Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America and by God we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Aren't you guys on the line?
I've got Dan Cohen.
He, you might remember, co-directed and produced Killing Gaza with Max Blumenthal, which is such an important movie.
You can watch it on the internet for just a couple of bucks and I really beseech you to do so.
But also he does lots of great journalism and here he is at The Gray Zone.
This one is called, by protecting Syria's Idlib, Idlib province that is, the US created a safe haven for Baghdadi and ISIS.
Welcome back to the show.
Dan, how are you?
I'm good.
Thanks a lot for having me, Scott.
And thanks for being one of the few people, few media people to talk about what I think should be or what is one of the biggest scandals, if not the biggest scandal of this century.
So, no, I appreciate you having me on.
Well, thanks for that.
I was talking with David Stockman a week or two ago about this, the Carter situation in northeast Syria, and he says about the TV news, he says, well, they've just abolished history.
They just refused to admit that the past even existed at all.
And they just, all we need to know is this is a thing and this is the crisis and this is why we're all mad at Trump today or whatever it is.
And they'll never explain, well, what was the crisis with the Kurds and the Turks in the first place there?
What was the crisis in the war in Syria?
And you have a great retelling of how all this happened.
So this is the part where I just step out of your way and let you explain.
What was the Syrian civil war anyway?
Well, I mean, the, you know, the Syrian civil war was first and foremost a dirty war waged by the US and its allies in the UK, France, and especially Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates that, you know, when popular discontent, whatever problems there were in Syria, basically created some kind of spark.
Then all of these vultures outside sent in a bunch of weapons and fanatical jihadists who had been in training, who had kind of cut their teeth in Libya and just started shooting at the government and soldiers and did everything to just turn that spark into a giant bonfire that engulfed the whole country.
And that's essentially what we saw.
And this was basically, you know, the US, I think, is the foremost player in this.
And that was in the Obama administration when we started, you know, under the advice of Hillary Clinton and David Petraeus, the CIA director, the Obama administration started arming a bunch of, just a ton of different groups under the guise of moderate rebels, calling them moderate rebels.
And as it turns out, and you know, many people knew at the time, these people weren't, many of them were not moderate at all.
It was basically, they were called the Free Syrian Army.
And basically anybody who just said, you know, I'm fighting in the Free Syrian Army was able to get weapons from the US.
If you just basically like sign some papers saying, oh, I'm moderate and I'm not going to kill civilians, then, you know, you could get serious deadly weapons.
And so that program allowed basically was, well, one opposition analyst called a weapons farm for larger Islamist and jihadist factions.
And so basically the Free Syrian Army banner was a way to launder weapons to Al-Qaeda and ISIS and like these various jihadist groups to wage war on the Syrian government and its supporters.
And so hundreds of thousands of people died.
Well, you know, here in the US we were told that these people were moderate rebels, but it turns out that they were in fact the, you know, basically ideological, ideologically the exact same as Al-Qaeda, you know, that attacked the US on 9-11, that killed thousands of innocent civilians in New York City.
And so, you know, that's kind of the backdrop for this latest, for the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
So, you know, that's where it brings us to this last week.
And basically, you know, for the last few years, all of the jihadists that the Syrian government had defeated, you know, from Aleppo, from Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus that was under the control of Jaysh al-Islam, another Salafi jihadist group backed by Saudi Arabia, all of these different groups, if they refused reconciliation, you know, with the Syrian government, and that was available to Syrians who had taken up arms and joined these groups.
So if they refused reconciliation, well, instead of, you know, lining them up against the wall and shooting them, which is maybe, you know, what some people would do and is maybe, you know, justifiable, because I don't know what you do with, you know, I mean, that's treason, and at least in the US, that's punishable by death.
But the Syrian government basically provided the infamous green buses and sent these people to Idlib province, where al-Qaeda was and remains in control.
And this al-Qaeda Syrian branch is run by a guy named Mohammad al-Jilani, and he was actually originally dispatched from Iraq to establish ISIS in Syria by the ISIS founder, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was just killed.
And so he, you know, originally they were called Jabhat al-Nusra, and then they did this like rebrand, kind of like how Blackwater, you know, the mercenary group, the private mercenaries in Iraq did, you know, their rebrand.
And so it's like a way for media to play along.
And so people forget, oh, this name of this terrorist group, Jabhat al-Nusra, that's associated with al-Qaeda.
Then they became, what, Jabhat al-Sham, then they became Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.
So all these names, but they're still the same group, the same al-Qaeda group.
