, you know what, we're really reluctant here to do this.
But then America really leaned on the Shah and said, look, Shah, you make a bunch of promises to these Iraqi Kurds that you'll back them up, not just us, who they don't trust.
And so the Shah was like, OK.
So then he got in on it, too.
And so then the Iraqi Kurds went along with it and for use against the Baathist regime there.
But then, as you say, they lost interest.
And I forget now if it was the Iranians who dropped out first or the Americans who dropped out first.
But as you say, their massacre amounted to nothing but a shrug of one shoulder of America's Henry Kissinger.
Who cares?
Yeah, I think it was simultaneous, you know, in the sense that the Shah and Saddam wanted to do this, wanted to come to an agreement.
And the U.S. was like, OK, cool with us, do it.
And, you know, we'll cut off the supply of arms.
And, of course, immediately afterwards, the Iraqi military went north and killed lots and lots of Kurds.
So during the 1980s, Iraq attacks Iran because now Iran is bad, because the Shah has fallen to the new Islamic Republic.
And so now Iran is our enemy.
The Carter administration gives Saddam Hussein a green light.
Apparently that seems to be the case.
It's not completely 100 percent proven, but there are classified documents that talk about this.
Carter gives Saddam Hussein a green light to attack Iran.
There's this truly hideous, you know, incredibly gruesome war between the two countries.
It involves the use of chemical weapons by Iraq, both on Iranian soldiers and also on Iraqis.
Like when there's a suspicion that these Iraqis, particularly the Kurds in the north, are not 100 percent behind the central government down in Baghdad, they're causing trouble and rebelling.
Saddam Hussein executes what was quasi or actual genocide against the northern Kurds using chemical weapons.
As you say, you know, it was truly awful.
It wasn't just the gassing of Halabja.
Now, this is telling.
There's a story in A Problem from Hell by Samantha Power.
She's talking about this, and she interviewed a Washington Post reporter who was trying to get the murder of the Kurds reported in the United States.
And so he was pushing for this, and one of his editors told him, you know, like, you have this photograph of a Kurd who's been murdered by chemical weapons.
And the editor said, who will care?
So that was the attitude of the U.S. at that time.
Now, of course, later in 1991 and then later in 2003, the Washington Post and the American media cared a lot.
Suddenly, the Kurds were the most beautiful people on Earth, and we had to do everything possible to protect them.
Yes.
So they were useful for something else again.
Right.
So this happens during the 1980s.
Then, of course, there's the first Gulf War in 1991.
At the end of the Gulf War, the first George Bush, George H.W. Bush.
It's unclear what the hell he thought he was doing, but he publicly said he called on, quote, the Iraqi military and Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.
And both Iraqi Shia in the south and Iraqi Kurds in the north heard this and were like, oh, wow, like the United States is telling us to go do this.
And, you know, we desperately want to.
So here's our time.
And so they rise up in both the south and the north.
And then we're like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.
That's not what we had in mind.
What we wanted was for the Iraqi military to take out Saddam.
So everything would be exactly the same as before, except Saddam Hussein wouldn't be in power and there would be some other Iraqi military leader.
And so we just stood down.
The U.S. military stood down and watched as the Kurds in the north and the Shia in the south were once again massacred.
So at least a hundred thousand dead.
Yeah.
And as America is, at least in the southern part of the country, standing right there watching.
There's a George Clooney Marky Mark movie about this, where this is the setting in the background of a gold heist.
There are three kings, three kings.
Everybody in America should watch Three Kings.
What a great movie.
Yeah.
And they're, you know, again, with truncating all the antecedents and everything.
Geez, are we really just going to stand by and watch all these people be massacred?
Yep.
And yes, we are.
Geez.
Was it our president who just told them to stick their neck out to get chopped off?
Uh huh.
At the end of a war that we kind of baited their government into in the first place.
Yeah, a little bit of that.
After we've been backing them for eight years against Iran next door.
After they were our enemies for a little while and we backed these same Kurds against them just ten years before that.
Pretty much same story.
If I was a Kurd, I'd be really pissed off.
