04/08/14 – Flynt Leverett – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And I need to cue up this piece here.
It's Flint Leverett and his wife Hillary Mann Leverett, authors of Going to Tehran, America Must Accept the Islamic Republic of Iran.
And they're at WorldFinancialReview.com with this one.
Can the West get out of its self-made cul-de-sac in Syria?
Welcome back to the show, Flint.
How are you doing?
I'm just great, Scott.
Good to be with you again.
Good times, yeah.
Very happy to have you back on the show, and it's an excellent piece that you have here with Hillary.
Thank you.
I guess, you know what?
It's pretty rich in background, so why don't you go ahead and fill us in on America before we get to, you know, the current choices to be made, as you guys put it.
The background, how we've gotten to where we are now in terms of American involvement in the so-called, at least, civil war in Syria over the last three years.
Yeah.
Well, I think it really goes back to the very, you know, earliest days in March and April of 2011, when protests broke out in some parts of Syria.
This was right after the Arab Awakening had forced out the longtime pro-Western authoritarian president of Tunisia, and even more significantly, from an American perspective, it had forced the longtime authoritarian president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, a critical partner for, let's say, the worst aspects of American foreign policy in the Middle East.
A popular uprising had forced Mubarak from office, and the Obama administration was, you know, really, really worried about a collapse of the U.S. position in the Middle East.
And so, they were looking around for somewhere where they could appear to be on the right side of history, somewhere where they could show that it wasn't just authoritarians who were willing to subordinate their country's foreign policies to American preferences who could get challenged by popular uprisings.
They wanted to show you could bring down a government that actually had a track record of foreign policy independence.
The other thing they were looking to do, they were really worried that Iran was going to benefit regionally from the spread of popular governments in the Arab world, and they were looking for a place where regime change would do harm to Iran's regional position.
And Syria seemed to fit the bill on both counts.
And so, from early on, the administration started encouraging and supporting the opposition, coordinating with allies, whether European allies, the Saudis, the Turks, the Qataris, to fund and equip armed oppositionists in Syria, a big percentage of whom, it turns out, aren't even Syrian, but have been brought in from outside of Syria.
And very early on, the president declared Bashar al-Assad must go, even though there was no real plan to make him go.
And the reality then, as now, Assad has the support of a significant majority of Syria's population.
And I think this was a really tragic course for the United States to take for a couple of reasons.
One, just in terms of the way Syrian politics has evolved, you know, I think there were, at the beginning of this, there were some legitimate local preferences, people who were clearly alienated from their government, had what they thought were grievances against their government, and who were trying to bring those out.
And this, I think, could have been dealt with, potentially, through a kind of process of negotiation between the Assad government and disaffected parts of Syrian society.
But instead, with this infusion of outside money, outside weapons, encouragement from outside powers, it turned pretty quickly into, as you said in your setup, turned into a very bloody civil war that, you know, three years on, has killed probably around 150,000 people.
The other reason it's really sad is because it has, once again, gotten the United States trapped in this, as we call it, this cul-de-sac of its own making, that the United States still can't get it straight, that it really doesn't do very well at trying to dictate the political future of Middle Eastern countries.
It doesn't do it very well when it invades and occupies those countries, like in Iraq, and it doesn't do very well when it tries to dictate the future by using a kind of externally supported opposition.
We did this in Afghanistan, got the Taliban and Al-Qaeda as a result.
We did it in Libya, we got a dead American ambassador and an incubating Al-Qaeda threat in North Africa as a result.
And now we're doing it again in Syria, and Syria has become, you know, the leading trading ground for the next generation of Al-Qaeda.
Yeah, but these are just the birth pangs of a new Middle East, Flynn.
I mean, it's an extended labor, maybe, but there's a democratic future right now.
Okay, I'm sorry.
Well, so there's a lot to talk about.
I guess, first of all, when it comes to the initial conflict, it seems like, and I'm not the master of this history, I guess I didn't know good sources, you know, in-depth sources to cover, you know, right at the beginning there to read about what exactly was happening there.