And actually inside Idlib, they still call themselves al-Nusra.
So the whole Hayat Tahrir al-Sham thing is just basically for public consumption.
It's like a propaganda thing that Western media plays along with.
And so all these jihadists are going to Idlib, and all of this time that these jihadists are going there, Western media, CNN, MSNBC, Fox, New York Times, the whole gamut is saying this is, you know, this is like just a bunch of civilians here.
This is all moderate people, and no doubt there are civilians.
But they totally erase the presence of hardened jihadist fighters from Idlib province.
Brett McGurk, he resigned some months ago in the Trump administration, but he was the head of the U.S. representative to the Coalition to Defeat ISIS.
And he infamously said that Idlib province was the largest gathering of al-Qaeda since 9-11.
And that should ring alarms for a lot of U.S. policymakers, but his words were just totally ignored.
And so for years, the U.S. has insisted that the Syrian military, the Russian military, the Iranians, they all leave Idlib alone.
Don't touch Idlib.
You can't, because it'll cause a humanitarian crisis.
Not that, I mean, the U.S. never actually cared about a humanitarian crisis.
It's happy to have the world's worst humanitarian crisis in Yemen, for example.
Or if you look at what the U.S. did to Mosul, where it basically destroyed the whole city and killed at least 9,000 civilians, probably a lot more, all under the banner of defeating ISIS.
So the U.S. didn't care about humanitarian issues.
They also would have never armed al-Qaeda in the first place in Syria.
And so actually, what it was about is keeping this al-Qaeda, these jihadists in power to keep the Syrian government weak, to keep the country divided.
And so this is where it turns out, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, was actually taking refuge.
And so when Trump assassinated him, all of these pundits who have long promoted the moderate rebels, who have long said that Idlib is not controlled by al-Qaeda, it's like Gaza.
It's just poor people suffering under the Syrian regime, as if Syria and Israel are the same, which is just a total canard.
All of these crocodile tears were actually to prevent the—well, effectively, they ended up protecting al-Qaeda and the ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
And so when Trump sent in the JSOC, the special force commandos, to take Baghdadi out, they got this intelligence from some people close to him.
It basically demolished this whole narrative that these are moderate—this is a bastion of moderate rebels who are just opposed to Assad's authoritarianism, because they were actually, of course, al-Qaeda and giving shelter to Baghdadi.
And so that's basically where it is today.
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All right, now, so there's a couple narratives on the narrow point here about whether Baghdadi was hiding under Jelani's nose or whether al-Nusra and the Islamic State have started to mend their fences ever since the destruction of the actual Islamic State itself and its reduction back to ISIS, the militia group.
What do you think?
I mean, there's an article in the New York Times yesterday that details how Baghdadi was actually making payments to another al-Qaeda linked group called Haras al-Din to give him shelter, which seems to be true.
It seems extremely unlikely that Baghdadi could be in Idlib without the knowledge of its al-Qaeda rulers.
I mean, they rule Idlib with an iron fist and that Baghdadi could just exist there without anybody knowing is just really hard to believe.
And certainly if U.S. intelligence managed to find out that Baghdadi's there and knew for some months that he had been there, then I mean, I think it's a pretty safe bet that Mohamed al-Jelani, the head of al-Qaeda, knew as well.
And so there had long been ISIS fighters fleeing to Idlib.
I mean, that happened basically immediately after Raqqa, the eastern Syrian city where ISIS was.
As soon as they were defeated by the U.S.-backed Kurds, then these ISIS fighters started fleeing to Idlib.
And actually the Kurds even facilitated some of this in certain deals.
So there's no secret that ISIS exists in Idlib, has existed.
There have certainly been clashes between the two groups, between the al-Qaeda groups and ISIS groups.
But nonetheless, I mean, they're ideologically indistinguishable.
And so basically I think what happens with these groups is if al-Qaeda is the most powerful, well, it's going to use violence to enforce its interpretation of how the strategy to create this caliphate should happen.
And if ISIS is, then it's the most powerful.
It's going to enforce how it thinks.
And so invariably there are clashes, but nonetheless, they're ideologically the same.
So it makes sense that the ISIS leader would go take shelter in the al-Qaeda stronghold, especially considering, as I said, the ISIS leader al-Baghdadi dispatched the al-Qaeda leader to form a branch of ISIS in Syria, and Ghulani, who became the al-Qaeda leader, spurned him.
And so there may be bad blood, but these guys are cut from the same cloth.
Sure.
Yeah.