I did see where when H.W. Bush died, they said, oh yeah, Mr. Embargo.
You know, supposedly he was their protector with the no fly zone and all of that.
But all they remember was being hungry.
Right.
Yeah.
It's funny, you know, like my job really is to write these stories.
And generally speaking, I'm sure like you, you know, I keep like the general details in my head.
But when you actually have to do something in public, you have to go back and check everything and get more of the details.
And this is really a story where it's like, oh my God, I'd forgotten this and like how awful it was.
Just this whole history is so dreadful.
And here's a particularly dreadful thing.
This is what I wanted to tell you about that will make you, Scott, specifically happy slash horrified.
OK, so it's the end of the Gulf War.
And it really does look very bad on CNN, like that we're just letting the Kurds get slaughtered.
And so we set up this no fly zone with the aim purportedly of protecting them from Saddam Hussein.
Now, and this is, if I'm remembering correctly, this is like the end of Three Kings or something like this.
But there are tons of Kurds who were like on the border with Turkey, you know, who were fleeing the onslaught.
They're on the border with Turkey.
And the U.S. ambassador to Turkey at the time is in charge and does a lot of like, you know, useful humanitarian things and like getting protection for these Kurds who are there in the mountains.
Now, then it's the 1990s.
And as we discussed, the Clinton administration is helping Turkey just wall up the hell out of Turkish Kurds and sometimes going and bombing Iraqi Kurds.
Things are happening in Bosnia, like, you know, Yugoslavia has fallen apart.
Samantha Power sees this on TV.
What she doesn't see on TV is what's happening to the Turkish Kurds.
That's not on TV.
But she sees what's happening in Bosnia.
She's very, very upset about this.
She has a job where she's the assistant for the guy who was the ambassador, who was the ambassador to Turkey.
And together, they're very upset about what's happening in Bosnia.
And she talks in her recent memoir about how, you know, she and the former ambassador were really getting up to speed on what's happening in Bosnia.
Because he wasn't really familiar with all the details and he cared so much about the people in Bosnia.
Something had to be done.
Well, he and Samantha Power could have cared.
He already knew everything about what was going on with Kurds in Turkey.
Like, he didn't need to read up on that to find out what was happening to people being massacred.
But somehow that never occurred to him, apparently, according to Samantha Power's book.
And it never occurred to her.
Like, there is no mention of this, you know, of what Clinton was doing at the time in Turkey.
So, like, this person, this guy, this ambassador, like, he had all this personal expertise, knowledge, contacts, everything.
Presumably, if he cared about human beings, like, he could have done something.
There is, as I said, no record of this in Samantha Power's book.
But it was very sad.
It was terrible.
We had to do something about Bosnia.
Yeah, man.
And by the way, one more point on the crushing of the uprising in 1991 was that the Mujahideen Iqalq became very useful to Saddam Hussein during that time.
And he used them to – I think particularly against the Kurds.
I don't know if against the Shia, too.
But there's a quote from Myron Rajavi saying, I guess, something like, don't waste the ammo.
Just crush them under your tank treads and this kind of thing.
Yeah.
It's such a dreadful story.
And then, of course, then by 2003, you know, we needed another war.
We needed another Gulf War.
And so the Kurds, you know, took center place again.
Let me interrupt for just one second to point out that in the meantime, the reason America was attacked on September 11th, giving Bush the opportunity to launch Iraq War II, was in revenge for America's stationing combat forces in Saudi Arabia where they could launch these endless no-fly zone patrols and bombing campaigns against Iraq for a whole decade leading up to that attack.
So kind of important.
Anyway, go ahead.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, we could talk for the next seven years and not get to the bottom of all the dreadful details that are involved in this.
And so, yeah, that's exactly right.
September 11th happens.
As Rumsfeld said on the afternoon of September 11th, you know, that they were going to use this as an opportunity to, as he said in his notes, sweep everything up, connected and not.
And one of the things that was not connected to September 11th was Saddam Hussein, who was still sitting there defying us by not actually doing anything but just being in power when we didn't want him to be.
So what's the case for invading Iraq?
