All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, guys, on the line, I've got Ted Snyder, regular contributor at antiwar.com for good reason, too.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Ted?
I'm doing well, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
So, we've got so much to talk about in a short amount of time today.
Let's talk about the new president of Iran.
I don't guess he's been sworn in yet, but the newly elected president.
Not until August, yeah.
And it's Ebrahim Raisi, is that how you say it?
I've been actually looking at that last name for a while.
I think that's right.
My Farsi's not great, so I'm not sure, but yeah, Ebrahim Raisi, yeah.
Okay.
Well, tell me everything in the world you know about—oh, well, let me introduce this properly.
You have two important articles we're going to discuss here.
First of all, Iran's election, making Iranian nightmares come true, and then running today on antiwar.com Thursday.
Why are we still at war with Syria?
So Iran's election, making Iranian nightmares come true.
I like that.
Yeah.
But it raises the question, Ted, doesn't it?
Who's making my Iranian nightmares come true?
Is it the Iranians or the Americans doing this to me?
It's the Americans, Scott, but it raises two interesting questions.
Who's making the Iranian nightmares come true?
But then is it really a nightmare or is it really what America wants?
I mean, the nightmare I'm referring to is a consistent pattern in history of America getting reformist presidents in Iran that they should be able to work with, and then completely discrediting those guys and setting the road to bring hardliners in, in a way that seems deliberate, like they're making their own nightmare come true.
They're bringing in hardliners who they can't work with instead of reformers who they can work with.
So you think they're making their nightmares come true, but then it starts to look, if you look at the pattern, it starts to look like it's on purpose.
And you know, you get people, like I start my article off talking about a 2017 piece by Elliott Abrams, and you could say, well, so what, who's Elliott Abrams, right?
But remember that Elliott Abrams went on to become the special representative for Iran under the Trump administration.
And he wrote this article about Raisi because this is not the first time he's run for president.
He ran before and Rouhani clobbered him.
And just for a quick on Abrams, Abrams is a severe player in the neoconservative movement convicted in the Reagan administration for Iran-Contra and played a central role in lying us into Iraq.
And then famously in the redirection in our anti-Ayatollah policy in the big turnaround in 2006 and seven there during W. Bush.
So this is not just some neocon from JINSA.
This is a really important gangster on the level of Richard Perle.
Sure.
He's the chairman of coups in the United States like this is this is a this is a big guy and that kind of thing.
Right.
And in 2017, when when Raisi is winning, running against Rouhani, you know, Elliott Abrams writes an article in which he calls Raisi.
He calls him like, I can't remember the exact words, as hardline an Iranian as you can get.
Like he said, this is a real and he tells why.
Right.
He gives the whole bunch of reasons why you should hate this hardliner, that he was a judge on the death commissions, that he executed thousands of people like he he gives this whole sort of list of reasons why you should not want this guy to be president of Iran.
And and then he says that he endorses him, that he wants him to win.
And you think like, what?
You just told me all these reasons not to.
And then and then he says in the article, why would I want him to win?
And then he says just this.
He says it's simple.
He says Raisi is the true face of Iran.
Right.
We're we're better off with a hardline so we can see Iran for what it is instead of having people like Rouhani who pretend to be something different.
So so here's Elliott Abrams saying, I want the hardliner in.
Right.
So so is it a nightmare or is it your dream?
Right.
He says, I want him in.
And the problem with Elliott Abrams article is is three things.
One is it's not the face of Iran.
You know, if you look at if you look at Iran in the in the years past, you know, post-revolution, there's been four presidents elected and reelected.
Rafsanjani, who is a moderate, a reformer, Khatami, who is a moderate, a reformer.
Then you get Ahmadinejad, who is a hardliner, and then you get Rouhani elected twice again.
He's a reformer.
The true face of Iran, when you let Iranians vote is is they bring in reformers.
But then what happens is that the Americans deliberately discredit those reformers so that nobody wants to vote for them.
Right.
They discredit them and pave the road for hardliners.
And then what happened in the current Iranian election is is that the United States completely discredited Rouhani and the reformers completely.
And they made him look like a total fool, because here's this guy who staked his entire two terms as president.