It's just al-Qaeda in Iraq.
ISIS is the Iraqi dominated faction and Nusra is the Syrian dominated faction of Zarqawi's from the last war.
War before last, sorry.
Well, so now here's the thing.
It seems like the Turks were keeping this little mini Islamic state in Idlib province to keep these terrorists for use against the Kurds.
See how moderate they are as your article starts off.
Who's committing war crimes against the Kurds?
Huh.
Josh Rogin's moderate rebels.
What a surprise.
You know, executing female politicians on the side of the road like they're Muammar Gaddafi and this kind of thing.
Another war, all these people support him.
But anyway, but so now I wonder if the Turks have a real interest in keeping these things going when the war is over, other than in Idlib province there, it's not quite over yet, but essentially, you know, the Russian broker deal, which is a lot like the American broker deal for the future of the Syrian-Turkish border there in northeastern Syria and Syrian Kurdistan seems, you know, essentially at hand.
Very low numbers of people are still being killed, I guess, in some small skirmishes, but that's pretty much settled.
And so I wonder if these terrorists are of any use to Erdogan anymore, if maybe you think we could expect him to go ahead and finally sacrifice them and stop standing in the way of the Syrian army and I guess with Russian help going in there and finishing taking the Idlib province from them.
You know, I don't I don't know.
It's, you know, this whole thing has created quite a quandary for, you know, NATO and, you know, the EU, the U.S. and Turkey, because on one hand, Turkey has definitely weaponized these jihadists.
I mean, Turkey was one of the, I mean, Turkey was maybe the most important country actually in arming these jihadists in, you know, facilitating the rise of ISIS, because of course it's located on the border and wanted to collapse the Syrian government, you know, for its own business interests.
And so, yeah, I mean, as you said, these, you know, formerly, you know, the like jihadis formerly known as moderate rebels who invaded northeastern Syria and started slaughtering Kurds after Trump greenlighted it.
Well, it's, you know, it's the same thing they did last year when they invaded Afrin and started ethnically cleansing Kurds from their homes and resettling Syrian refugees and fighters in those homes.
Because basically, Erdogan does not want all these Syrian refugees in Turkey.
There's a lot of anti-refugee sentiment, as, you know, there always is when there's a regime change war, a huge influx of refugees.
You know, invariably, the local population doesn't like what's happening.
You know, they see them, you know, as a threat, right or wrong.
In the case of, you know, many Syrian refugees, they're just the innocent victims or the cannon fodder for these wars.
But nonetheless, it increases kind of nativist, you know, nativism and xenophobia.
And so now Idlib is kind of serving as this big, you know, holding cell for all of these jihadists.
And I don't know.
I mean, you know, the war is ending.
I don't think that Turkey is going to really be able to weaponize them again.
And so basically, they're just stuck in Idlib.
Now, the reason that the EU and the U.S., but more the EU, doesn't want Idlib to be retaken by the Syrian government is because then all of these hardened jihadist fighters, many of whom are foreign fighters, they're from Europe, will then go to Turkey and then back into Europe.
And for years, Europe is going to be dealing with blowback, with, you know, massacres and suicide bombings.
And like we've seen for the last several years in Europe, many, some of which were a result of the war in Libya, the the massacre.
Exactly.
You know, the first ISIS attack was in 2013 at a Jewish community center in Brussels.
And they just said, oh, well, no, these guys are moderates.
These guys are heroes.
They're fighting the evil dictator.
And they just kept this thing going for years and years after we could already see that the consequences of backing them in Afghanistan was, you know, all the terrorist attacks of the 1990s.
Then we go and create a whole new Afghanistan for them in Iraq.
And they all come home when all the guys who fought in Iraq, they all come home to where they're from, Libya, Syria.
Now we support them in Syria for six years or something and support every kook in Europe and America who wants to go and join them.
And then what do we think's going to happen?
Exactly, exactly.
And so we're going to be dealing with blowback for years and years to come.
And probably a lot of innocent people are going to die.
I mean, we saw what happened, as you said, in Manchester at the Ariana Grande concert, where a bunch of little girls, you know, watching their favorite pop star were gunned down by some nutjob, who it turns out was, you know, the British intelligence was facilitating him to go back and forth to Libya in order to, you know, take part in their regime change war.
And so, you know, now it's like, well, on one hand, it makes sense that the Europeans don't want Idlib to be liberated, because then, you know, you have all these jihadis that are going to go wreak havoc.
But at the same time, the Syrian government is well within its right.
