All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Daniel Lazar.
He is our newest regular contributor to antiwar.com, I'm so happy to say, and his very latest is called Erdogan's Excellent Syrian Adventure.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Dan?
I'm just fine.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today, here.
There's so much going on, and so, first of all, people need to understand where and what is the importance of the Idlib province in the Syrian war.
Can we start there, please, sir?
Yeah, let's start there.
First of all, the thing to know is that the situation is exploding.
Erdogan is pouring in reinforcements.
He's exchanging fire not only with Syrian government troops, but apparently with Russian forces as well.
So we've got a real serious situation there, which is blowing out of control.
It's something.
Secondly, Idlib is a province in northwestern Syria, which abuts the Turkish border.
And as such, it's been an entry point for Syrian rebels, so-called, since the civil war there started in 2011.
And in 2014, and especially in the spring of 2015, the rebels, who are led by al-Qaeda, the same folks who blew up the World Trade Center on 9-11, al-Qaeda, armed with U.S.-made, Saudi-supplied TOW missiles and backed by Turkey, invaded Idlib province and essentially took it over from the Syrian army.
And since last April, April 2019, the Syrian government has mounted a counteroffensive to drive the rebels, led by al-Qaeda, out of the province.
And they have been very successful.
And in mid-December, they launched a stage two of that offensive, and that's gone even more rapidly than the previous stage.
So as the offensive has advanced, Turkish positions have come under fire from the Syrian government, and therefore all hell is breaking loose.
So for nine years now, eight or nine years now, outside parties have been feasting on the poor, broken carcass of Syria, but now they're coming to blows with one another.
And the situation seems to be like exploding, and it looks like we have a serious war on our hands.
Man, I'll tell you the part that I like the least, and that is that it was Russian war planes that intervened and forced an end to the fighting here, which put a NATO ally, Turkey, in conflict, or almost in direct conflict with Russia.
Dan?
Well, it isn't direct conflict.
I mean, it's Turkish troops that are coming under fire from Russian military aircraft.
So there's a direct exchange of fire.
It's really serious.
Oh, so the Russians did, oh, I see now.
They did actually launch strikes.
I was thinking they just maybe did one of them Top Gun fly-by things and told everybody to shut up, but no, it was worse.
No, it's a pretty serious conflict, and yeah, the Russians are providing air support to the Syrian government.
And legally, legally, the Syrian government has every right to ask for support from whatever outside party it wants.
When the Spanish Republic was under assault in 1936, the Spanish Republic appealed for international support and got it from the Soviet Union and, interestingly enough, from the Turkish Republic.
So what's happening now in Syria is, legally speaking, no different.
Man, and if anybody in DC wants to do anything to try to resolve this or, you know, tone down the conflict between the major powers here, for example, by leaning on the Turks to back off, something like that, then, well, they're just Russian traitor, Kremlin stooges, which Donald Trump is a Russian asset, is trending again right now as we speak on Twitter here at the end of February 2020, almost a year after it was over, it's already on again.
And so I guess that makes you Putin's agent too, since you know better than all this crap.
And you too.
But as we know, the CIA has informed Adam Schiff that the Russian government is once again intervening in the U.S. elections in Donald Trump's support.
Yeah, so which is must be true.
It must be true.
Right.
But I mean, it really.
Yes, of course.
I mean, they just take it absolutely at face value that, hey, if you say so, I can't remember you getting anything wrong recently, FBI.
Certainly not on this issue.
So Adam Schiff says, you've got to believe it.
Right.
Yeah, man.
So but I mean, it really means that, I mean, here, I don't know, when was the last time we had the Russians actually bombing and killing members of a NATO allied state?
Like a how about never.
And so, well, I'm sorry, I'm just behind on this.
Do you know if Trump is doing anything?
He's sending anybody anywhere to talk with Lavrov or what the hell is going on here?
Yes.
Yes, he has.
He has.
He has.
I think it was last Saturday.
Erdogan gave him a call.
On the phone call, Trump expressed sympathy and conveyed his feelings that Russia should stop what it's doing.
But Turkey has invaded Syria.
It is occupying Syrian territory, yet it insists on labeling Syria as the aggressor.
But sorry, that's not the way it works.