He staked everything on the promise that I can get Iran out of international isolation and I can end sanctions by engaging with America.
I can negotiate in good faith.
We can actually trust them, negotiate with them.
And the hardliners said from day one, you're naive.
Look at history.
Every time you negotiate with America, Iran keeps his promise.
America breaks their promise.
You're discredited.
This isn't going to happen.
So Rouhani negotiates the JCPOA, the nuclear core of the United States.
Trump pulls out of it.
Complete illegal betrayal.
I mean, the treaty is a long, complicated treaty, but it really boils down to one simple thing, and that's that if Iran honors its promises to limit its nuclear program, the United States has to end sanctions.
And it's only if Iran violates their agreement that the U.S. can legally snap back sanctions.
Well, Iran was completely, you know, consistently certified as keeping all their promises.
So when Trump pulled out, it was completely illegal, but it discredited Rouhani.
The hardliners all said, we told you, you're a naive fool.
We told you to negotiate.
So Rouhani says, OK, hold on, hold on, hold on.
Biden's coming to power.
Let's just wait this out.
They can sabotage our nuclear plants.
They can sink our ship.
We can wait this out.
When Biden comes in, he said he's going to come back.
So what happens?
Biden comes in.
He deliberately delays for months and months and months, right?
Then when they do get to the talks, it's a simple deal, right?
It's simple.
You go back to your nuclear remits, we'll go back to taking off our sanctions.
Like Biden had this handed to him.
Obama had done all the work.
He just has to go back and do it.
But he doesn't.
And when he finally gets to talks, he still says, I'm not ending all the sanctions.
He drags it on.
He drags it on, drags it on.
And then Rouhani, the moderates have to go up, face an election.
And they've been totally discredited now that the economy is bashed, right?
The sanctions are on, Iranians are struggling.
So the economy's wrecked, the sanctions are on, they didn't get their nuclear agreement.
And so what happens now, you get the guardian council in Iran, who is the body that's in charge of deciding who can run in the election, who can't run in the election.
And you get 14 reformers running.
And the guardian council throughout the history of Iran has always wanted to prevent reformers from running, but they can't.
They can't get away with that.
But this time, because the reformers have been so discredited, because the middle class is gone, because the economy's ruined, because they're still isolated internationally.
Now with all that there, the guardian council can go ahead and ban these reformers.
So what happens in the current reign in election is that a hardliner has no one running against him because of a situation entirely created by the United States that allowed the guardian council to do what they've never been able to do before.
And that's like completely cleansed the ballot of reformers.
And so it's the American betrayal of the nuclear agreement and the refusal to negotiate it while the reformers are still in power that so completely discredits them that the guardian council can wipe them off the ballot and put a hardliner in.
So America has to deal with a hardliner government in Iran now because of what they did, right?
They did this.
And now, today, Iran is saying, we can't even finish now until the next president is in.
And so Rouhani's not even going to get to renegotiate it.
He's going to end his two terms.
History's going to look back.
It'll forget all the details.
All history will say is that at the end of Rouhani's term, he'd accomplished nothing, that he was naive to trust the Americans.
So Trump and Biden completely laid the grounds for this candidate to become the president of Iran.
They made their nightmare come true.
Except that, you know, Elliott Abrams says, it's not a nightmare.
You want a hardliner.
And then you've got to ask, why does America want a hardliner in Iran, right?
Because that's what Israel wants.
That's why.
So that we can't get along with them.
It's a poison pill.
We have no partner for peace.
Look at this raving madman.
Right.
I think it does two things.
I think that's one of them.
You say it keeps Iran the enemy.
And as long as Iran is the enemy, then that justifies everything that you're talking about.
And I think the other one, too, is there's a very long history in the United States, there are different reasons of keeping dictators, you know, and hardliners in power in different countries, because that makes it easier to justify taking them out later when you want to.
Right.
So, you know, you look through the history of other parts of the world where you often put a dictator or a hardliner in power because it's easier to control them, too.
Right.
You can't tell a democracy to give us your oil, but you can tell a dictator, we'll keep you in power if you give us your oil.
So dictators often serve America's purpose.
