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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All right, you guys, introducing Greg Shoupak, again, writing for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
That's fair.org.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm well, thanks.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Good to talk to you again.
Been a little while here.
And great peace, too.
Media conceal or celebrate depriving Syrians of food and medicine.
Oh, Greg, it couldn't be as bad as all that, could it?
Oh, it certainly could and certainly is.
And there are a variety of mechanisms through which this is happening.
All right, so what is the Caesar Act, first of all?
Well, actually, that's just one.
I'm getting ahead of the story.
What are the different aspects that people need to be aware of here at play?
One is that there have been U.S. sanctions as well as, you know, European and Canadian sanctions on Syria throughout the war and, in fact, even prior to the 2011 war.
And the thing about sanctions is that they don't have effects only on the sort of institutions or individuals that they say they are ostensibly aiming at.
So they have secondary effects, meaning if you sanction even just a few people in a government, whether that's Syria or Venezuela or Iran or Cuba or anybody, then what happens is international investors get scared because they think either that more sanctions are going to come that will jeopardize their ability to do business in the country, or they worry that they may almost inadvertently violate the rules that the U.S. has put in place or Europe or Canada and be punished as a result of that.
The Caesar Act brings the sanctions on the Syrian government and, frankly, all of Syrian society to a new level because it doesn't even, I mean, it barely has the pretense of targeting only high-ranking government officials.
So it.
That's how they announced it, though, right?
That's what they claim it's all about.
Sure.
Yeah.
And that's always what they claim it's all about.
And, you know, we can sort of also bracket off the question of whether it's legitimate for the United States ruling class to be carrying out economic warfare against whichever governments they choose to.
We can bracket that for a moment and just say that when sanctions are applied supposedly to only high-ranking officials, there are invariably going to be these other effects that I mentioned.
And the PR is always going to massage it to sort of pretend that there's going to be no effect on the broader population, that humanitarian assistance will still be allowed.
But that typically and certainly in this Syrian case is untrue.
So the Caesar Act, they have very clear provisions for punishing persons.
And by the way, not just American persons, even though this is issued by the U.S. government, they're applied to any, quote, foreign person.
So people living anywhere on Earth, such persons are being punished if they, quote, knowingly, directly or indirectly provide construction or engineering services to the government of Syria.
So in practice, that doesn't necessarily just mean you're building a house for someone in Bashar al-Assad's family.
It means construction anywhere in the country, in effect.
So this is a major issue when we're talking about a country that's been flattened by nine years of war.
Similarly, we have the provision in the Caesar Act that targets any international person who might invest in Syria's production of natural gas or petroleum products.
So again, this has the kind of, you know, fig leaf attached to it that says the government of Syria's production of natural gas, petroleum or petroleum products.
But the government of Syria is involved to one extent or another in all of that production.
So that, you know, in effect means all of the domestic production of gas and oil in Syria, setting aside for the territories that the U.S. controls and is attempting to, as Trump said, quote, secure and, quote, Syria's oil.
So what I'm getting at here is that the Caesar Act is decimating or seeking to decimate the oil and gas industry in Syria as a whole, which necessarily, like a lot of these other sanctions, undermines the Syrian economy as a whole, thereby affecting everyone in Syria and Syrians living outside the country in some cases as well.
All right.
So before we get into the media aspect of this, which, of course, is fairness and accuracy in reporting or the media critics, but you guys really stand apart, by the way, of media critics.
And that goes, you know, back in history, Peter Hart and all the different guys going back for years and years at FAIR, where you really know what you're talking about when you come out after these guys, the way that you do and then the way that you chronicle the errors of the media in carrying out their duties as the, you know, the tellers of the false narratives and all of that.
It's really unparalleled work that you guys always do.
It's just great stuff.