Syria is the defender.
And to label the aggressor is to turn reality on its head.
Well, and I mean, I know that Trump, as far as I know, that this was real because, you know, I talked with other people who confirmed this later.
It wasn't just the Washington Post said so, that in June of 2017, when Pompeo was still at CIA, that Trump called off support for al-Nusra and their allies there.
The whole part of working on that regime change, that part of the policy, was wound down from that point.
You might remember the headline in the Washington Post, should be famously, was, in move sure to please Vladimir Putin, Trump calls off support for the Syrian rebels.
But that doesn't mean that the U.S. has not turned a blind eye to Saudi support for the Syrian rebels.
Yeah, which has continued.
Which I suspect is, I very much suspect is the case.
Except, well, so, I mean, I don't know if there even is really a policy on this question.
But it seems like if there was one, it would have to be that, look, the war is over.
We're going to stand back and go ahead and let the Syrian government take back the province.
And these fighters are going to have to go to prison somewhere, or they're going to have to get jobs in Turkey or something.
But are we really just going to let there be, you know, this little mini-Islamic state in the Idlib province forever, and we're going to take Turkey's side and continuing to back it, even now?
Yes.
But Turkey, when Turkey invaded Syria in 2018, it did so with explicit U.S. support.
Well, and they did it.
I mean, it can't be, but I agree with you.
But that was against the Kurds, right, when they're taking Afrin and all that.
But that's already done.
That was against the Kurds, but it was explicitly, there were Islamist rebels who took part in that invasion.
Oh, yeah, sure.
Exactly.
So, it's implicitly in behalf of the al-Qaeda-led rebels.
And so- But I guess I just don't understand why the Turks still need them.
They got Afrin.
They got as much as they're ever going to get from Assad, as far as weakening him, and that much is over.
Well, under the Astana Accords, the Astana is the city in, I'm sorry, I should know this, Uzbekistan, I believe, where peace talks were conducted and under Russian auspices.
Turkey was allowed to maintain a temporary control over Idlib if it agreed to separate the so-called moderate forces from the al-Qaeda forces and get rid of the latter.
Now, that's like trying to, that's like putting sugar in your coffee and then trying to pick the crystals out.
So it's meaningless.
But the point is that Turkey never, never undertook that project.
And that is now serious justification for going to war to get the entire rebel force out of its territory.
Hey, guys, Scott Horton here from Mike Swanson's great book, The War State.
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All right, so now the Turks have killed over 50 Syrian troops.
Jason has written at antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com there.
And as you say, the Russians launched some strikes against the Turks in response.
And I guess they have sort of a temporary ceasefire now as far as that goes.
The Turks are vowing they're not leaving, and the Syrians are vowing that they're going to finish this job.
So it certainly is not over yet.
And the Turks are vowing to step up their effort.
So both sides are escalating, which means that the conflict is escalating.
And America's on the side of Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, who is blood oath sworn loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the butcher of New York City.
Yes, yes, yes.
This is, I mean, why aren't people rioting in the streets?
I mean, you know, was it really so long ago that the Twin Towers came crashing down, killing nearly 3,000 people?
And now, and now the U.S. is essentially aiding the same elements?
I just, I mean, is the, are Americans asleep at the wheel?
I mean, not only that, but, you know, they were the worst part of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq War II, where, you know, 4,000 out of the 4,500 Americans that were killed in Iraq War II, well, it's more than that if you include the contractors, but of the American soldiers, they died fighting the Sunni insurgency.
And in many cases, it was the al-Qaeda in Iraq guys, the suicide bombers and Zarqawi's men who were the leading edge of that for a couple of years there anyway.
America has been on the side of al-Qaeda or proto-al-Qaeda since 1980.
And it just can't quit.
And as the conflict with Iran heats up, the more, the more the U.S. falls into the arms of the Saudi al-Qaeda, Turkish, you know, broad alliance.
Hey, just one year ago, there was a truck bombing against the Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran that they blamed on Saudi and America quite credibly.
It was al-Qaeda that did it.
So that means Washington, D.C.
Just like the Reagan years, like all the, all they're turning on us never happened.
Hey, they're still useful against our enemies.
So who cares?
Our real enemies, the states that stand in our way.
