06/28/13 – Conn Hallinan – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
The website is ScottHorton.org.
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Our next guest is Con Hallinan.
He writes at ForeignPolicyInFocus, that's F-P-I-F.org, and the latest is Syria and the Monarchs, A Perfect Storm.
Welcome back to the show, Con.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing real good.
I appreciate you joining us today.
I sure like reading your articles because you know what you're talking about.
So, thanks for joining us.
I hope you can say out loud all the great stuff that you wrote in here about what exactly is America's role in the, at least, so-called civil war there in Syria as of, say, the end of June 2013.
Well, we're doing a whole number of things, and some of it's been under the radar and some of it has been sort of in the open.
Very early on when the civil war broke out in Syria, the U.S. made it clear that their position was that the Assad government had to go, and that that was sort of the bottom line for negotiations or political resolution or anything like that.
And then they very quickly sent significant numbers of CIA agents and special forces into Jordan where they began training these insurgents, the Syrian insurgents.
And they also encouraged the Gulf monarchies, particularly Qatar and Saudi Arabia, to begin supplying arms to the rebels.
And they did that, one, by encouraging them to do that, and then, two, negotiating with the Turks so that a lot of the arms now come in through the Jordanian border in the south, and large numbers, most of them, come in through the Turkish borders in the north.
So we've sort of been in on the ground, you know, right from the beginning we've been involved in this, even though publicly, of course, what we've said is we want a political resolution and also that we're not going to, up until a week ago, that we were not going to be directly involved in supplying arms and ammunition to the rebels.
We are now.
Right.
And now, you know, I always wondered about what was even really the point about just having the Saudis and the Qataris do it, because it wasn't very plausible deniability for anybody who was interested in it.
Obviously, the whole dang thing was a CIA op, or at least we're involved enough with the Saudis.
We certainly weren't telling them to please don't or anything like that.
And as you're saying, been coordinating them and trying to create, you know, American-owned rebel groups in Turkey and Jordan this whole time, I guess successfully creating some groups in Turkey and Jordan this whole time.
So if they've been that involved all along, what is the point of just having the Qataris buy the guns for us and we'll pay them back or whatever, you know?
Well, actually, the Qataris are buying them on their own.
They're immensely wealthy.
They're per capita wise, they're the wealthiest country in the world.
They have a very small population, a large amount of oil.
They have already pumped in about $3 billion.
Actually, I don't think the Americans could afford to do that right now.
And so if the Qataris are going to do it and the Saudis are going to do it, that's icing on the cake for us.
I think one thing it should be, people need to kind of dial back their history on this.
U.S. involvement here didn't begin with the outbreak of the civil war two years ago in Syria.
Back in 2005, the Bush administration, after it invaded Iraq, sort of gave a list of targets, the next on the list.
And the two major targets for the next on the list were Iran and Syria.
And also, by implication, Hezbollah in Lebanon, southern Lebanon.
And then in 2005, the King Abdullah of Jordan gave a speech which called for the formation of an anti-Shiite alliance to deal with what he called the threat of the Shiite Crescent.
And that Shiite Crescent would be Hezbollah, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.
And so in a sense, Syria has been sort of in our gun sights for a long time.
And I think in part, that is in part why it is that the Assad dictatorship reacted as violently as they did in the initial stages of what were peaceful demonstrations and peaceful demonstrations by mostly teenagers.
And this civil war started because of the brutality of the Assad regime.
But it is no longer that.
I mean, now it's a proxy war.
And you know, you've got Turkey in the United States and Britain and France and the Gulf Cooperation Council, which is the Gulf monarchies on one side, and Iraq to a certain extent, the Maliki government in Iraq, Iran, Russia, kind of distantly China, and Hezbollah on the other side.
So, you know, the issues now have morphed into something which are very, very different.
And it's much more dangerous.
I mean, it's destabilizing countries all over the Middle East.
This is the single most destabilizing event since the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Right.
Well, and in so many ways, as you're saying, is a direct consequence of that invasion.
Now, I think we talked about last time you were on the show, and we talked about Afghanistan.
We talked about how they're not leaving any weapons behind in the hands of the Afghan army because they know that the Afghan army, such as it is, you know, when you can stop laughing, will be dead the day they leave and that those weapons would then end up in the hands of the Taliban or whoever else.
And they can't have that.
So they're basically leaving them without even so much as rocket, you know, shoulder fired rocket launchers or any kind of thing.