It absolutely has the right to demand that, you know, it takes back its land and liberates people who are living in Idlib who don't want to live under al-Qaeda rule.
I mean, it's also, you know, Idlib was basically ethnically cleansed.
Like, there's no one living there who's not Sunni.
And if you're Sunni, then you have to, you know, basically live under al-Qaeda's, like, al-Qaeda's rule.
So it's not as if it's some paradise right now.
And, you know, just, you know, the Syrian regime's massacre is gonna, is gonna, you know, kill everyone.
It's like, this is a real problem.
And, you know, the West, the United States, the European Union, and its allies really, you know, need to be held responsible for this to make sure it never happens again.
And whatever blowback goes on, you know, is minimized.
But, you know, inevitably, I think there's, we're gonna see some.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's funny, because once in, I think, 2013, and then just a few weeks ago, we actually saw US strikes against al-Qaeda targets in the Idlib province.
And then they're at pains to say, wait, stop.
This isn't Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Tayyab, al-Tahrir, al-Sham, all whatever, our moderate terrorist, wonderful rebels who are focused on Assad.
This is the Khorasan group, a group of those guys, but a smaller group, and these guys want to attack us.
So essentially, they're still admitting to their treason, you know, in the, in their claim that that's why they have to do this, is because these are al-Qaeda terrorists focused West.
And they claimed what, just four or five weeks ago, that they did a strike in the Idlib province against this Khorasan group again, as they called it, which is Khorasan is a ancient province that no longer exists, that was like sort of Northeastern Persia and into Afghanistan, as far as Eastern Afghanistan, in fact.
But so the region is still referred to that way by some, and then supposedly these are terrorists who are from there.
I don't know.
Well, I mean, I think, you know, so there has to be accountability.
And I don't think we're going to see that because, I mean, you know, one of the really interesting dynamics is how this whole thing has been enabled.
I mean, on one hand, as you said, the US is reserving the exclusive right to, you know, kill terrorists in Idlib as it sees fit when it wants.
But on the other hand, you know, the local actors who have actually led the fight against ISIS and al-Qaeda and all these jihadi groups, you know, it's only, they're only allowed when, they're not allowed to, you know, when they do it, it's very bad.
And so the US kind of wants to keep this, you know, this al-Qaeda ruling over Idlib as a card it can play.
So, you know, one of, I think actually for Trump, now he has this huge feather in his cap that, you know, he killed Baghdadi and going into 2020, you know, he said he was going to kick ISIS's ass and all this stuff when he was, you know, as a candidate.
And a lot of people, you know, were like, oh, Trump's not living up to his promises and all this stuff.
You know, he also said he was going to end some of the wars.
And, and on one hand, he just, you know, pulled some troops out of Northeastern Syria.
So he can now say, he can kind of live up to his anti-intervention cred a little bit.
Even though at the same time he's doing that, he's, you know, underwriting the genocide of Yemen and using crushing sanctions against Iran and Venezuela.
And, you know, not living up to any of the deals he's making with North Korea, preventing a peace process from moving forward there.
So while he's still actually carrying out, you know, the vast majority of all the same foreign policy, you know, precepts that, you know, the Obama administration did and every warmongering administration otherwise, he can say, oh, you know, basically the bar is so low, is so insanely low that he can say, oh, I pulled troops out of Northeastern Syria.
You know, we're ending these regime change wars.
And at the same time, he can say, but I'm also killing terrorists.
I killed the ISIS leader.
And so, you know, this is a huge feather in his cap going into 2020, into reelection.
And all of the people, all of these media outlets who claim to be anti-Trump, I mean, they basically set him up for this.
They gave him just an easy win where they insisted that, oh, there's no terrorists.
These guys are moderate rebels.
We, you know, ISIS couldn't be there.
Baghdadi couldn't be in Idlib, you know, and then Trump kills him.
And, oh my God, how did this happen?
We had no idea.
And it's like, well, you just gave Trump this easy win that's, you know, going to help him secure, you know, reelection.
Well, that's right out of Barack Obama's playbook, right?
I killed that one terrorist while I'm taking their side everywhere else and escalating the rest of the wars and all of the rest of this stuff.
But got that one big PR stunt to run on.
Right, exactly.
And then also, you know, I think it's really important to look at the key people who promoted these, you know, these jihadis as moderate rebels, who promoted the Free Syrian Army as moderate rebels, the same Free Syrian Army that was slaughtering Kurds and beheading them and executing, as you said, you know, female politicians on the street.