But before we do that, I want to go back to one thing that you said is one of many points in a row that I think is worth harping on about how international businessmen say in shipping or banking or, you know, any kind of these multi-billion dollar conglomerates responsible for international trade, how even when the sanctions have nothing to do with them, they're afraid of messing with Uncle Sam and the U.S. Treasury.
Man, you don't want to get your business on the bad side of the U.S. Treasury.
So we see this in the case with Iran as well, where you just do business with somebody else.
You just go somewhere else.
And sorry, Iranians, but we're just not selling medicine to you right now.
And even though medicine isn't on the list of sanctioned products, of course, that would look bad.
Might as well be, because the people who make the medicines, who would sell them, aren't terrified to pull their ship into port.
They don't even bother.
Yeah, exactly.
And in Syria's case, interestingly, they had significant domestic pharmaceutical production prior to the war.
However, that still requires imported implements.
So even when they in the past hadn't relied on, or at least not depended on, importing pharmaceuticals, that whole aspect of the domestic economy has been hampered to a large extent because of the the ways in which these sanctions make it hard to get the resources that they need into the country in order to make pharmaceuticals.
And yeah, I mean, it's a relatively clear calculation, right?
Like if you're a business that is trying to make money all over the world, obviously you're not going to you know, cut off your ability to do operations in the United States.
And from that market of almost 350 million people or so, and you know, the wealthiest country on earth, despite of course massive internal inequality, you know, corporations, banks and so forth, they're not going to say, oh yeah, we'll give up that in order to do business with Cuba or war-ravaged Syria or, you know, sanctions asphyxiated Iran.
It's not a very complicated calculus that they have to do.
Yeah.
Right.
Even when the European nations were kind of to spite Trump and were trying to shore up the Iran deal, wanted to create a special purpose vehicle so that European companies could still deal with Iran.
But they had very few takers because it ain't a free market.
And with the great white shark known as the U.S. Treasury out roaming around, you know, France cannot protect you.
You know, the nation states of Europe cannot protect, the EU cannot protect you from the U.S. And so you better just not.
Yeah.
And I mean, that's why these promises from the EU to try to give Iran some sanctions relief have come to effectively nothing or nothing that comes even close to denting the damage done by the sanctions.
And, you know, in a lot of cases like Syria and other aspects of the sanctions regime on against Iran, the EU is often enough a willing partner anyway.
So it's not as if they, you know, even have the kind of inclination to launch some principled stance for, you know, the sovereignty of countries in the crosshairs of the U.S. Empire.
Right.
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All right, now do us a favor as you do in this great piece and name and shame these major media figures who are helping to promote this essentially economic terrorism against these weaker nations, in this case Syria.
Sure, yeah.
Well, I mean the Washington Post ran an especially egregious editorial from their editorial board that openly celebrated the fact that the sanctions are going to harm the Syrian economy and frankly therefore Syrian society as a whole.
So the Washington Post's, I say in the article, they were endorsing the sanctions not in spite of the fact that they harm all of Syria, but they were celebrating the sanctions because they harm all of Syria.
So if I can just read a very brief quote.
But wait, I'm confused though, Gregg, because I thought that the only reason they supported al-Qaeda over there all those years was because of how much they loved the Syrian people and it was all for humanitarian reasons.
I'm getting mixed signals.
Yeah, it's very hard to process, but it seems that there might be some reason to believe, hard as it is to accept, that the Washington Post serves U.S. imperial interests and is interested in trying to remove any barriers to that and they see the Syrian government and its allies from Iran and its ally in Russia and its ally Hezbollah as barriers to that.
So even though the war is over and the Syrian government side won, here we are in 2020, three years after, two years anyway, after the final end of Iraq war three and all of that, and still, you know, out of, I guess, spite for having lost, now they're adding on this extra economic war.
Is that it?
I mean, that's roughly it.
I would say that the economic war is an indication that the war is not over.
It is now, you know, there's the arming of the opposition by the United States is, so far as I can tell, over.