And it seems like the policy in Syria for the last couple of years, two and a half years now almost, has been, yeah, give them a case and and, you know, maybe some explosives or something like that, but not enough to actually win, just enough to hurt.
Right.
Well, that's certainly that it does look like that, Scott, although there was a very interesting piece last week in the Los Angeles Times that that basically said that the Obama administration has been training the insurgents in Jordan in the use of air to ground missiles, what they call these man pads, these shoulder fired anti-aircraft weapons and also anti-tank weapons.
Now, the shoulder fired anti-aircraft weapons and anti-armor weapons, anti-tank weapons are sort of the two things that the Obama administration said very early on.
They're not going to supply these kinds of things because we don't know where they're going to go.
We don't know where they're going to end up.
And they could end up, you know, knocking down commercial airplanes or being used against Israel or our allies, other allies in the in the Middle East.
But apparently that's not true.
I mean, apparently we have been training people in the use of these.
They haven't shown up a lot.
And and I don't know exactly what that means.
I assume what it means is that even the Qataris and the Saudis are having difficulty obtaining these kind of, you know, shoulder fired anti-aircraft weapons.
But I don't have any doubt that in the long run, they probably will show up.
And now what about the policy?
I mean, are they trying to arm them?
Shoulder fired weapons or not tanks or not?
I mean, are they actually trying to the Obama team?
I mean, are they really working to see Damascus fall and these coups take it over?
I mean, they are the coups now, the al-Nusra and Associated Brigades here.
Or are they really just trying to bog Assad down for the indefinite future kind of thing?
Well, you know, I think, Scott, they're doing both.
That is, I don't think the administration is entirely of one mind on this.
They you're right.
You're absolutely right.
They have not supplied the rebels with the kind of equipment that they need to really take on the Syrian army.
On the other hand, I think one of the reasons why they've done that is because they are very nervous about who it is they're going to be supplying in Syria.
Right now, the most effective frontline troops are the Nusra Front, which is very closely associated with al-Qaeda and particularly al-Qaeda in Iraq.
So you have the administration on one hand, they want to get rid of Assad.
On the other hand, the only people who are really going to get rid of Assad are people who not only don't like the United States, but also don't like the U.S. allies.
That is, they tend to also be very opposed to the Saudi Arabian regime.
If you recall, bin Laden got his start setting off bombs in Saudi Arabia.
And he started off denouncing the Saudis because the Saudis allowed Americans close to the holy sites in Saudi Arabia.
So it's an absolute mess.
We have set loose in the Shakespearean fashion.
We have cried havoc and set loose the dogs of war.
And the dogs of war in the Middle East are, well, they're not only really dangerous, but they're also all over the place, and we don't control them.
And I think the administration is in a position of where it wants to overthrow Assad.
And it initially thought that all they had to do was push a little bit and Assad would fall.
That's what the Turks thought as well.
Well, it hasn't turned out that way.
And now they're kind of stuck, and they won't sort of bite the bullet.
And the bullet is that you essentially say, look, if you want a peaceful diplomatic resolution, you can't tell people what the outcome is in advance.
You can't say, yeah, we want a diplomatic solution, Assad has to resign.
That's not negotiations.
What you have to say is, we need to get all the parties to sit down and talk about, get a ceasefire, stop the flow of arms from everybody, from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United States, Turkey, Russia, Iran, etc.
Get a ceasefire.
And then we've got presidential elections coming up in 2014.
Let's see if we can't work some sort of thing around the presidential elections in 2014.
If Assad doesn't have any support in the country, let him run for president, guarantee that there will be access for an opposition, and we'll have a political resolution.
But they're not making that decision.
That's their problem, is they know if there is an election that he will win if the opposition is...
I think, you know, that's what they're discovering.
I mean, they're discovering two things.
Number one, Assad always had more support than they projected that he had.
And then two, Syria is a secular country, and has been a secular country for a long time.
So these insurgent groups, not all of them, but the key insurgent groups, the secular Syrians are horrified by who these people are.
It doesn't mean they support Assad.
It means that they would, caught between the devil and deep blue sea, they would rather go with what they have than what they fear from these, you know, Islamic extremist groups in the future.
If it came to an election, you might find that a lot of those people would say, well, okay, we want the end of the civil war, we'll support Assad, but I won't necessarily vote for him, I'll vote for another candidate.