You know, people like Michael Weiss, who's a longtime neoconservative operative.
He, you know, was a CNN contributor until he got fired.
He, you know, he still writes for the Daily Beast.
Do you know why he got fired from CNN?
I do not.
I really don't know.
Yeah, he was the worst of them, though.
Yes.
And he's, you know, he's one of several.
Michael Weiss, you have Elizabeth Zirkov, who is a former Israeli soldier, and she did reserve duty, which, you know, women don't typically do reserve duty in the Israeli military.
And, you know, she's highly educated.
And so she's not like, you know, a soldier who's at the checkpoint or like invading the refugee camps or something like that.
She's much more likely to be Israeli intelligence.
And if you do reserve duty, then it's like you're continuing on with that.
And if you come out of Israeli intelligence, then, you know, that's your career.
You're setting yourself up for a career.
So I think it's actually very likely that Elizabeth Zirkov, who writes in foreign policy, who's kind of writes all over the place, and is taken seriously by Western media as a real Syria analyst, you know, she very well may be Israeli intelligence.
At the very least, she's advancing Israel's policy of, you know, regime change or weakening the Syrian government as much as possible.
It's a huge conflict of interest on the face of it.
And then, as you say, it certainly raises an honest question about where all of her paychecks are coming from when it comes to that kind of thing.
Yeah, exactly.
Then, you know, there's a number of these people who, you know, we're all so shocked.
You know what, go on and on about Charles Lister for a minute, would you please?
Oh, yeah, Charles Lister.
He's a key one of them.
I mean, this guy, he's like a overgrown British schoolboy who's here in Washington and works at the Middle East Institute, doesn't speak a lick of Arabic, doesn't really have any understanding of what's happening on the ground in Syria, and doesn't care to.
He's basically just, you know, what I would call a lobbyist for Al Qaeda and these various jihadist groups.
I mean, the Middle East Institute is basically paid by NATO, by United Arab Emirates, by the Gulf monarchies, by a bunch of, you know, massive corporations that all of course would profit massively off of the collapse of the Syrian government when they can pillage its resources.
And so, you know, you have Lister, actually, I filmed Lister, Charles Lister, about two years ago, saying Al Qaeda has really got it right.
And this guy is just, this was in the Capitol building in Washington, DC.
So, I mean, it's just incredible to me that, what, you know, that was 16 years after 9-11, Al Qaeda basically has a lobbyist in Washington.
And, you know, and now, of course, and now Lister is one of these guys who's so surprised, so shocked that ISIS could be, or that Baghdadi could be in Idlib.
Oh, it just doesn't make sense with everything I know.
But it's like, well, he's being, you know, fed his talking points by, you know, the same, by the people who, you know, who funded Al Qaeda and, you know, and ISIS and all these groups.
Right.
And, you know, for people who are new at this and really don't know this story very well, you might sound like you're the one who's crazy here in saying that this is the deal.
But essentially, this is the deal, that after Iraq War Two, and even, and this wasn't just Obama, this was still during Bush.
I like to mention this all the time.
It's such a great article.
If everyone reads it for the 10th time today, you'll still just love it.
It's called The Redirection by Seymour Hersh.
That's not his term.
That's the Bush administration's term for oops, we empowered Iran in Iraq.
Now we got to tilt back toward the Saudis and the Sunnis, and Israel and Turkey, of course, meaning Al Qaeda.
That's the shock troops.
That's who Saudi has to use as weapons against Iran's friends.
And so that was the whole purpose of the war in Syria was trying to make up for Iraq War Two by getting a consolation prize, taking Damascus away from Iran.
And it didn't work.
But that's the explanation for why, because it does sound completely nuts.
There has to be an explanation.
That's the explanation is our government hates Iran and the Shia and their allies more than the Al Qaeda guys who, after all, they attacked us because our government was too close of friends with theirs, that we were propping up governments they wanted to overthrow.
They weren't from Iran, Iraq, and Syria.
They were from Saudi and Egypt.
And so, but when it comes down to it, those same jihadist forces are essentially available to be used by those intelligence agencies to get American dirty work done.
So it's just sort of like 9-11 and Iraq War Two never happened.
And we'll just go back to the Reagan and Bill Clinton era of backing these terrorists to use against whoever we want.
Exactly.
It's the same story over and over again.
So, you know, there's- But the thing is, here's the reality, though, is post 9-11 and post Iraq War Two, that's high treason.
You know, for Bill Clinton to continue backing them after they were already attacking us, that's pretty damn bad.