However, they still have this economic war which is decimating the country and they also are holding significant chunks of territory in the northern part of the country, through the northeastern part of the country, through Kurdish forces allied with them in an attempt to what Trump has repeatedly described as, quote unquote, securing the oil in Syria.
So, and they still have bases that they set up in the country as well.
And Al-Qaeda still controls Idlib province too, importantly.
Yeah, Al-Qaeda affiliated groups and Turkey as well, which has often been the more than willing partner of HTS, HTS, excuse me, I butchered the name, which is the current incarnation of what was previously Jabhat al-Nusra, which was the Al-Qaeda franchise.
They, like ISIS, seem to have had a lot of enabling through Turkey and that continues.
So, yes, Idlib is still very much a sort of a hot zone for, you know, a pretty brutal military battle that seems to be, well, not only ongoing, but also the climax, I think, has yet to arrive.
You see what I mean, everybody, about you could be a media cricket and just say, well, I think that that's unfair the way you frame that or something like that.
But these guys have the deep background to really understand the story.
That's why they're always this level of BS proof.
You hear it in his explanation of what's going on with HTS and the rest of that there, obviously.
Just had to reiterate because I like it.
I did divert you off of the path of your condemnation of these horrible media people who love this economic war so badly.
So if you wanted to pick up that train of thought again, that'd be fine.
Sure.
Thank you.
Yeah.
So what I was going to say from the Post, what they said in their editorial was that the sanctions are going to make it so that the efforts to reconstruct Syria's economy, quote, suffer a severe setback, end quote.
And then they say a sentence or two later, for that some credit is due to Congress.
So what they're saying is that Congress deserves credit for making it extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, for Syria to reconstruct its economy, which is totally in shambles in large part because of the sanctions, as well as factors like the war and the COVID-19 and the economic issues in Lebanon, which, by the way, the U.S. is also trying to leverage against people in Syria, many of whom have sort of kept their money in Lebanon or moved their money to Lebanon because that has not been subject to the same type of sanctions that Syria has.
So the Post was particularly galling in that regard.
Foreign policy ran a really feeble attempt at justifying the sanctions, and in fact claiming in their title that the sanctions will help and not harm civilians.
And so this was run by a couple of folks affiliated with the esteemed intellectual institution known as the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, long a sort of house organ of U.S. empire and their misinformation and propaganda schemes.
So the two authors of this particular piece, David Adesnik and Toby Dershowitz, wrote this article making the outrageous argument that these sanctions are good because they'll eventually lead to the collapse of the Syrian government and therefore a better government will come into being.
In the process, they're, for one thing, totally ignoring the fact that for that to happen, for society in Syria to get to the point where the government collapses because of sanctions, there would have to be just absolutely extraordinary levels of deprivation and suffering.
I mean, they've already had extraordinary levels of deprivation and suffering for nine years of war and that government hasn't collapsed.
So it's hard to even conceive of what it would take to just sort of have the government so strangled that it falls apart.
I mean, look at in Iraq in the 90s when the sanctions on Saddam Hussein's government caused the deaths of 500,000 children.
That didn't cause the Iraqi government to collapse.
Hasn't worked in Cuba.
Hasn't worked in North Korea.
Hasn't worked in Yemen where we're carpet bombing them and blockading the hell out of them.
Houthis are still in power in Sana'a.
Yeah, exactly.
And as you said, they already backed a legion of suicide bombers against this government in Damascus and lost.
But now you're going to sanction them into collapse?
No, you're just going to sanction innocent people into going hungry.
That's it.
Yeah, I mean, and that's already been happening.
We have evidence from a Danish think tank going back to 2012 that was commissioned by the Danish government to study the effects of Syrian sanctions.
And they were identifying then, a year into the war, that the sanctions against the Syrian government were producing, making it harder for people to access food and medicine.
So this is going back that far.