Well, there was the bullshit about weapons of mass destruction, but there was also the heart-rending moral case expressed by people like Christopher Hitchens at the time because the Kurds are such wonderful people, and we've got to help the Kurds, and we've got to do this right now.
This is our opportunity.
Let's go.
Now, Daniel Ellsberg, like right after the war started, was on C-SPAN with William Crystal, and I once really went through that in detail, and it is hilarious in retrospect.
That's the one where he doesn't have any idea about the CIA overthrowing Mossadegh in 53, right?
And Ellsberg has to teach him, and he's like, huh.
I think they're talking about Iraqi history, and there are all kinds of things where William Crystal is like, I did not know that.
Amazing to the rest of us.
I definitely want to invade this country.
I know absolutely nothing about it, but I'm sure that invading a gigantic war is the right course of action.
So Ellsberg was saying people talk about the Kurds.
Well, the Kurds have every reason to think that they're going to be betrayed by the United States again as so often in the past.
The fact that we're inviting the Turks into the war, they're going to be pretty nervous about that.
And Crystal said this.
This is why he deserves the title of America's sleaziest human being.
She's like, I'm against betraying the Kurds.
Surely your point isn't that because we betrayed them in the past, we should betray them this time.
And Ellsberg said, not that we should.
I'm not advocating that.
I'm just saying that we will.
And Crystal was like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
We will not.
And of course we did.
Eventually, in 2007 in particular, we let Turkey come and bomb the Iraqis again.
Now, the funny thing is that Weekly Standard, edited, of course, by William Crystal, at that time published an article saying that like, well, we've got to let Turkey bomb the Kurds.
William Crystal was there.
He was so sad about the Kurds.
It was so important for us to help them.
It was so wrong of Ellsberg to say that we were going to betray them again.
And then in 2007, he's running a magazine.
It was like, well, time to betray the Kurds.
Let's get going.
Yep.
Hey, business is business.
You know, I used to like the Kurds, but they've really changed.
I don't know what it is.
Let's go kill them.
So, you know, that's the history.
There's even more to it.
There's more recent things that are pretty awful involving America and the Kurds.
But that's the story, and now we get to today where we put some troops in Syria and they were really there partly to keep Turkey from coming in and killing all the Kurds.
And now the U.S. government decided it's time for us to do it all again.
It is important, too, I think that – and I'm not sure about the exact dollar figures and what have you.
But I guess my understanding is that out of all the allies that participated in the Syria war on America and al-Qaeda's side, that the Turks actually did more than anybody to boost the Islamic State specifically.
So, like we were saying, that was sure betraying the Syrian Kurds at that point.
But they also invaded western Iraq and were not quite at the gates of Erbil, but across the river or right across the highway or whatever from the gates to Erbil in northern Iraq.
That was like finally when the line was crossed and America intervened in August of 2014.
So, that's a whole other screw over right there.
I mean, they eventually did side with them and intervene there, but they let the Islamic State become a major problem.
And then I don't know if anybody counted how many Peshmerga died in Iraq War III fighting with the Americans and the Shiites, again, against the Sunni insurgency there in the Islamic State.
Yeah, I mean, we don't bother counting that kind of thing.
So, at the end of this, there's a very famous saying, which is, we have no friends but the mountains.
And that really is true.
And it's just the way foreign policy works.
In a certain sense, Kissinger was right.
Foreign policy, covert action is not missionary work.
It has zero to do with any kind of morality.
And the point is, just don't fall for it.
Right now, today, it's mostly a lot of Democrats, also some Republicans, rending their garments and shrieking to the heavens about our terrible behavior.
And it is terrible.
It is incredibly dishonorable and grotesque and awful.
But number one, it's par for the course.
And number two, it grows out of the core aspects of US foreign policy.
So, if you support standard US foreign policy, you support what's happening with the Kurds right now.
Like, it's inevitable.
So, choose one or the other.
Yeah.
You know, in the Hearst series from the late Bush years there, where it was, you know, the redirection and preparing the battlefield and a few other of those about this, he talks also about American support for PJAK, which is the Iranian version of the PKK or the YPG.