In the case of Iran, it's not oil.
In the case of Iran, it's what you said.
It keeps Iran the enemy.
But what it does later is when that hardliner or dictator is no longer serving your purposes, it's way easier to market taking out a hardliner or a dictator than it is a democracy.
You know, Chomsky used to say that you put in a hardliner or a dictator, and then when he no longer serves your purpose, you try to distance yourself from him.
And then when you can't distance yourself from him, you take him out and pretend he was always a horrible hardliner and dictator.
Right.
Yeah.
So.
So.
So, you know, Elliott Abrams would argue that this serves America's purpose because it keeps Iran looking the way you want Iran to look.
But then the scary thing, Scott, after is that it also makes it easier to justify a coup because how do you take Rouhani out?
How do you possibly remove a guy who's just said they'll limit the nuclear crime?
You can't take Rouhani out.
He's on your side, right?
But the guy who was, you know, the who oversaw, you know, the killing of thousands of people and as a hardliner, you can take him out.
So I'm not so sure that in this case, man, I mean, I think, you know, American policy in the Middle East this last 20 years has been trying to figure out ways to spite Iran that, of course, only always backfire and benefit them.
But because we can't do a 53 coup and because we can't do a 2003 style invasion.
So we're left with this BS, you know, all the time.
And then so like, I just don't know.
I mean, maybe I'm underestimating the CIA, but I don't know how they could infiltrate Tehran and take the damn thing down now without just dropping bombs on the thing.
Yeah.
And I'm not saying that's what they're going to do.
Right.
I'm not.
It could it could be it's better to have a hardliner and because it keeps them an enemy.
But but remember, like and I've been writing about this a lot to an anti or is it, you know, the evolution of the coup is moving further and further away from, you know, sending the Marines in and bombing a country that the evolution of a coup in Iran, if a coup in Iran were to happen, would would look much more like putting in a government that that you can present as repressive to the people and then to encourage the people to take to the streets to oppose that government.
And then you back that government.
I'm not saying that's going to happen.
Right.
I'm I'm saying that if you look at if you look back at Rafsanjani and Khatami, these were both presidents who went extremely far in in doing what the West what the West would want.
They went extremely far, really far in negotiating and doing things with America, with American promise that if you do this will will return the favor and then and then completely betraying them, not doing the favor, completely discrediting the reformists and, you know, bringing us with Dinajat into power.
And and, you know, what I argue in my articles that is that this is exactly what would happen with Rouhani.
It's just this consistent pattern of reformers saying we can break around out of international isolation by negotiating with the United States.
Right.
Hey, in July, in July of 05, W. Bush said, you Iranians better not elect the right winger like two weeks before the election.
It was so obvious what they were trying to do there.
Yeah.
And by the way, you know, when when you have a guy like Khatami or Rafsanjani or Rouhani in there, I say Khatami or Rouhani the first time I forgot.
Anyway.
Now you got it right.
Yeah.
When you have these reformer type guys who don't seem so bad, then they focus on the Ayatollah because he's got the funny hat and all of that.
But he's not you know, the current Ayatollah is not nearly as scary as the old Ayatollah with the big dark circles around his eyes and the great Satan and the burning flag.
But he died back in 89.
It's been the current Ayatollah since then.
But so the when you have a nice president, they focus on the Ayatollah.
But right when they got Ahmadinejad elected, you never heard the Ayatollah's name the whole time he was in power.
And they wanted to pretend that Ahmadinejad was the one who could start a war if you wanted to or could do this or that.
Nuclear bombs because he was such a loud mouth, basically, you know, and so they could focus on him.
And then you get a guy like Rouhani in there and they go, oh, yeah, no.
But everybody knows that that mean old Ayatollah is the one calling the shots anyway.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And if you know, if you go back, you know, you mentioned you go back to 1989 and you get you get Rafsanjani, for example, telling Bush that he'll intervene to get the release of American hostages in Lebanon.
And Bush, H.W. Bush, says that if Iran can do that, we'll remember for a long time and goodwill to get goodwill, we'll repay you.
And instead of that, when Rafsanjani gets the the the hostages out, Bush sends word to Rafsanjani not to expect any reciprocity and just leaves him hanging and complete discredits him.