So these authors for foreign policy are suggesting not only that this will cause these sanctions, set aside the United States does not have any legitimate right to carry out regime change wars economically or militarily, to unseat the government of Syria or any other government that it wants to.
You're right that it's unlikely to work.
And if it did, it would require so much suffering that it's ludicrous to suggest that that constitutes, quote unquote, helping, as the authors say.
They go on to say in the process that it's OK that there are negative economic consequences because of the sanctions.
And the reason it's OK is because the governments of the United States and Europe that prosecute the sanctions, they offer humanitarian aid, which, for one thing, it's demonstrably the case that humanitarian aid or not, we have a wealth of evidence indicating that there is major harm being experienced by the population.
So, for instance, there was an institute that was commissioned in Switzerland by the Swiss government that in 2016 carried out a report, and they found that it was nearly impossible to import medical instruments in Syria.
So, you know, from that standpoint, it's whatever humanitarian aid is being given is not fixing this problem.
We've had similar results come be documented far more recently than 2016.
The same is being reported regularly, including by humanitarian organizations that are working there.
So, the Red Crescent in April noted that the sanctions were among the factors leading for what they described as, quote, hardship for many vulnerable Syrians, end quote.
Similarly, a few days after, I think 10 days after this foreign policy article came out, the Red Crescent said that these recent harsher economic sanctions have, quote, exacerbated humanitarian needs, making the situation more untenable than ever before for civilians with no stake to the conflict, end quote.
So, you know, 10 days after the sanctions, when this new round of sanctions went into effect, 10 days after this silly foreign policy article was published, it was already clear that this key premise in the article was completely undermined.
They're making an argument saying the humanitarianism, that the generous countries of the European Union and the United States, their benevolence towards Syria through humanitarianism mitigates the harm done by the sanctions, and yet we have the Red Crescent, which is there on the ground doing work, saying 10 days later the sanctions are harmful.
So you can't really square that with what these authors have quite disgracefully argued.
Another one of the more outrageous pieces of media coverage was the Wall Street Journal, which ran the kind of laughable headline that says U.S. hits Assad family with Caesar Act sanctions.
Well, they're not hitting this one particular family, they're hitting the entire country.
And as I indicated before, the sanctions are undercutting the country's ability to rebuild.
And in fact, part of the Caesar Act, which is folded into the Defense Authorization Act for 2020, part of the Caesar Act says that its, quote, strategy is to deter foreign persons from entering into contracts related to reconstructions in the areas under the control of the Syrian government or its allies.
Well, that's the vast majority of the country.
So the Journal is claiming that the Caesar Act targets the Assad family when the Caesar Act itself openly says that it's targeting the vast majority of the country that is under control of the Syrian government and its partners.
Equally absurd, in my view, is this Wall Street Journal report that was run on June 17th.
They say that the sanctions punish, quote, the regime's supporters.
So that's what Osama bin Laden said in his declaration of war.
You people pay your taxes.
You're all responsible.
You're a democracy, aren't you?
Then you're no different than those who implement these policies.
That's what he said.
The world's worst terrorist.
That's a really great analogy.
It's the textbook case of collective punishment.
He was just, you know, parroting back Madeleine Albright's philosophy on her, you know?
Yeah, that's no, that's true.
And I mean, the atrocities of 9-11 were in some ways at least connected to U.S. atrocities around, in Muslim-majority lands.
The Syrian government has not done anything to the United States government.
The United States government has no legitimacy, legitimate grievance with the Syrian government.
They have not bombed them.
They have not carried out economic warfare against them.
They go, they exist against their strategic interests.
And so the United States pretends to care about human rights in Syria, which is obviously ludicrous, considering that the United States is the greatest violator of human rights around the world, bar none.
In Syria, too, at least equal to Assad and his air campaign, which is frankly defensive against American aggression.
Not to apologize for his tactics, but certainly if America did to any country in the world what they did to Syria, the governments of those countries would react the very same way.