But after September 11th, I mean, hell, you could lock him up, too.
But after September 11th, and after 4,000 guys died fighting the Sunni-based insurgency and the very worst part of it, al-Qaeda in Iraq, in Iraq War Two, for them to do this, it makes Benedict Arnold look like George Washington, for real.
It's crazy.
It's true.
It's as insane and ridiculous as it is treasonous, but it's all three.
I mean, it's really, you know, it still shocks me when I think about this.
I mean, I wrote the article, I've been paying attention to this for years, but it's like, it's just, it is really shocking.
And it makes you sound like a nutjob when you're like, the U.S. is basically backing al-Qaeda.
And it sounds conspiratorial, but it's actually true.
It's just out in the open.
It's just hidden in plain sight.
And mainstream media is just totally on board because, you know, their corporate overlords are in on the game, too.
So, I mean, it's just so, it's, I don't know, you know, what would the 9-11 families, you know, say?
I mean, it's, what's remarkable to me is all the, how there's this patriotic fervor over 9-11 in this country, and people really have no idea what, you know, how that's played out since then, how the U.S. has done everything possible to ensure al-Qaeda's, you know, existence.
No one on TV will ever explain it.
I mean, that's the deal.
They never just say, look, here's the shirts, here's the skins, here's the Shiite crescent, and here's the American-Sunni Israeli alliance, and here's what they're fighting about.
And it's all simple.
We talk about it every day on this show.
Of course, you write about it all the time.
It's not too hard to understand, but they just won't give, you know, regular TV viewers the access because America is too implicated in it all.
You can't tell the story without explaining why it's all Carter through right now's fault on this side.
So.
You know, the one person who has said it is Tulsi Gabbard.
I was just going to say, would you please talk about her and her role in this conversation during this campaign here?
Well, so Tulsi Gabbard, you know, is an interesting candidate.
I mean, she's, you know, a Hawaii congresswoman who believed the Bush lies about WMDs in Iraq and went to, you know, enlisted as a medic and saw, you know, a lot of people die over there needlessly.
And then she eventually realized that it was a lie.
And so, you know, she became a congresswoman eventually.
And her signature issue is foreign policy, which, you know, I agree with her that it's the most important issue.
And so she has, you know, basically made a campaign of ending regime change wars.
And she has spoken out about this.
I mean, back in July, during one of the Democratic presidential debates on CNN, she straight up said it, Donald Trump is supporting or is protecting Al Qaeda.
And it's totally true.
And she was just pilloried, smeared in mass media as an Assad apologist, because she went to Syria a few years ago to meet with Syrians.
Not only she met with Assad, the president of Syria, and she met with Syrian opposition figures.
She met with religious figures, people of all kinds, in order to understand what's going on there.
And basically, you know, acting in a sort of diplomatic role.
And, you know, that's like a lost art in the U.S. If you, you know, any form of diplomacy is considered treasonous.
And so she's just been smeared relentlessly as a Putin puppet.
You know, we saw her, Hillary Clinton, you know, attack her about two weeks ago now and say she is, you know, being groomed by the Russians.
And, I mean, this is totally absurd.
And it actually gave Tulsi Gabbard a little bump, a little boost in the polls.
And so, you know, you see this kind of Clinton, the Clinton legacy, the Clinton-Bush legacy of warmongering, and, you know, permanent regime change wars and just death and destruction all over the world.
Anyone who challenges that is smeared as, you know, the catch-all, smear term of a Russian agent.
So, you know, I mean, whatever you think of Gabbard's politics overall, I mean, I think it's incredibly brave of her and important to take the stand that she did.
And it shows that anyone who challenges the bipartisan foreign policy consensus of the permanent war state is immediately cast out.
I mean, before 2016, she was considered, by the Clinton machine, she was considered the future of the Democratic Party.
But after, you know, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Democratic National Committee threw Bernie Sanders under the bus and, you know, selected Hillary to be the nominee, who of course eventually lost to Trump, Tulsi Gabbard stepped down from the DNC.
She was like, no, I'm not partaking in this, in these dirty games.
And so she went from, you know, the future of the party to enemy number one.
And so, you know, the Democratic Party is doing everything possible to attack Tulsi Gabbard, you know, as some kind of fifth column, as a Russian agent.
And, you know, in every single one of these Democratic debates, she has been the most Googled candidate.
So, you know, I think she's bringing a really important message that resonates with a lot of people.