And Rafsanjani doesn't give up.
He keeps going.
When you get to the Iraq-Kuwait war, he completely backs the United States.
And again, the United States betrays them by continuing in isolation, leaving them out of conferences.
Rafsanjani is completely discredited in Iran.
He disappears.
You know, then then then Khatami comes in and and he he keeps doing the same kind of thing, too.
He recognizes Israel.
He backs the U.S. against al Qaeda and ISIS.
He basically gives the states an army in Afghanistan.
He's absolutely instrumental in setting up the post-Taliban government, which the Americans couldn't do.
Trita Parsi tells these stories of completely failed negotiations, trying to negotiate a post-Taliban story.
And then and then you see like Iranian diplomats pull the Taliban off to the side and talk to him like privately in a room.
And then the Taliban come up, come back in and they sign the agreement.
I mean, Iran was not a fringe player.
They were absolutely instrumental in helping the United States in Afghanistan.
And so they give them intel on al Qaeda.
They did everything.
And instead, what what Bush does is he puts them in the axis of evil speech.
He completely snubs them.
Khatami can't believe what's just happened to him.
The hardliners say that's because you're a naive idiot, just like they just did to Rouhani and they completely discredit them.
And Ahmadinejad comes to power.
So there's this very long, consistent history of Iranian presidents trying to negotiate in good faith with America.
And this is not what you read in the newspaper, right?
What happens every time is Iran keeps their promise.
America breaks theirs.
Then the reformers are discredited.
The hardliners come to power.
And this is what the states keeps doing in Iran.
And this would just happen now.
The only way this guy managed to be the only candidate in the election, the only way it was possible, was because Trump and Biden had so discredited the moderates that the Guardian Council was able to take the moderates out of the election and a hardliner won because there was nobody running against them.
And that was America's doing.
So it's it's fascinating.
OK, hang on just one second.
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Well, and by the way, I can verify everything that you just said about the days right after September 11th and before the axis of evil speech and all that, because I have it firsthand from Hillary Mann Leverett and Flint Leverett, who were on the National Security Council working for Bush on all of this stuff and have explained it all first person on this show in the past.
So anybody can check into that if you doubt it.
And now, and Scott, when they talk with us, like in their book, it was called Going to Tehran.
That's still one of the best, but it's still one of the best books written on Iran.
Like those guys were really authoritative and she was there.
She knew, right?
Yeah.
And Flint too.
Yeah.
No, he was there too.
Both of them.
And I can tell you firsthand that this is exactly what happened and how and everything.
Yeah.
And what, and what Katami got for that was he got screwed and, and, um, he got completely discredited.
It was Richard Pearl and David from who put that axis of evil crap in that speech.
It was the conservatives who did that.
That was like, like the most dangerous line in modern American history was that that axis of evil speech.
And by the way, so now just for time, we got to get back to the goddamn Biden crew here because importantly, these are the guys, I mean, Sullivan helped break the, the negotiations open in the secret meetings in Oman and Blinken was apparently, you know, instrumental for at least part of the process in developing the Iran deal.
Like this is the, the Biden team is just the Obama team, four years removed.
This is their deal.
Wendy Sherman's on the team too.
And they ruined it.
Wendy Sherman's on that team.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
Wendy Sherman's on the, she was.
Oh, right.
Wendy Sherman.
And, and, and she's there too.
And yeah, which, which, and, and, and Scott, this was not a hard one, right?
This was handed to Biden.
All he had to do on day one was just say, we'll remove sanctions.
You go back and it's done.
Or even worse.
You know, he could have said, he could have said, listen, we're going to talk tough and drag ass for about nine weeks.
And then we'll sign the deal.
And you guys just have to sit there and take it.
But you know how politics are in America.
We got to be jerks about it, but we'll sign, but they didn't do that.
But Scott, it had to be before the Iranian election and it had to be Rouhani at the credit.
And so, so not doing that was such a deliberate discrediting of the moderates that, that there's, there's no way that that team could have thought that would do anything but bring a hard line at a power in Iran.
So then you've got to ask, like, why?
Absolutely.