Yeah, I mean, a major portion of it, of the Syrian government's bombing campaign was a response to international arming of armed groups.
In the process, the Syrian government committed acts that could turn out to be war crimes and certainly were, you know, led to the deaths of many innocent civilians in the country.
The point vis-a-vis the United States is that it has done that in, you know, more countries than we have time to list, even just in recent memory.
And it has zero legitimacy determining who governs or any country on earth other than itself, let alone attempting to, you know, overthrow other governments through either armed invasion or arming opposition groups.
So, you know, in this respect, we—and, you know, there's more ground here than we can cover unless we want to go continue this discussion for a month and a half.
But there, in these ways, the United States has been a major contributor to the violence in Syria and to the economic and humanitarian deprivation in the country.
And so consequently, we know that even if we look, like you said, just at Syria, the humanitarian claims are untrue.
There's some evidence that the United States used chemical weapons in Syria in the campaign that was ostensibly aimed at ISIS.
So a lot of the— You're talking about white phosphorus or something else?
I'd have to recheck, actually.
I didn't mention that in this article, but The Intercept reported on it a few years back.
So I'm just going by memory as to exactly which substance it was.
Their jihadists certainly did, but I didn't know about that part.
But anyway, go ahead.
Opposition groups certainly did as well.
So, you know, these are worth mentioning because the the allegations of the Syrian government using, and it looks like it likely did in at least some cases, chemical weapons against the forces it was fighting, that has been one of the most widely used justifications for international intervention.
And so I highlight that because the United States would, well, has on at least two occasions in the Trump administration, bombed Syria on the grounds that it needed to react to use of chemical weapons that the Syrian government was alleged to have carried out.
But the U.S. itself used chemical weapons in the country, let alone what it did in Iraq, for instance, or, you know, run through the history and go back further to other countries as well.
Importantly, those were both hoaxes, just as the big one in August of 13, under Obama, was also a hoax.
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot, there's...
And which the media went along with lock, stock and barrel because anonymous intelligence sources told them to, just like always, right?
There's good reason to be skeptical of these claims.
And I think that I hope over time we get clear, you know, documentation as to exactly what happened.
But one thing that's clear is that in the immediate days following these attacks, the Syrian government was accused of carrying out, it certainly wasn't clear at that point that there were chemical attacks or who carried them out.
So if you look at what the World Health Organization was saying in the days leading up to the U.S. bombing of Damascus in April or late March of 2018, you'll see that they were not saying, based on what they were observing, oh, we have decisive proof of a chemical weapons attack.
I mean, this whole thing about chemical weapons is, to me, a little bit misleading because, okay, so the Syrian government has certainly caused many civilian deaths in some of its bombings.
Well, I wonder why then do we seize on chemical weapons as the be-all and end-all?
Likewise, the United States...
Because of the focus group, right?
That's the answer, because that's what works in terms for the media selling it to people.
Yeah.
And likewise, I'm, you know, sort of trying to mirror that by talking about the U.S. use of chemical weapons in Syria.
But that's even beside the point.
So let's just pretend that didn't happen.
Well, they still flattened all of Raqqa, for example, killing thousands.
So what difference does it make what weapon they used, right?
Likewise with their U.S. warfare across the Middle East and beyond.
I mean, it's clearly, I think, an ideological game to just say, oh, this one method of murdering people that we say an enemy government did, that's totally unacceptable.
But all the ways that we do it are completely fine.
If the argument is that chemical weapons are somehow worse than other types of bombs, I really fail to see that.
But I would highlight, well, sanctions are also, I think, among the most brutal ways that you can murder people because it's a slow, painful, miserable death.
And it's indiscriminate, right?
As you write about in here, you're talking about little kids deprived of their cancer medicine.
And this isn't a joke.
No.
And this is a grinding death of deprivation that people are experiencing or watching their loved ones go through.
So that, to me, is as brutal a form of death as any if we're trying to do some sort of moral calculus about which types of killing people is legitimate.