Dana Rohrabacher, the former Republican congressman from Southern California, who's been in the news lately because of Julian Assange at a hearing in Congress actually said, well, shouldn't we support ISIS if they're going after, if they're going after Iran?
There you go.
And he was, he was shouted down merely, merely because he was stupid enough to say out loud what everyone else was smart enough to whisper under their breath.
Yeah.
And some of the Israelis who were happy to say it out loud over and over again, including Michael Oren, their ambassador to the United States.
Yeah, yes, he did actually.
He actually did say that, that ISIS was preferable to Assad.
But yes, no, it's, I mean, Scott, it's, it's really, it's, it's funny in one sense, but it's, it's horrifying in another sense.
I mean, essentially the U.S. government is still in league with the forces that killed 3,000 people in lower Manhattan, Scant, 18 or 19 years ago.
But that crime has never been investigated.
And in fact, the U.S. is on the side of the perpetrators and that should horrify any American who expects justice or expects democratic representation from his own government.
I mean, his own government should not be lining up with the people who are killing him.
Does that make sense to you?
Sounds right to me.
So that's not what, we the people don't want our government to kill, to kill us.
So yes, that's what's happening.
And this is only my second interview of the day about America fighting on the side of al-Qaeda.
Previously it was Nasser Arabi reporting out of Sana'a, Yemen, where America's still fighting on the side of AQAP and the UAE there.
So let's talk about Erdogan, the sort of pseudo kind of dictator of Turkey here.
He's an Islamist, not exactly a Muslim Brotherhood type, right?
Where's he come from?
I would describe him as Muslim Brotherhood-lite.
He is a mild Islamist and you must remember, if you go back 15 years, he was celebrated by everyone from George W. Bush to the New York Times as the good side of, as the person who represented democratic Islam.
I mean, W. praised him to the skies.
The New York Times couldn't keep writing favorable stories, couldn't write more favorable stories about him.
He was really the great white hope.
He was the way, he was the good alternative to al-Qaeda.
And as time has gone on, Erdogan has just turned darker and darker.
And the Syria adventure is, you know, has been a major factor in this development.
Because Syria, you know, has essentially had the effect of dragging Erdogan into this great morass.
The more he was dragged into it, the more his dark side came out.
The more he found himself aligning himself with really dark Sunni chauvinist elements, and therefore, you know, revealing more about himself in that regard as well.
So Erdogan is on the offensive now.
He recently traveled to Pakistan, gave a major speech before a joint session of parliament in which he essentially kind of lauded the Muslims in neighboring Kashmir as fellow Muslim brothers and pledged his solidarity on the basis of a common Islam, which is extremely provocative.
And just about the last thing that region needs.
And he also has inserted forces into Libya on behalf of the Islamist-backed General National Administration, I believe it's called, the GNA, which is essentially ensconced in central Tripoli.
But he's, you know, he's sort of carrying this kind of soft jihad father and father.
It seems like such a half-assed operation, though.
You know, there was a time when his asset, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had seized Mosul and declared the Islamic caliphate and all that.
It seems like that would have been the perfect time.
He has all these bin Laden knights to do all the dying for him, to push the front line all the way to Baghdad and all the way to Erbil or, you know, the river outside of Erbil.
And then that would have been the perfect time for Erdogan and his army to ride in and say this is now greater Turkey and I'm the sultan and I'm the caliph and I'm the boss around here, not Baghdadi, and expand Turkey's borders then.
It seems like all this effort, but for what?
He hasn't, what's he even getting out of this?
Well, first of all, the rule was that Baghdadi had declared himself the caliph.
And so we would have had two rival caliphs.
Yeah, but Erdogan, when it comes to military power, Erdogan's forces could have whooped the Islamic State and taken right over Mosul.
No problem, right?
That's true.
But Islamic State is, you know, it was a force to be reckoned with as well, or it was until recently.
He could have just increased their salaries and it would have worked OK.
That's true.
But Erdogan is a neo-Ottoman.
I remember for 500 years or 400 years, actually, the caliphate was based in Istanbul.
I mean, that's what I'm saying.
I mean, I really thought, honestly, in 2013, I'm like, well, you know, he's essentially using all these Bin Ladenites to soften up all of his enemies and to expand as much territory as he can.