The only way you can do that is by getting a ceasefire and stopping this idea that you're going to kind of shoot your way into a diplomatic resolution.
It's not going to do it.
But you know, Scott, I'm an incurable optimist, but I got to tell you, I'm pretty pessimistic on the way this is going to end up.
I mean, I see this going on for a long time, and I don't see the United States really being serious about a diplomatic resolution, and I just think it's going to drag on, maybe for years.
Well, you know, here's the thing, it's sort of kind of all on purpose, right?
I mean, I just talked with Fred Bronfman, and we were trying to tally up the body count of the American empire in the last 40 or 50 years or something like that.
It's a big one.
Yeah, it is a big one.
But you know, a big part of what happened in Iraq, as he mentioned, was that Douglas Fythe and Paul Bremer decided that they would disband the Iraqi army and police force and let them eat sand.
And that the occupant, now, look, it's easy, always very extremely easy to consider Fythe just really bad at being a person, and anything that he's ever done is always horrible.
But you know, I don't think you've got to be that kooky to think that this is just what the Yanon plan, if that's how you pronounce it, from back in the early 1980s, that the right-wing nationalist Likud party and worse, in Israel, would like to see all of the Middle East broken up into warring tribes instead of nation-states that they would ever have to worry about again.
So what's going on here is Doug Fythe doing their dirty work in Iraq, and you know, you're right that obviously Iraq has fallen into pro-Iranian hands and Shiite hands and whatever.
So much the better for long-term, low-level, inter-sectarian conflict and butchery murder, and everyone will be leaving Israel alone in the meantime, and I guess leaving the kings of Saudi Arabia alone so that Houston can have their way too.
Well, I mean, that's an absolutely valid way of looking at it, Scott, because certainly the Israelis have always taken the point of view that either you rule with dictators who are close to you, like Mubarak in Egypt, or chaos.
And if you have chaos, then you don't have any organized resistance to Israel.
I mean, a perfect example, Palestinians have dropped off the front pages.
With the Syrian civil war going on, the situation in Iran, nobody's talking about the Palestinians.
And the Netanyahu government continues to build more settlements, continues to deepen its grip on the West Bank, and you know, at this point Lieberman was talking about the fact that they have to go back into Gaza, and the pretty open talk about the fact that Israel would like a rematch with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon at some point in the next year or so.
So I mean, I do think you're right.
I think that if you have the kind of chaos that is likely to flow from a continuation of the Syrian civil war, I do think that what that does is that it creates a very fertile ground for being able to manipulate the politics of the region.
I mean, absolutely, I mean, ruling from chaos is a long time, matter of fact, it's an old British tactic.
Right.
Well, and you know, if your goal is chaos, and you don't have to be very good at it either, you know, if your goal is screwing up.
So I don't think that, you know, when they wrote the road to Damascus runs through Baghdad and all that in the clean break strategy, they didn't think they were going to be handing over two thirds of Iraqistan to the Shiites and in alliance with Iran.
You know, they thought, hell, I mean, if they believed any of their own nonsense, they thought that a Shiite democracy in Iraq was going to put all this pressure on Iran where we wouldn't even have to regime change them because the people would love us so much and want to be like Iraq now and whatever.
I think Wolfowitz actually really believed some of that nonsense anyway.
But it doesn't matter how bad they screwed up and that Chalabi was an Iranian spile along and whatever, whatever, because, oh, well, so just we'll just have more war then.
Well, I mean, I think it's true.
You know, you you you we don't pay a cost or we pay a small cost.
I mean, in a sense, I guess you could look at 9-11 and say, well, that's a cost.
And we pay a cost in places in in in the dead and wounded in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
But you know, it's not it's not a massive it's not a massive bill, although financially it's a massive bill.
And now, you know, the Obama administration has really gotten this thing of, you know, no boots on the ground.
We can carry out a war by killing at a distance the drone wars.
And and it's a it's a cheap way to to run war.
It certainly produces chaos.
It makes things worse.
It certainly has made things worse in in Afghanistan.
I mean, one of the effects of the drone war, people think of the drone war only in Pakistan.
In fact, it's going on in Afghanistan as well.
One of the effects of the of the drone war is that we've knocked off a significant section of the Afghan top Afghan Taliban leadership.
And so now what you have is this fragmented organization that, you know, kind of post politics vary from valley to valley.
I'm not quite certain who's going to sit down and negotiate with in the end.
And but this is, you know, this is a problem we created.
We basically knocked off the adults.