And by the way, send me that intercept piece and we'll put it in the show notes for later.
Sure.
Yeah, I will.
To tie that part up.
And look, we got to mention here, too, that this is all about Iran.
That's the only reason they picked this fight with Assad anyway, was they couldn't go to Tehran and they gave Baghdad to Iran's best friends in Iraq War II.
So they said, well, if we can get rid of Assad, that'll be a consolation prize after all the screwups of the last few years.
And so that was why they did it, was to take Iran's second to last, after now Baghdad, second to last Arab best friend away from them.
And of course, as they said openly all along, is how I can say that so definitively, what their motives were, they said so.
And as they continue to say that this is part of the maximum pressure campaign against Iran, even why do we have to occupy these oil fields?
Because if we deprive the Syrian government of revenue, that means they're more dependent on Iran, which I thought that was what they said they were against, was Syria's relationship with Iran.
But anyway, if we make them more dependent with Iran, that will crunch Iran's budget.
That will be a stress on the Iranian regime that now they have to pay to help keep the Syrian government from falling apart.
And so it's all fit a one big picture where the enemy is the terror masters in Tehran, as Michael Ledeen called them.
And that's why they backed al-Qaeda in Syria.
Why would they back al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's because they're fighting against the Shia.
And these guys, they hate, as you put it, their strategic rivals in the region are much higher priority than enemies who are actually soaked in the blood of American civilians.
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's pretty, it's in many ways a parallel to the intervention in Afghanistan, beginning in the 70s, I think, the war on Syria, that is, which that we, you know, exhaust a lot of the parallels, but at the simplest level, that was obviously to bleed the Soviet Union in the 70s and 80s.
And this, in many respects, has been to bleed Iran and, and Russia.
And let's, we should also not forget Hezbollah, which is also part of the, you know, Middle Eastern axis that the United States finds objectionable.
So they bled, they're just battle hardened now.
But anyway, none of this has worked at all.
That, no, I mean, I don't think it's particularly worked as far as, as far as Hezbollah goes.
I mean, in Syria is more dependent on Iran than ever before.
They were friends.
Now they're completely dependent on them, right?
Yeah, no, it's, I mean, like a lot of US wars, I think, when we get into talking about whether it worked, or whether they achieved what they wanted, it depends on how we define a victory.
And so, I mean, yeah, they didn't succeed in the sense that they didn't overthrow the Syrian government and carve Syria up there, or, you know, install some kind of Saudi style, Qatari style government.
Only for three years, then they had to go to war to blow it up.
Yeah, well, in Syria, that that hasn't worked.
And at the same time, we can look at it from another angle and say, well, they did decimate the country, or at least help decimate the country, and push it into abject poverty, so that its levels of socioeconomic development have been set back decades.
They've cost Iran and Russia, you know, blood and treasure.
So, you know, they, the US planners, I think, at least partway achieved their goal of, you know, inflicting massive harm on Syria, and really ripping the country apart.
But, you know, it is true that they didn't, they've really cemented the alliance, probably more so than anything else, between the Syrian government and the government of Iran, and also Hezbollah.
And now that Iraq is in that mix, in some respects, also, yeah, they're in a, the US is in a worse regional position, probably, than they were prior to, you know, the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
I mean, at least if we're looking at the strength of their main kind of organized resistance at the level of state, states or major state, major non-state actors like Hezbollah.
Right.
And in fact, after everything that Bush did for the Iranian side in Iraq War II, after Iraq War, after the Syria intervention had backfired in the Islamic State, not just seizing Eastern Syria, but rolling into all of Western Iraq, then Iraq became even more dependent on the Iranians than ever before for the ground forces to liberate Western Iraq from the Islamic State.
So America came in with their air power, decimating the place, as you said.
But so, if we, if the reason they backed al-Qaeda in Syria was because they resented the fact that they had fought for Iran in Iraq War II, then it immediately backfired.