And I don't know how much they've had to suffer for accepting America's help in agitating against the Iranian regime.
That's something that's been sparsely covered.
But that supposedly was part of that back then.
You know of any follow up on that?
I do not.
I mean, the incredible thing, of course, is that America is so powerful that we just like run roughshod over people all over the world.
And even for freaks and weirdos like you and me, like we're doing it and it's hard to keep track of what's going on.
You know, there's so much of it.
Yeah.
Well, and you know what?
You are just like me and probably better at the Mr. Footnote thing where you always remember where you read everything, which not everybody can do.
But yeah, you're right.
It's essentially impossible to keep up with all this stuff.
And never mind keeping up with all the junk on TV, but even keeping up with all the important stuff.
Wait a minute.
Whatever did happen to CIA support for PJAK there?
I mean, those guys get massacred or what?
I don't even know.
I need to follow up.
Now I'm going to forget that I need to follow up on it.
Anyway.
Yeah.
It really does require, going back to Noam Chomsky, like it really does require.
You know, this mind of somebody who's like one of the greatest intellects since Galileo to keep track of all of it.
Yeah.
It's like it's too much for our normal-sized brains.
Yeah.
In fact, I actually emailed him for a footnote about Senior's refusal to negotiate with Saddam Hussein in the second half of 1990, you know, because he wanted to have his war.
Once he decided he was going to have his war, he wouldn't let Saddam surrender no matter what.
And Chomsky was like, oh, yeah, you know, that's chapter six of Necessary Illusions or whichever it was.
I'm pretty sure that was what it was.
Yes.
I would just like to point out that I, Noam Chomsky, am 90 years old, and my brain still functions much better than yours does.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah.
No problem.
He certainly didn't have to look it up.
He emailed me right back.
Oh, yeah.
It's chapter six of Necessary Illusions.
Okay.
Thanks.
And there's so much great stuff there, you know.
I got a ton of great stuff.
One of the guys in Newsday back then was just doing killer work on Saddam Hussein, going, look, man, let me save a little bit of face and I'll get the hell out right now, please.
They just were like, no way.
Stiff arm.
Forget it.
Almost like, you know, Cheney and his men dressing down the Swiss ambassador who dared to bring the Iranian golden offer in 2003.
I'm like, what?
Unconditional surrender.
I don't want to hear that.
You know?
Yeah, exactly.
Then we wouldn't get war.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It is incredible.
Like, that's a perfect example with Iran.
It's just like, we will do anything.
We'll go to any lengths to avoid peace.
And in fact, that was maybe the last good thing that Jim Risen wrote was about Najib Sabri, who was the same guy who swore that it was a CIA asset, you know, agent, I guess, working for them.
We got rid of all the weapons and we are not friends with Osama, I swear.
You guys trust me, you know?
And they were trying to ignore that.
But anyway, he was, I think, the head of intelligence.
He wasn't the former.
I think he was the head of Iraqi intelligence.
And they sent him to London to meet with Richard Perle.
And this is like three or four months before the war.
And they said, we surrender.
That's it.
We'll hold elections.
You want democracy?
We'll hold elections.
You want to find whatever weapons?
You can send in the army, the FBI, and the CIA to search wherever you want.
Forget UN weapons inspectors.
You guys can just come right in.
You don't have to invade.
You can come in and look.
If this is about mineral rights, like, they didn't even know what was going on.
Why do you want to kill somebody?
If this is about the oil, we'll give you the oil.
Exxon can do the pumping.
What do we care?
And then Richard Perle at the end of this, oh, and what?
The Palestinians?
Screw them.
We'll never donate to anybody in Gaza or the West Bank again, under any circumstances.
And Richard Perle told Najib Sabri, you tell Saddam Hussein, we'll see you in Baghdad.
Right.
I mean, which that story alone, I remember when I first saw that.
I was on a road trip and saw it in the front page of the New York Times at a newspaper stand.
It was like six months after the war started.
And I'm telling my friends and family in the car with me.
You see this?
You see?
God dang it, Bobby.
That's where we're at right there.
And then Jim Risen became a Russia kook.
Oh, and so that story was by Risen.