Right.
So then you've got to ask, like, what's the foreign policy goal, right?
Why?
Why did America want a hardliner instead of a Rouhani prodigy?
You know, Javad Zarif could have been the president of Iran.
What could have been better for America, right?
Right.
So, I mean, I don't know he could have been, but he was one of those people that might have been.
But so, so why did they, what was Biden's overall foreign policy goal in bringing a hardline at a power in Iran?
So, so really interesting, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's all about Israel, man.
This whole problem.
I mean, you know, the Americans have their grudge against the Iranians for the hostage crisis and all that.
But that was 40 years ago.
Ronald Reagan sold the missiles a few days later, right?
Nobody cared back then even.
We can't get over that now, 40 years later.
It's BS.
This is all about what they want in Tel Aviv.
And so what America has to do then.
Yeah.
And you're right about, you're right about the, but Scott also, I think like one of the most important things in history is where you decide to start your narrative, right?
And you can decide to start it with, we have a grudge for the hostages.
But of course the Iranians will say, that's not where the story starts, right?
You did stuff to us that, that led to, right?
So it's not even like you can just, you can just start it there and say, and say, we have a grudge.
Well, they could, I mean, I'm, I'm just speaking from their kind of point of view, right?
Like over at the state department, history began the day of the hostage crisis.
So I'm saying, okay, fine.
But still, that was 40 years ago and Ronald Reagan sold the missiles, oh, through Israel at the time, by the way.
Yeah.
So anyway, I want all these hawks to shut the hell up, you know?
In Lebanon, like whenever they wanted to work with Iran, whether it was against the Taliban or whether it was a hostage, they worked with Iran.
You know, it's, it's, so it's not like when they didn't want to forgive it, they couldn't forgive it.
And when I do, when I'm doing history, I call this, I call this history, you know, ex nihilo, right?
It's like create your ex nihilo from the bottom.
Like it's history that suddenly comes out of nowhere.
Like there's no history before that.
Like Robert Higgs began with the hostage taking, right?
Yeah.
Robert Higgs, the great libertarian economist and historian calls it, and this is in, in reference to World War II, especially, but I think you can kind of use it all the time.
Truncating the antecedents.
I love that.
Right.
It's a lot.
That's right.
At first you're like, wait, what is that?
You got to think about it for a second.
Truncating the antecedents.
That's a good one.
Yeah.
It's like, it's history ex nihilo.
Like it just started from there.
There's nothing before it.
Yeah.
And the difference is, you know, that, that, you know, Americans have historical amnesia.
It's really easy for Americans to forget those antecedents.
But the thing is, Iranians don't.
Like Iranian culture is, you know, it's steeped in its history.
It remembers Mosaddegh, it remembers, you know, that stuff.
And so when, when we start our history from these points and we just like have this historical amnesia, like we conveniently don't remember where, where history came from, like history started from nowhere.
But that's not how the Iranians feel, right?
They painfully felt the effects of that coup in 1953.
And they're still painfully, you know, living that history.
So they don't start their history at, you know, at a hostage taking.
And they don't think the hostage taking came for no reason.
And here's this country that, that, and remember that catalog I just gave, three out of the last four presidents, I think all of them were reelected too.
So you're looking at like a huge chunk of time electing presidents on a platform that we're still willing to completely negotiate and, and improve relations with the United States.
Despite that history, they're putting out these reformers to do that.
And here we are embarrassing those reformers, discrediting those reformers, using the people of Iran, because they're the ones that are starving because of these sanctions.
So here's the Iranians still reaching out, willing to negotiate despite that history.
And here's America still betraying that history, you know, America who betrayed them in 1953 when they took out Mosaddegh.
So, yeah.
Yeah, man.
All right.
And now, so here's why they hate Syria, because Syria is friends with Iran.
And so they're constantly picking on Syria, but you've got this great article about how, well, geez, the Syrians are always trying to get along with us.
And not only that, they've been trying to get along with Israel too.
And then you go through and give us the litany.
Can you do it for us out loud here?
Yeah, it's, it's, it's, you know, as I was writing it, it was almost stunning to write.
There's this long history of Syria doing whatever it can do.