But I guess at least my impression is that Assad really cracked down on what were mostly peaceful protests, kind of way out of line, and really hardened his opposition, and in other ways made mistakes where he could have been a lot more gracious in the midst of the Arab Spring.
I think that's absolutely right.
I think that's absolutely right.
I think the Assad government did make some mysterious, serious mistakes early on.
But I think that the problem was made much, much worse by, from early on, having externally provided weapons, money, foreign fighters, jihadis, all coming into Syria to, you know, escalate the violence on the other side.
I think that just, you know, from very early on, it got turned into a very militarized conflict rather than what should have been a political process.
Right.
Yeah, well, especially when, I mean, as Patrick Coburn has been saying on this show all along, and in his writing, of course, all along, it's the case that he never was losing.
Assad never was losing.
These guys never could win.
And so what the Americans have done, like the Israelis talked about, just, you know, let the two sides wear each other out and all of that kind of thing.
That kind of policy has led to, I don't know how many refugees, and they say a couple of hundred thousand people killed on either side.
And now maybe the Sunni rebel types would have really been crushed severely, you know, if the outside powers had not been backing them.
Maybe he would have really, you know, beaten them quicker.
And that might have been a lot worse for them.
But it seems like it would have saved the massive humanitarian crisis that exists on all sides in a war that no side can win now, you know?
I think that's exactly right.
I mean, Hillary and I have been saying for three years since this started that Assad wasn't going to fall.
He was not going to be overthrown, at least not by Syrians.
That if you look at where his government has substantial bases of support in Syrian society, it pretty clearly adds up to over half of the society.
And from what information we've been able to gather, whether through polls, internet surveys, participation rates in a couple of elections that have been held in Syria since the conflict started, you know, there's a fair empirical case to make that Assad still at this point has a majority support in Syria.
In fact, as the jihadis have come to be kind of the dominant force within the opposition on the ground in Syria, there's evidence that popular support for the opposition has really shrunk.
NATO did a study last year in which they concluded that 70 percent of the population is actually supporting Assad over any plausible alternative.
Only 10 percent supported the opposition at that point, and 20 percent were basically neutral.
All right.
Now, let me ask you, how could that be when this guy is a fascist totalitarian monster with a secret police force and he tortures people?
We know he tortures people because he tortures them for the Americans sometimes.
Yes, he has apparently done that.
But you know, if you look at it in a Syrian context, Syria is this very complicated, very divided, multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian society.
And part of what the Assad government represents, and it is, you know, whatever else you may say about it, it isn't a validly secular government.
And so, for religious minorities in Syria, for non-Sunni Muslims, who are probably, you know, 15 percent of the population, for Christians, who are another, you know, 10 to 15 percent of the population, for Sunnis, who don't want to live in an al-Qaeda state, you know, you put those communities together and they support the Assad government, because it is the Assad government which, not just under Bashar, but for 30 years under Bashar's father, Abbas al-Assad, has protected them from what they would see as government by jihadi crazies.
And so, you know, those communities really support the Assad government.
All right, now, we only have a minute left before this break, but I guess we can start on this line of questioning about whether the border between Syria and Iraq, which was drawn after the First World War by the British and the French, whether it exists anymore, whether the state of Syria will exist anymore.
I wonder, honestly, it's funny, it reminds me of Bush's ridiculous claim about the Islamofascist caliphate in the heart of the Middle East.
It seems like he's just created it with the Sunni revolt in the Anbar provinces and into Syria now with ISIS and al-Nusra.
That's right.
You definitely have.
And, you know, this was happening during our occupation of Iraq.
One of the ways that Sunni jihadis were getting into Iraq was through Syria, and now it's going the other way.
All right, now, I'm sorry, we've got to stop there, Flint, because we've got to take this break.
Of course, the Syria thing has re-energized the whole rebellion in Iraq and led to even more violence.