And they ended up fighting Iraq War III for those very same Shiites they wish they hadn't fought Iraq War II for.
And then, but, and now driven the Baghdad government even further into dependence on Iran to keep the bin Laden knights down and out.
Yeah.
And to the extent also that they've inflamed, re-inflamed the opposition to any U.S. presence whatsoever in Iraq among the Iraqi population, that's sort of a byproduct of this larger regional war.
And that's what this is.
These are not, you know, discrete events.
These are all connected.
And the Russians are back for the first time in 25 years, 30 years.
And the Americans are surprised and shocked and angered by that, but can't figure out how it's their fault, when they didn't even really intervene until the end of 2015, four years into the war, four and a half years into the war.
Not in a particularly robust way until then, at any rate.
Yeah, they were selling them weapons and stuff, advising and that kind of thing.
Sure, sure.
And, but certainly that's when they really ratcheted it up to say that they were not going to basically allow the U.S. to, the U.S. and its partners in Saudi Arabia and Turkey and Qatar and so forth to bring down the Syrian government.
And a lot of that actually also connects back to Libya, where the total catastrophe for the Libyan population that has resulted following the NATO overthrow of the Libyan government in 2011.
The governments in Russia, and even in a limited way, China said, well, you know, we won't be having that happen again in Syria.
And so they, and especially Russia, of course, said that they didn't want to allow the U.S. to overthrow a government using rather dirty methods and unleashing what would at best be a very uncertain and paradoxically certainly violent future.
And so say what you want about it, but that's what the Russian logic was.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
And I mean, at the end of 2015, it looked like the bad guys were going to be able to sever the highway between Damascus and Aleppo.
And we're really going to threaten the capital city there.
And by the bad guys, I mean, come on, the Bin Ladenites, the sworn Bin Ladenites and their competition in ISIS, who broke away from Zawahiri, but who were, as pretty much everyone agreed, the same thing, only worse than the ones who are still loyal to the guys that knocked the towers down.
So, you know, talk about everything that they blame Russia for.
They basically forced them to do, you know, they gave them no choice but to send in their air force at that point, you know?
Well, they at least created the conditions that made that highly likely.
And, you know, there were like, if we go back to the beginning of the Syrian war, there were a lot of moving parts.
Right.
And so there were elements of a popular uprising protesting against the Syrian government, which, you know, was involved in kind of the neoliberalization of the economy and torture and undemocratic practices.
At the same time, it's also the case that there were, you know, sectarian and religious elements involved in that uprising, and crucially for our purposes here, an attempt to not just leverage that moment, but ensure that it went from, you know, protests demanding certain types of reform to an effort to bring about as violent as possible, it would seem, of a civil war.
So by 2015, which you mentioned, the kind of, you know, democratic and or left leaning kind of elements that had been a part of the Syrian opposition early on were totally marginal and had you know, so far as I can tell, next to nothing to do with the armed opposition that was engaged in major direct combat with Syria and Russia and its partners, and that was receiving weapons from the US and its partners.
And so at that point, I think that the opportunity for a, you know, kind of brighter future to emerge in Syria as a result of the uprising was not in the cards at that moment, and something that the conditions seem to have conspired against.
And by the conditions, I mainly mean the country being an international, a site of an international proxy war.
Right.
Yeah, that's the whole thing about it.
No matter how badly you sympathize with Syrian protesters on the ground, by the summer of 2011, it was clear they were already essentially extras in their own movie, because the key words and all anybody needs to know, Prince Bandar is sending fighters off to Syria.
And that's it.
Game over.
This thing has nothing to do with your popular revolution.
Not anymore.
And sorry, like it's unfortunate if you live under a fascist dictatorship and you would like to have a more democratic government instead, that you live in a relatively weak state like Syria, and that happens to be at the crossroads of everything between all these major powers, then you essentially cannot act especially in a situation like this.