It's the same story I just told you about Iran with, you know, Iranian presidents trying to improve their relations with the states.
And here you get this history in Syria of continuously trying to improve relations with the states, whether it was cooperating in 9-11 or cooperating against al-Qaeda or cooperating against ISIS or getting rid of their chemical weapons.
But one of the really sort of stunning things is if you go back, and I started my history with, with the first Assad, but you can actually start it earlier.
You can start this going way back into the 1940s and 50s.
But I started with Assad because that's the current situation of presidents who are willing to do what it takes to get along with the West.
And for the West, that always partly involved recognizing Israel and getting along with Israel.
And the kind of stunning history is that both Assad's, the father and the son, continuously offered to recognize Israel under improving, improving terms.
So first it was, we'll recognize Israel and set up full diplomatic relations if you let there be a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank.
And then it was, OK, you don't even have to have a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank.
You just have to get out of the Golan, the Golan Heights.
In the end, by the way, Netanyahu, with Trump's permission, annexed the Golan Heights.
And even then, Syria didn't respond militarily.
So it even seemed like, OK, you can even take our land and we won't attack you.
But the striking part of the history is that it's never presented this way, but it was always the states in Israel that turned Syria down.
Time after time after time, going back like more than 25 years, you got meetings between Syrian presidents and American presidents and Syrian presidents and literally every single prime minister of Israel since 1994.
And you get Syria continuously offering peace plans to have full diplomatic relations with Israel and either the states or Israel continuously turning them down.
And sometimes the stories, Scott, were like almost almost unbelievable, like sort of the most striking story is at the end of 1999, beginning of 2000, you've actually got a draft of a peace treaty.
Like it looks like Syria and Israel are actually going to have peace.
And Ahud Barak's the prime minister of Israel at the time, and he flies in early 2000 into the States to meet with Clinton.
And I think if I remember correctly, Syria had sent their foreign minister.
It wasn't the prime minister or whatever.
So Ahud Barak's plane lands on the tarmac on Washington Airport.
The door opens, right?
So he's there.
He's about to step out to sign and he panics as the door of the plane opens and he turns to Martin Indyk, who I think was the secretary of, assistant secretary at the time.
And he just says, he says, I can't do it.
And Indyk looks at him like, what the hell are you talking about?
You just landed, the door's open, you're about to sign.
And he just says, I can't do it.
And he flies back to he flies back to Israel.
And this kind of thing happened repeatedly when Hafez Assad died, I think, in 2000.
And Bashar al-Assad becomes the prime minister.
He immediately begins resuming talks with Israel and the states.
And it's it's him that continuously gets rejected.
There's a there's I think the I want to say famous, but I wish it was famous.
People don't know.
But there's a sort of there's a sort of famous story that when first he goes to explore talks with Israel and Israel turns him down.
And then later, Israel's thinking, OK, well, should we talk to him?
And the Israelis go to Condoleezza Rice.
And they ask, like, should we should we continue exploring this opening of Syria?
And and she quote, she said, she says, don't even think about it and slams the door.
And then Seymour Hersh reports that that they even you go so fast.
That's so important.
The Israelis under Olmert said, hey, maybe we should talk to him.
And the Americans said, no, don't.
Americans said no.
So so, you know, before this, you've got you've got Israel and the states.
Sort of saying kind of no.
But there were times that Israel looked like they might be really close to signing something with Syria.
And in this particular case, it was it was it was pretty close.
And they they they called and they want to know if they should they call them exploratory talks.
Should we feel out whether Syria is serious?
And I think it was an article in Haaretz that quoted and and and Condoleezza Rice just just literally this like this, like five words.
She just says, don't even think about it.
Like you were not talking to Syria.
And she like slammed the phone.
And so so again, you get you get the states blocking Syria from not only recognizing Israel, but making complete diplomatic relations with Israel.
And this this just keeps keeps going on.
And talk about laying down and rolling over here.
Assad is essentially willing to sign away the Golan Heights.
Fine.
You guys stole it fair and square.
You know, officially, officially, Syria always said for a peace treaty, we don't care about the Palestinians, but you have to get out of the Golan Heights.