It's only, you know, it's kind of in the beltway, these coastal elites who really believe the Democratic Party's, you know, bogus, you know, Russiagate narrative that hate her because they're threatened by her.
Well, and you know, it's funny too, is all of this overreaction, and she's only half good on this stuff, right?
She's against the insane, crazy, treasonous, ridiculous policy in Syria and in Yemen of fighting on the side of al-Qaeda.
But that's her sin, right, is that she can tell the difference between the shirts and the skins.
She knows who is the Bin Ladenite axis, including the USA, and who is the Shiite Iranian axis.
And she remembers that it was, as you said, she was a medic at the Balad Air Base in Iraq, World War II.
She knows that it was the skins, not the shirts, who were killing all her guys.
And now, you know, in Obama years, and even up to this day, like we're talking about in Idlib, our government is trying to insist that, no, you're supposed to be on the side of the skins.
And she's going, no, I can see right through that because I can still just remember a few years ago when I was there and this kind of thing.
But on the other hand, she's completely terrible on bombing the skins from now on.
She says, you know, there was this, first of all, she says, it's all about their radical Islamic beliefs, as opposed to retribution for American foreign policies, which is just, you know, she sounds like Frank Gaffney talking about radical Islam and all this.
She sounds like Donald Trump.
And then she says, you know, there are still al-Qaeda terrorists in the Idlib province, where al-Nusra is and AQAP in Yemen, and al-Shabaab in Somalia, which you can tell she's already getting pretty broad in her definition of counts as al-Qaeda here, which they're sworn loyal to al-Qaeda, kind of, but they really are their own local insurgency there.
Again, all George Bush's fault.
And, and there's the AQIM in North Africa.
And then she says, there are hundreds of these groups throughout the Middle East, and we have to take them on and fight them in the war on terrorism.
No more wars for terrorism, but wars on terrorism.
Oh, yeah.
And of course, it's a completely ridiculous joke that there are hundreds of groups like that.
The only reason she could name four was because there's about four, you know, maybe five.
And, and it does not go without saying that, yes, we have to bomb al-Shabaab as long as there's such a thing as al-Shabaab.
Now we have to bomb our allies, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, once we turn on them again, and, and all of that.
All we did by bombing them in the first place was grow them into a giant thing.
Now, we certainly, certainly shouldn't have turned around and allied with them.
But Obama's drone war only benefited them, not hurt them.
And so, you know, half of her entire Middle East foreign policy is as bankrupt as the day is long.
But it just goes to show how completely horrible and corrupt and wrong her opponents are, that for them, that's not good enough by a long shot.
You want to fight the war on terrorism forever?
That's not good enough.
We have to fight the war for terrorism against Iran and their friends.
That is our mandate from the Saudi King.
Who are you to stand up to that?
Netanyahu wants the same thing too, of course.
So that's talk about consensus.
You know, forget the New Yorkers.
I mean, Scott, I do think, I don't know, I'll say this.
I do think there's a fair point to be made that Tulsi brings up.
You know, there are a number of things that I disagree with her on, but I do think there's a fair point to be made about actual international cooperation to defeat terrorism.
I mean, you know, the neocon regime change wars were all under the guise of the war on terror.
And so it's kind of made defeating terrorism a bad name.
They kind of sullied that whole idea.
And so, you know, of course, it's never been about defeating terrorism for the U.S.
It's been about, you know, using terrorism as kind of, you know, proxy.
Well, that's true.
However, look at the two examples, and there are only two examples in this era when they really did focus on going after and killing al Qaeda terrorists.
And that was Obama's CIA drone wars in Pakistan and in Yemen.
And in both cases, they were terribly counterproductive and got tens of thousands of people killed and grew the enemy.
The only reason there's such a thing as ISIS in Afghanistan is as a direct result of the CIA drone war in 2010 and 11 in Pakistan.
And the only reason that we're fighting on the side of al Qaeda now is because all the bribes that we paid to the government of Yemen to allow us to bomb them, ended up turning into a war machine that he tried to use against the Houthis, that same dictator tried to use against his Houthi enemies, that only backfired on him.
Now we're on the side of al Qaeda against the Houthis, and a much more powerful al Qaeda than when we started bombing them in the first place.
So you're right that Bush completely exploited the concept of the terror war to overthrow Saddam, and that Obama did the same thing, sort of, kind of in Libya and in Syria, making people believe this is all the Middle East wars are somehow about fighting Osama or that kind of thing.
And yet in these two examples, they're both total catastrophes.