And then he's going to expand his territory.
He wants to be the sultan, but then he never seemed to really go for it.
I don't know why he didn't.
Well, because he's working up to it gradually.
But remember, if he expands his sultanate, he essentially expands it in two directions.
One is towards the Arab world in Syria, Iraq and North Africa.
But the other direction is towards Turkish Central Asia.
And so, therefore, he has lurking in the back of Erdogan's mind are some pretty considerable imperial ambitions.
So that seems to be what he's heading towards now.
Well, there is, by the way, there happens to be the completely unresolved matter of Western Iraqi Sunnistan.
And so somebody is going to be the dominant force there.
And maybe the clean break will come true after all.
And it'll be a Jordanian-Turkish-Israeli alliance that dominates Iraqi Sunnistan.
Right.
Sure is a long way around to what Wormser was saying would happen.
But anyway.
But of course, these imperial ambitions greatly outweigh his real power.
So what's going to happen is that the more he acts on these ambitions, the greater the chance is going to fall flat in his face.
And that's what he is already doing in Syria, because he can't win this war in Syria.
Yeah.
Well, and talk about Libya, too.
I mean, he's really expanded a whole other mission there.
Yeah.
And as I said in my antiwar.com article, it's a classic case of a rat, you know, fleeing to a sinking ship rather than away from it.
I mean, the GNA barely controls central Libya, central Tripoli, much less the vast, you know, the vast portion of Libya outside the city limits.
It can't win.
It doesn't have a friend in the world.
It's allied with the most extreme Islamist elements.
And that is not to say that Heftar, the warlord, the American-Libyan warlord who is waging war against the GNA, I'm not saying he is any better by any means.
But the GNA itself is a regime that's definitely going to go down in defeat.
So with amazing accuracy, Erdogan has chosen the losing party in this conflict.
And that can't end well either.
So he's he's he's heading for disaster on two fronts.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny that I wonder how isolated he is in his own little information bubble or what, after how difficult the going has been in Syria this whole time in terms of actually accomplishing any of his goals, that he would just imagine somehow that Libya will be a pushover.
I don't know what got him thinking that way.
I remember, you know, he's in Scotland, he has an eleven hundred room presidential complex outside of Ankara.
So I imagine he like he roams the corridors like a figure out of a Gabriel Garcia, Garcia Marquez novel, you know, sort of talking to himself and, you know, and just sort of wondering, you know, that he's absolutely positive he can prevail in Libya and Syria, when, of course, the reality is is directly contrary because he can't win there.
He's going to he's going to wind up with a bloody nose.
And domestically, his power is is is ebbing away.
He lost a huge battle back in June for control of Istanbul against against a center leftist party.
So he lost that battle.
The economy is doing extremely poorly.
Political support is ebbing away.
So he's he's losing it on all sides.
All right.
So now, just exactly how consistent are his policies lately with U.S. goals in the region?
Because I read a lot about tension, but I wonder if the Americans really mind any of this.
It's a mess in the U.S.
You know, I mean, does the U.S. have any idea what its goals are in the Middle East?
I mean, the U.S. is the I mean, I've never seen a more confused policy than what we're seeing now out of the out of the Trump administration.
I mean, somehow it it it it it it's trying to maintain control of the oil fields in eastern Syria.
It's half at war with the government in Iraq.
It's sword rattling toward toward Iran, seemingly provoking it at every turn, but yet at the same time clearly afraid of a major war breaking out.
It's deeply in bed with Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, whose government is really just as far as I'm concerned, hanging by a thread also.
The U.S. is just it's just has got itself tied up in knots.
I mean, Trump is friendly to Russia on one hand.
He's afraid to alienate Erdogan too strongly.
On the other hand, he's you know, he supports one one moment, another or another moment.
He doesn't have a clue as to what the hell he's doing, really.
Yeah, man.
Well, that sure sounds right to me.
We have this entire self-generated crisis with Iran right when we didn't have one at all.
Right when everything was fine.
And you know what?
Honestly, if Trump had really wanted to put teeth in that nuclear deal, I think if he had just treated the Iranians with respect and said, man, you know what?