I'd forgotten that.
Yeah.
No.
And here we are today.
And, you know, it's actually, it's even worse than you say about Saddam Hussein and his trying to propitiate, make nice, do whatever the US wanted.
Oh, yeah.
I looked at the 12,000 page dossier.
He turned over to the UN.
I'm sorry.
What were you going to say?
Well, I was going to say, you know, in the CIA, you know, final report, the Dolpher report about Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction, you know, it's really incredibly fascinating.
And I think I'm one of the very few human beings on earth who's ever actually read it because it contains all of this history.
Like, it's shockingly honest.
It's just sitting there on the CIA's website for anybody to read.
And it just talks, you know, it wasn't just with George Bush.
It was with Clinton, you know, where Saddam Hussein continually was like, look, I don't want to be your enemy.
Like, I want to be on your side.
Tell us what we have to do.
And you're like, sorry, no, not interested.
Right.
Man, you know what?
I've never read the Dolpher report myself.
I will send you this.
You're exactly the audience for this particular weird information.
Yeah, man.
No, I definitely need to look at that.
I actually remember just settling for the Fox News headline.
Final report.
No Iraqi WMD made after 1991.
Yep.
Right.
A little bit too late to come out with all that.
But anyway.
You can hear The Scott Horton Show and Anti-War Radio on Pacifica, 90.7 FM, KPFK in LA, kpfk.org.
APS Radio at apsradio.com.
The Libertarian Institute at libertarianinstitute.org.
And of course, check out the full archives.
More than 5,000 interviews now going back to 2003.
And sign up for the podcast feed at scotthorton.org.
And thanks.
You know what?
I was making fun of Jim Risen for being a Russia truther.
But you know what?
That's a good segue into the de facto, okay?
The result of the Russiagate scam has been that liberals love the CIA more than ever before.
More than actually is possible to be true.
It's just absolutely crazy the way that they've gone this way.
And as I mentioned at the beginning there, the Democrats voted unanimously.
Which, you know what?
I want to point out.
I'm being redundant here with other interviews.
But Nancy Pelosi led the Democratic Party against Iraq War II in 2003.
And for everything I hold against her, which is everything, that was heroic.
I mean, the pressure to go along with that was everything.
And they were in the minority.
They were, of course, unable to stop the resolution.
But the majority of the Democrats voted with their leader against that war.
And then now look at these freaks.
Unanimous against pulling the troops out of northeastern Syria.
And as you write about in this article about the Democratic Party debate, where the closest thing you can get to anti-imperialism in there is Tulsi Gabbard.
And, I mean, part of it is just time constraints and whatever.
But part of it is she really is for the war on terrorism.
She's just against the war for terrorism.
Which is perfectly understandable and heroic, given the circumstances.
But endless drone wars against AQ, initial, initial, for the rest of this century seems fine with her, as far as I can tell.
Yeah.
Well, the thing about the Democratic debate, there really was more discussion of foreign policy than you almost ever see in these things.
And it did not address reality at all, for the most part.
Every now and then, Tulsi Gabbard did say some things that did involve the world we live in.
Even if she's a really imperfect messenger for that, as you say.
But everybody else, like even Sanders, who is the best on foreign policy of all of them, he could not tell the truth.
And the truth is, as we just discussed, this particular betrayal of the Kurds is number one, inevitable.
And number two is part of the core aspects of U.S. foreign policy, of the fact that we have an empire and we are interested in running the Middle East, as Joe Biden's advisor, Nicholas Burns, would tell you.
So, they just can't talk about the most basic facts.
And if you can't talk about the most basic facts, inevitably, you end up like this is a disease of the Democratic Party, which is that there's nothing they love more to do than attack the Republican Party from the right.
And like, well, they're not hawkish enough.
Well, they don't want war enough.
You see this all the time.
And it's always a disaster.
It's always terrible for them in the long term.
But they just can't seem to accept the fact that, and the most amazing thing about Donald Trump is that he demonstrated that even in the Republican Party, there's a huge constituency for some sort of drawback of the empire.