I'm sorry, I shouldn't interrupt you.
But now we've got to go.
We'll take this short break, and we'll be right back with Flint Leverett.
He teaches foreign policy at Penn State and wrote the book Going to Tehran.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Flint Leverett.
Like I was saying, he teaches foreign policy at Penn State.
He co-authored the book Going to Tehran with his wife, Hilary Mann Leverett.
He's a former CIA analyst, former National Security Counsel, and former State Department guy, and a real expert on all this stuff.
And now, I'm sorry, because I asked you a big question right before the commercial break, but that's just how it goes around here, Flint.
You were saying about the various jihads, or the one big jihad, maybe, in the Sunni areas of Iraq and in Syria.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a fairly porous border between Iraq and Syria.
And during the U.S. occupation of Iraq, Sunni militants were making their way into Iraq in no small part through Syria.
And now the flow is, in many ways, reversed.
You have jihadis who fought in Iraq coming into Syria.
The U.S. intelligence community estimates that you could have between 25 and 30 percent of the opposition fighters, those who are actively fighting against the opposition government, the Assad government, are not actually Syrian.
They're from outside Syria.
And they are actually the most defective, the most experienced, the most lethal fighters in the opposition.
You know, most of the rest of those guys don't seem to be able to fight their way out of a paper bag.
But these jihadis, they've been battle-hardened, they know what they're doing.
But a lot of them come in from outside.
Well, and the thing of it is, too, I mean, you mentioned Afghanistan before and the holy jihad of the 1980s and all of that.
And I guess the lesson from that, right, was that, yeah, but then what are you going to do with these guys?
Because you can't control them.
And so now here we are, we're dealing with that exact same lesson again from the war in Iraq.
What are you going to do with the fighters?
Not that Bush was fighting for them the whole time.
He was fighting for the Iranian side the whole time in that one.
But he gave them a giant lawless territory to train in and become al-Qaeda in Iraq in and all that, the Islamic State.
And then the U.S. military provided them with very high-quality live ammunition training.
Yeah, yeah, it left all of Saddam Hussein's depots wide open for the looting and all the rest of it.
Yeah.
And so we saw that giant war where they, you know, they might as well have been backing him for all the good that it did al-Qaeda during the Iraq war years.
And then now, with the Americans actually fighting directly on the side of the jihadis in Libya and in Syria, it brings up the obvious question, well, who the hell is going to call these guys to Geneva for the ceasefire?
How do you get a bunch of suicide bombers to cooperate ever again?
Will there ever be anything like an Arab state in that part of Iraq and Syria ever again?
You know?
Not that I'm the biggest champion of states, but if it's just lawless war and chaos from now on, that's not much of an improvement.
No, and I think it is going to be an ongoing security problem in that part of the region in Iraq, in Syria for years to come.
And you're right.
It is, in many respects, a direct result of U.S. policy.
I mean, you don't even have to, you know, go back to the Bush administration and what the Obama administration did in Libya, where we didn't even really, as Obama kept telling us, we didn't even really put boots on the ground, but we, you know, we provided the air force, basically, for the anti-Qaddafi opposition, provided them, or coordinated with our allies to provide them with all kinds of weapons.
And you know, it's jihadi militants that either we supplied or one of our allies supplied that murdered the U.S. ambassador in Libya and three other official Americans.
I mean, this is how, you know, how utterly turned on its head this approach is.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Eric Margulies was on the show, and he, I think, about 55 percent seriously said, we ought to be allies with Assad right now.
That's it.
Just the same way as we should have let Saddam back in from the cold after 9-11 and said, listen, you fulfill your prime responsibility, which is keeping Al-Qaeda down and keeping them, you know, east of Iran somewhere, and we'll let you live, that kind of thing.
They could be doing, and I'm a libertarian, I'm not for any of this, but I'm just saying Margulies isn't, so he can make that kind of argument that, you know what, our interest is in fighting these Al-Qaeda guys, and that means not overthrowing Assad, that means backing him.