You cannot act politically, but that you are a sock puppet of somebody essentially serving someone else's interests.
As you put it, you know, the Americans looking to secure their interests there.
Meanwhile, the Americans are talking about, we just want to help the Syrian people.
Come on, you're looking for your own angle in this crisis, just like everybody else.
And then, but when, you know, those magic words, Prince Bandar sending fighters, that means al-Qaeda in Iraq, in Syria.
That's what it means.
It's the same guys, Zarqawi's guys, Saudi Arabia's, you know, bin Ladenite shock troops.
They don't have an army.
They have bin Ladenites, you know, terrorists, and they're doing suicide bombings and cutting people's heads off, you know, certainly that summer in 2011.
So it was already game over for the idea that this was going to be some kind of moderate rebellion.
I mean, after all, the bin Ladenites had grown up in Iraq.
A whole entire group had grown up in Iraq for years resisting the American and Shiite war against the Sunnis there.
And so, you know, they were down, but not completely out.
And this was their chance.
Obama just resuscitated them, gave them everything.
And I'm sorry, I'm just rambling.
But anyway, the point is this now, is that Donald Trump came into power and he and Pompeo called off, as you mentioned, they called off the CIA support for these guys.
In the summer 2017, they said, we're not doing this anymore.
We're not seeking regime change in Damascus.
We'll even say that out loud.
We're just not.
But then they're still doing this anyway.
Again, as they admit, just to spite Iran.
But it seems like a pretty strange state of affairs where we're having this conversation quite literally three years after they announced that they're backing off.
And yet they're willing to put this level of screws to this society still.
And well, so we covered the maximum pressure thing.
But do you think that this signals an actual change in the policy back toward regime change?
That they really think that they can get?
I know that you say that these idiots at foreign policy wrote that, but I wonder if you think that, you know, Pompeo and those guys that that's really their thinking here is that it's back on.
Well, I mean, it's interesting in the Caesar Act, it says that it has some curious language in that it talks about, you know, it says that the sanctions will stay in place until the Syrian government, and I'm paraphrasing here, until people who committed war crimes during the war are brought to justice.
Well, according to at least the U.S.'s definition, we'll see about more independent bodies.
But according to their definition, and there's probably some truth to it, that would be a lot of those were people who committed war crimes would be in the Syrian government.
And so the Syrian government is not going to prosecute itself for war crimes.
And so what that means is that the sanctions are in place, basically, until there isn't the current Syrian government.
There's also language in the Caesar Act about saying that sanctions will remain in place until there is a government that, again, I'm paraphrasing, but, you know, is sort of democratic and human rights respecting.
Well, again, that's nothing that the current Syrian government is ever going to live up to in the eyes of the U.S. state.
So what this indicates to me is that the sanctions are pretty clearly a regime change gambit.
And I don't think that that goal has ever been taken off the map, including since the CIA arming program ended.
I think that they've basically accepted that it's unlikely to work anytime soon.
And so they've kind of shifted tactics and are happy to just inflict as much misery as possible on Syria and prevent it from reconstructing and hope that another window opens up soon.
I think also that the Trump administration has been a little bit more overt than the Obama government was in confronting Iran.
So they may be hoping to go sort of directly for what they see as the bigger fish.
And the calculus there would be if they could cause the Iranian government and, frankly, Iranian society to fall apart, then that's going to, in the process, bring down Syria as well.
So they, I think you could argue, are attempting to just keep Syria as poor and dependent and non-sovereign and as suffering as is feasible without really expecting the Syrian government to be overthrown in the short term.
And that this is, as you say, one part of the agenda to oust the rulers in Iran.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I'm sorry I kept you so long here, but it's been great talking to you again, Greg.
You do great work, man.
Thanks.
You too.
It was a lot of fun.
All right, you guys, that is Greg Schupach.
He is at FAIR.
That's Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
FAIR.org.you