But the Democrats can't take note of that and be like, you know, I bet grassroots Democrats are pretty tired of the empire too.
So, it was just a shame.
It was really a shame.
It was a great opportunity.
I had some hopes, certainly for Sanders, a little teeny tiny bit for Warren.
But they just can't do it.
And how obvious is the line of attack that, you know what, Trump promised us peace.
And he's escalated everything.
Instead, it has to be he hasn't escalated everything enough.
Enough.
Come on.
And it's funny because I'm always saying, you know, recommending to libertarians, we need to always attack the right from the right.
But I mean in the good way.
Like, hey, you can't have a hard money standard if you have a world empire.
Or you can't have a constitutional law if you have an empire.
Or, you know, whatever it is.
Attack it in the way where it makes sense to a right winger to be good on this stuff.
But, boy, the Democrats get that all screwed up where you're right.
They're like, I can't believe that the Republican Party is no longer as devoted to whatever the CIA and the military want us to say and think than they should be.
You know?
Yeah.
As they should be.
I mean, it's really dreadful.
And it's just like it's so, so hard to make any kind of progress on U.S. foreign policy and politics just because it's this crazy bipartisan consensus that what we always need is more war.
I've always believed, and I think history shows this, that it's literally impossible to advocate so much for war, to love war so much that you are no longer a Washington, D.C. expert.
If you're somebody who continually writes papers about how we need to invade Saturn, you will remain on the call list for CNN.
Yep.
That's clearly the deal.
I mean, all the very same guys who got Iraq wrong were the very same ones who got Libya and Syria wrong and Afghanistan wrong this whole time.
Remember, in 2009, they relaunched the whole damn Afghan war with that surge.
And it's no different.
It's the exact same people with the exact same consensus.
Everybody knows that Bashar al-Assad is worse than Stalin.
And Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, the commander of the suicide bombers, who's sworn blood oath loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri, why, he's just the leader of the moderate rebels trying to bring democracy and the rule of law and protect the poor people of Syria from their government that has launched this war against them for no reason at all, apparently.
I mean, we went for years listening to people say that.
And it's still going on.
They won't admit it.
In fact, who's committing war crimes against the Kurds right now?
The moderate rebels under Turkish control.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
Very moderate, these guys.
But, yeah, it is funny, kind of.
I mean, it's obvious that it's all about the money and whatever.
But it's funny when you really do have, you know, as Matt Taibbi wrote about Russiagate, that this is WMD times a million and whatever.
But it's also Libya times 10,000 and Syria times 50 million and whatever.
It's these very same guys who get all of this stuff wrong and mostly quite deliberately, it seems like.
Yeah.
I mean, that would be my caveat is that, you know, when you talk about William Kristol being wrong, like, well, was he actually wrong?
I mean, his goal was to start a war and he succeeded.
You know, like with all of these guys, you can't – you know, their job is not to be, like, factually correct.
You know, it's to make the wars happen.
And they're actually pretty good at that.
Yeah, absolutely.
So as Ahmed Chalabi said, hey, we're just heroes in error.
Don't be mad, bro.
It's all right.
We got what we wanted.
Heroes in error.
Oh, wow.
That is such a great phrase, like props to him for coming up with that.
Yeah.
I don't know if you saw, but I'm debating Bill Kristol in May in New York.
For real?
Yeah, at the Soho Forum.
And it sold out in a day or two days or something, and they had to move it to a bigger thing.
Okay.
We're going to have to take this off the air and discuss this in depth, and I'm going to have a lot of suggestions.
God bless you.
I like listening to you say things, so let's – I'm happy to do that.
All right.
You know what?
We should wrap this interview up.
We're right at an hour.
Thank you, Jon Schwartz.
You're great.
All right.
Thank you so much.
My hope is that the United States is not going to stop doing horrible things in other countries, and we'll have the opportunity to talk about other things in the future.
You know what?
I'm pretty sure you're right about that.
Okay, guys.
Jon Schwartz at The Intercept.
The U.S. is now betraying the Kurds for the eighth time.
He's not saying we should stay.
He's just saying, hey, hey, that rhyme, you've got to admit it.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