Over here, we really want to lift those sunsets and go ahead and keep some of those limits a little bit longer, guys.
What do you say?
I think he could have negotiated that.
I think he would have gotten exactly what he wanted if he'd stayed within the deal and said, you know what?
Before I got here, the last guy went ahead and, you know, opened the door.
So what the hell am I going to do?
Reverse that.
Let's see what we can do to work it out.
And that means and hell, even adding missiles.
You know what?
Let's limit your range to just outside Dimona.
I bet you could have got them to sign up on that.
You know?
Yes.
But Israel would have said no.
Israel would have said he would have halted him in his tracks.
And it's not that Israel is all powerful.
It's that Trump has no has has made it his duty to cater to to Netanyahu's every last whim and then some.
So it's Adelson who's all powerful.
That's what it is.
And so.
So.
So Trump.
So Trump couldn't couldn't couldn't reach any halfway reasonable accord with the with Iran without without, you know, infuriating the Israelis and also alienating Mohammed bin Salman bin Salman in in Saudi Arabia.
So the U.S. has gotten itself into a pickle.
And it's you know, and it doesn't know how to get out.
And that thrashes about and everything gets worse and worse as a consequence.
And the situation is just blowing up.
It's just, you know, it's it's you know, it's a lot of it is Trump's fault, but it really is the culmination of 70 or 80 years of just ongoing U.S. incompetence.
And, you know, and so it's not all Trump's fault.
No, certainly not, except just like with Obama or any of these guys, I mean, you've got to realize going in, if you've already lived to your 40s, 50s, 60s, et cetera, then you already know how quick eight years goes.
You have eight years to be the guy in the chair whose shot it is to call.
You don't really have to go along with what the Israelis say, not if you play your cards right, they all just.
The U.S., the U.S.-Israeli alliance, the U.S.-Israeli-Saudi alliance goes very, very deep.
I mean, we saw what happened to Trump when Trump talked about a rapprochement with with Russia.
He was he was almost driven out of office.
And and believe me, I mean, Israel has its hooks deep into America's soul.
And it's not because of Jewish money or, you know, or or the elders of Zion or any other of that nonsense.
It's because the U.S., you know, threw in its lot with Israel from the very beginning.
And then Israel, you know, established itself in 1967 as the dominant military power in the Middle East.
And the U.S. from that point on just couldn't say no.
So since then, the U.S.-Israeli alliance has has just gotten deeper and deeper and deeper.
And it's one that that no president to date has dare walked away from.
We'll see what happens if Bernie Sanders gets into the White House.
And I think the money has a lot to do with it.
And it's certainly not so broad as Jewish money, because after all, most American Jews are liberals and support peace.
But Sheldon Adelson gives one hundred million dollars every two years to the Republican Party.
And without that money, they lose.
With that money comes obligations to his priorities and his priorities are straight, direct Likud policy, you know, out of Israel.
He supports the pro-Likud paper there.
It's on the record saying America should have dropped a demonstration atom bomb in the desert outside of Tehran to show them what's coming up to them next if they don't bow down to our every demand, et cetera.
And but but this is a relatively new phenomenon.
There wasn't big money until about a decade ago.
Before then, Israel was not a big spender.
It was not like the Saudis, you know, don't know, doling out, you know, tens of millions of dollars, you know, to everyone from from the Atlantic Council to to the Clinton Foundation.
The Israelis did not dole out big money, but they still they still had vast support through, you know, in academia, among Republicans and Democrats, the press, et cetera, et cetera.
So, you know, there was, you know, hard cold cash played a fairly secondary role.
Yeah.
Well, and especially after the Cold War, when it became more necessary, they used to have a narrative that we really, really needed them.
Now they're trying to find excuses.
And so that's a little bit more expensive.
Yep.
But anyways, all right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate the fact that you are writing for Antiwar.com, a regular column now for us.
And the previous article, which maybe we'll catch up on this topic sometime soon, is called Tactical Nukes, Armageddon on the installment plan, which is a lot of fun.
They've been deployed now, these low yield nukes.
And so we'll definitely have to catch up on that.
But this one is Erdogan's excellent Syrian adventure.
Thanks again, Dan.
Great.
Thanks, Scott.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
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