And I spoke to one to Stephen Zunes one day, and he's like he's like one of the best on the Middle East.
And and I asked I asked Zunes what was happening there, whose whose fault?
And he said he said, this is not Assad.
Right.
He said the fault is totally with the states in Israel.
When I asked him why, he said that nothing was going to happen unless Israel returned the Golan.
And he said Netanyahu is never going to return the Golan.
So the so the peace thing's basically dead.
And then and then the sort of really interesting test of that's gone.
It's not like a test because it wasn't like a peace treaty discussion.
But but towards the end of the Trump administration, when Netanyahu actually did annex the Golan and and shockingly and illegally, Trump officially, formally recognizes that annexation.
Syria did nothing.
And so, you know, you've got to point out the fact that if you're not going to attack a country when they actually seize and annex your territory, clearly you're not going to attack a country.
Like so this is Syria sort of tacitly still saying we're not going to go to war with you if you take our land.
Just like you were saying earlier, you said it quickly, but you said, you know, Iran was willing to recognize Israel.
Well, that wasn't exactly right, but they were certainly willing to go along with the Palestinians settling for a mere 22 percent.
And I think I forget now.
It's been a while since I read the book, but I think in Trita Parsi's book, he quotes one of these Iranian ministers saying, look, I can't be more Catholic than the pope.
Right.
Yeah.
And so if the Palestinians will settle for two states, then who are we to say that's not good enough?
And Russ and Johnny officially said way back even before that, but also remember that Iran's a signatory to the Arab initiative from 2002.
And even I forget what they called the earlier incarnation of the Fez agreement or whatever, but Iran's a signatory to the agreement that they would recognize the state of Israel in return for pulling back to pre-67 boundaries.
And the thing with Syria is that Syria went further because that was their starting position.
But really early, under the first Assad, they had already made it clear that a peace treaty with Israel was not contingent upon a Palestinian state.
I mean, they made it really clear that if you'll pull out of the Golan, that's it.
Right.
They offered terms that were incredibly attractive, and both Israel and then, you know, Condoleezza Rice in the States just slammed the door on it.
They did not want that peace agreement.
Right.
So here's Syria saying that we want, like Iran, I mean, it sounds exactly like Russ and Johnny's words, you know, we want to improve relations.
Do we want to be friends with the states?
So the state says, OK, you know, there's a whole bunch of things you need to do.
Assad says we're willing to do the things that we need to do.
So, you know, in response to 9-11, you got Assad saying that they completely supported the states.
And it wasn't just words.
Assad actually gave the CIA dozens of really sensitive files on the Muslim Brotherhood.
They did intelligence sharing.
They told the states about future al-Qaeda attacks.
So they helped there a lot.
When it came to al-Qaeda and ISIS, they cooperated with the U.S., like actually cooperated, not just they were both fighting ISIS.
There was actually intelligence sharing going on when the states completely hypocritically said Syria has chemical weapons because nobody has a bigger store of uninspected chemical weapons than the states.
Syria turned over all their chemical weapons.
Then the state says, OK, you've got to recognize Israel.
Syria says we'll recognize Israel.
And then, Scott, the last piece I talk, the last thing I talk about in the piece, and it's kind of the weirdest one that nobody talks about, is, as you said, at the beginning of the show, all of this is really because Syria is an ally of Iran.
It's all really about Iran.
And then the totally striking thing is that going back to as early as 2006, when Israel and Syria were negotiating a peace settlement, one of the things that Israel said to Syria at this time is that we want to drive a wedge in what they call the kind of axis, Iran, Syria and Lebanon.
And Israel made a new condition now with Syria of a peace agreement that you've got to break off relations, you've got to distance relations with Iran.
And shockingly, Syrian officials made it very clear that if there were a peace agreement, that they would distance themselves from Iran.
And they did this repeatedly because years later, during other negotiations between Assad and Israel and the states, the Israeli lead negotiators, he knew he was the one talking.
He told the states that Syria is increasingly open to a peace deal with Israel and that that deal with Israel would involve weakening Iran's influence in the Middle East.