And that was when they were actually trying to do the job that you're describing, their real writ after 9-11, kill bin Ladenites.
I mean, I think, you know, if there was a real international cooperation to defeat terrorism in a way that was not just about drone strikes that mostly killed civilians, and I just don't think that's definitely not the way to do it.
But if you look at, for instance, what Syria, Iran, Russia, Hezbollah have done in Syria, I mean, that is international cooperation to defeat terrorism.
I mean, they have been fighting al Qaeda and ISIS and these different jihadi groups that the U.S. and its allies have been backing.
And if the U.S. was actually legitimately interested in defeating terrorism, I think there's ways to go about it.
I mean, my position is that the U.S. should just get the hell out, because clearly it's not interested in defeating terrorism.
And, you know, I think it's better for the U.S. to just sit this one out, considering its record, and let, you know, I mean, I think the U.S. needs to kind of really redefine its position in the world and have some, you know, kind of reckoning internally of, you know, what this country is.
But, you know, I do think there is, it is possible to have, you know, real international cooperation to defeat these kind of fanatics.
I mean, actually, just a few days ago, there was an Air Force chief of staff, this guy, this is the Air Force chief of staff, David Goldfein.
He basically called for the U.S. to have, you know, to cooperate on some level with Russia and with China, actually.
China certainly has interest in defeating terrorism in its own right.
But that's another issue.
And, you know, this totally fell on deaf ears.
And so there are kind of realist thinkers in the military who are like, OK, you know, why are we funding these terrorists and why are we doing this?
And like, shouldn't we just, you know, let countries exist and we trade with them and whatever?
And that's business.
But, you know, because we have such a neoconservative driven foreign policy that's, you know, given cover also by, you know, the whole R2P, you know, responsibility to protect Samantha Power types, you know, who just say, you know, the U.S. has to be the world's police and stop all the dictators who are committing genocide, even if that genocide is not actually happening.
Or it's our proxies who are committing the genocide.
You know, I think if that whole paradigm was done away with and these neocons and war promoters were actually finally and permanently discredited and, you know, we're in the streets begging for, you know, scraps where they should be, then, you know, we could take a different approach.
And I think that's what, you know, much of the rest of the world is actually doing.
And that's what we see in Syria.
But, you know, sadly, that's not where we're at.
I mean, we're just in a place of total denial for most of, you know, Western media and politicians.
And, you know, while this kind of insidious campaign continues, that's, you know, my opinion, at least.
Yeah, well, I'm with you.
I mean, I could see a situation where I'm the president and you're my chief of staff and we get us a good terror war going and do this right or something.
But instead, we see what happens.
We give them the writ to kill bin Laden and Zawahiri.
They kill a million other people who didn't do anything to us.
And, you know, a war on terrorism, even as Gabbard describes, is a loophole big enough for Bush and Obama to drive 10 wars through.
And so instead, we need to just repeal their writ.
And you know what?
Let the Syrians read.
That's the number one solution to the problem of al-Qaeda in Syria is let the government of Syria reestablish its territorial monopoly on violence.
That's the whole thing about the caliphate back in the Bush years is it was ridiculous propaganda.
Where are you going to put it?
There's all nation-states in the way of where this caliphate is supposed to go.
So let those nation-states reestablish their military, you know, monopolies and then let them work it out from there.
You know, it shouldn't be any of North America's business at all.
And all these problems solve themselves.
I mean, even at the height of the Islamic State, they were surrounded by two major factions of Kurds, the Iraqi Shia backed by Iran, the Jordanians, and the Syrian Arab Army backed by Iran and Russia.
And of course, Turkey was using the Islamic State, but if it had turned on them, they sure weren't going to get anywhere as far as moving Turkey's borders north.
That was for sure.
So they're completely surrounded by enemies.
We didn't even need to fight them then.
We could have quit right then at the height of the Islamic State and the problem still would have resolved itself without us.
Yeah, I mean, yes, definitely if the US had just like, you know, said, okay, we're not doing this anymore and just backed off, then, you know, these things would have been resolved a lot later.
But sadly, that's, you know, that's not the way policy circles operate in this country.
Yep.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I've taken up enough of your morning, but I sure appreciate your time on the show today, Dan.
Great work here.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
Appreciate it.
All right, you guys.
That is Dan Cohen.
He is co-producer of Killing Gaza, which is so important.
You've got to see it.
And then please read this great article too.
By protecting Syria's Idlib, the US created a safe haven for Baghdadi and ISIS.
It's at thegrayzone.com.
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.