And what you've got is a bunch of young teenagers in charge of the Taliban.
And and how are you going to how are you going to talk with those people?
So, you know, it's just anyhow, you know, when you start adding all the things up, Scott, it can look pretty discouraging.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, that's how much is for sure.
But we we trudge on now.
So back to the Arab world here for a minute in the chat room, someone's asking about what Wesley Clark talked about, which this was, you know, Rumsfeld and Richard Pearl and Paul Wolfowitz and them and their plan and and what seven regime changes.
Right.
And it included Libya.
And, of course, Ariel Sharon and John Bolton, right after the Iraq invasion, said Libya and Syria and Iran have to be next on the list.
And Wesley Clark, Wesley Clark basically came out back in what, oh, seven and said, well, they also even were talking about regime change in Somalia way back in late one, early or two.
And then there were a couple of more on the list.
So I guess the question then is, so the Yanon plan makes perfect sense if you're a right wing Israeli nationalist and you just want to break the whole region up into warring nation states.
But what exactly or I don't know, is there even a consensus view in D.C. or was there about what the hell they were trying to accomplish?
Were they trying to turn all of North Africa into chaos stand as well?
I mean, it seems like having Hosni Mubarak run Egypt is preferable to have in from the empire's point of view is preferable to have in chaos or even the Muslim Brotherhood there.
Well, you know, I think that when you the question you ask, you know, is there one point of view in D.C. and I think that there probably isn't one point of view in D.C.
And I think that some of it is illusion.
You know, that is, oh, yeah, we're going to go in and we're going to create these, you know, kind of liberal democracies and and everybody will be saying, you know, be throwing flowers at our feet because, you know, we bought about this wonderful change.
I mean, there are people who actually believe that there are the liberal interventionists, you know, who think, you know, you get a crisis and it's a crisis in an area which is important to American interest.
Then you, you know, you intervene and then you you get people who who basically are going to look, just keep the pot boiling.
I mean, that's that's the key.
Keep the pot boiling.
And as long as the pot boils, then essentially we can afford to move where we where we want, how we want, etc.
And nobody's really there's no real no no real serious opposition to this.
Actually, Syria was a country that, you know, did not represent the politics of the United States or Israel in in the Middle East.
And so knocking off the Assad regime was a big plus.
Same thing with Iran as to whether or not all of this was thought out.
I think some people thought it all out and other people, this is the way that they look at the world.
They figure that the Americans are the number, you know, we're the number one power in the world and that we can still use a force projection as the term goes.
We can still use force projection to to get our way in the world.
And that's a that's an attitude which is really a deep set attitude.
And I think it's one that obviously has to change.
But when it changes and how it changes, that's not clear to me at this point.
Well, you know, Ron Paul keeps coming up today.
He always said it won't change because you listen to me.
It'll change because we're going to run out of money.
And when your dollars won't even afford to get the guys home on Delta from Afghanistan, that's when the empire is going to fall apart, basically, you know.
Well, there was an interesting piece in the Financial Times from one of their key editors.
And basically what he was saying is the United States has to give up on this idea that it has an empire in the Middle East.
It doesn't.
And it and it needs to get out.
Now, of course, that's also predicated on the basis of fracking.
And it was the United States is going to be energy independent because of fracking.
Yeah.
But what are you going to do about it?
Well, the other side of it is, you know, there is no more destructive way except maybe the oil sands to extract energy, except fracking.
I mean, fracking is just people have no idea that one of the big things that fracking does is it pours methane into the atmosphere using CO2 is bad.
Methane is a hundred times more efficient as a global warming device.
I mean, and we're pouring already pouring tons and tons and tons of methane into the atmosphere.
So if we're going to be in it, energy independent, but we're also going to be underwater.
I'm sorry.
We got to go, dude.
I'm already over time.
I don't want to chase Madara on here to talk about Bradley Manning, but I really appreciate your time on the show.
You're really great at this stuff.
Anytime, Scott.
It's fun to talk to you.
Yep.
Right.
All right.
That is Con Hallinan.
He is at foreign policy in focus.
That's FPIF.org.
FPIF.org.
The latest is Syria and the monarchs.
A perfect storm is a great rundown.
Well, as you just heard, a great rundown of America's position in the Syria rebellion.
And obviously there are a lot of questions left unasked and unanswered there.
But we got to go.
We'll be right back with Chase Madara on Bradley Manning right after this.
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