So even this whole thing that we talk about all the time, that all of this is really about Iran, 20, 15 years ago, Syria said that they would be willing to distance themselves from Iran.
So they were even willing to give to the states the thing that the states now says is what they most want.
And, you know, here's Syria saying, and I do think a lot of what's happening to Syria now, the states is doing because they see Syria as an ally of Iran.
But it ignores this history that it didn't have to be that way, that Syria was actually willing to give that up at the time.
So this is another case of making your nightmares come true.
Like, why are we doing all this stuff?
Because we want to weaken Syria's ties with Iran, because we rejected Syria when they said they would weaken their ties with Iran.
So, so, you know, I could have called that article making your Syrian nightmares come true.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm going to call every article from now on.
And now here's the thing, right, is, I mean, we've had this whole regime change war in Syria, which has led to increased Syrian dependence on Iran.
And during which time, because of Iranian intervention there to help prop up the Syrian government, has then, you know, the Israelis have chosen to then bomb Syria every couple of weeks or so for the last 10 years straight, something like that.
And so very recently.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So now if, you know, if the point of your article is why do we have such a problem with this country, then it's fine.
But if it's that, you know, they still are probably just as willing to negotiate now as they ever were.
Now, I'm not so sure about that.
What do you think about that?
I mean, we did back a bunch of suicide bombers against them.
Yeah, I don't I don't know.
I mean, I can't say what I haven't read and don't know.
And I don't know what Syria's position right now would be in terms of distancing themselves from Iran or whether they could trust the states right now to distance themselves from Iran.
I would say that Syria didn't intend this to happen, that they thought they were in this existential fight against ISIS and al Qaeda, that they thought they were on the same side as us.
And what ironically happened is that the states found themselves fighting on both sides of the war.
They were they were both fighting against ISIS, who was trying to take out Assad and fighting against Assad so that they were the states was literally fighting against itself.
I don't think that Assad saw himself as doing anything but fighting on the same side as the states during this war.
So so again, I don't I don't know what his position negotiating would be, but I don't think he saw himself as being in in opposition to the US.
It was it's the only war I can think of that the states was actually fighting on both sides and literally fighting against itself.
So, yeah, you know, it's trying to it's trying to get rid of it's trying to fight Syria and it's fighting Assad.
Sorry, it's trying to fight ISIS and it's fighting Assad who's fighting ISIS.
So I think as late as the current war, I think Assad still saw himself as as being aligned with American interests.
In this case, they were his own interests, too.
But I don't think he meant to put himself in opposition to the US.
In fact, it was it was the breakout of this civil war that really cut off the last peace talks between Syria and Israel, because it now became convenient for us to be fighting against Assad.
But that's what broke off the last round of talks, though.
There hasn't been, as far as I know, talks with Assad since then.
But he was still talking to Israel and the states about making peace when this war broke out.
A war in which he saw himself as still being on the same side as the states.
Right.
So, yeah, they even tortured the innocent Canadian Mara for W.
Bush.
So, yeah, you know, I quote I quote John Kerry in the book talking about how he had said to Assad, hey, listen, I really want you to crack down on jihadis moving from Syria into Iraq.
And that he said, absolutely, let's shake hands.
And then he lived up to it, too, and gave him great credit for that.
I mean, if you were Bashar al-Assad, you'd be terrified of bin Laden nights, too.
So assuming that the bin Laden nights are the Americans concerned, then we have plenty of mutual interest there with him.
But if the bin Laden nights are just American and Saudi shock troops for use against the Shia, then we're enemies.
Mm hmm.
Mm hmm.
Yep.
And in this bizarre war, we were both.
Yeah.
All right.
Thank you, Ted, for coming on the show.
Appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
God, it's great talking to you, you guys.
That's Ted Snyder.
He is a regular contributor at antiwar dot com.
And by the way, if you guys have not been checking the right hand margin of antiwar dot com right now, I mean, it is just absolutely rocking.
Every time I talk to Eric Harris, all he ever does is complain about how many originals we've got and especially by our in-house writers like Ted.
Here we have why are we still at war with Syria and Iran's election making your Iranian nightmare come true?
The Scott Horton Show, antiwar radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS radio dot com, antiwar dot com, Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