That's right.
I mean, if you want to look at things in those terms, if what you're looking for is a strong secular government that has a long track record of, you know, forceful and effective opposition to Sunni Islamist radicalism, you know, the Assad government is your ticket.
Well, now, so, okay, I'm sorry, because it's too much, and it's my fault, too.
I frame this whole discussion in terms of the idiocy of this Obama-Clinton-Petraeus-Panetta policy, whatever it is, whoever I'll carry to, that we've been talking about here, and it is idiotic on the face of it, but that's only from an American citizen national interest point of view, not a U.S. government point of view, which has an entirely different set of interests over there, and they consider weakening Iran important enough that they don't care if they're backing Al-Qaeda against them.
I was really struck.
You're absolutely right, and I mean, I think this is very much the mindset, that if you can weaken Iran, it really doesn't matter, you know, what other, you know, supposedly unintended consequences you create.
I have to give John McCain credit for one thing.
A year or so ago, he went to Syria, he went into Syria for about an hour and a half and met with some oppositionists, and at least some journalists were enterprising enough to do a little bit of research and figure out that some of the oppositionists that Senator McCain met with while he was doing his, you know, drive-by run in Syria were people who at least had been involved in the kidnapping of Shia religious pilgrims in Syria, may have been involved in worse stuff than that, and so when he came back and went on all of the talking head shows to talk about how great the opposition was in Syria, how the United States needed to be doing more to support them and no-fly zones and all of this, and somebody, one host actually had the wherewithal to ask him, but you know, Senator, some of these guys you met with turned out to be not very good guys, and if we give weapons to them, aren't some of those weapons going to end up in the hands of some pretty bad guys?
And McCain's answer, I swear to you, you can look at the tape, his answer was, he didn't even try and defend it, he just said, at least they won't be working for Iran.
And so McCain, and I think the Obama administration is more or less with him, if they think it would hurt Iran, they would rather give weapons to Al-Qaeda, give Al-Qaeda a new lease on life than actually come up with some serious diplomatic approach to Iran.
That's how far gone it is.
So in other words, I mean, because at the same time they're pursuing this nuclear deal, which of course is the single greatest, outstanding, parentheses, fake issue between America and Iran.
Yes.
They are working hard on settling that, are they not?
And so is this supposed to be just another stick to try to get the Iranians to make this pseudo peace deal here?
I mean, because this is a pretty hard stick to be using.
We don't know yet how serious the Obama administration really is.
If they, you know, if when you actually get down to the nitty gritty of negotiating the text of a final deal, if the Obama administration is basically not going to be prepared to accept the, both the reality and kind of the principle of Iran doing safeguarded enrichment and, you know, basically what you can get from Iran is greater transparency on their nuclear activities, but they're not going to agree to let the United States kind of micromanage their nuclear program and, you know, cut two thirds of it out.
If the administration doesn't, you know, get serious about that, it's not really serious about negotiating a deal.
And the fact that they're still pursuing these policies in Syria, you know, suggests that they aren't really all that, aren't all that committed to trying to realign relations with Iraq.
But they'll do it if Iran basically is willing to surrender, then they would be prepared to realign relations.
But if realigning relations is going to mean actually accepting the Islamic Republic as a legitimate order representing legitimate national interests, I don't think it's clear yet that the Obama administration's up for that.
All right.
Now, one more thing here, and I'm sorry because we're so short on time, but can you give us a thumbs up or thumbs down on Seymour Hersh's new piece about the sarin attack last August?
You know, I think Sy Hersh has, over the course of his very, very long and distinguished career, he has nailed some really important stories going all the way back to the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War.
You know, he's one of the central figures in breaking the Abu Ghraib story during the Iraq War.
And this latest piece he has in the London Review of Books is, I think, a really very strongly reported and very important piece, because what it says is that, you know, last year when Obama was making noises about attacking Syria because the Syrian government had supposedly used chemical weapons against its own people, that in fact the intelligence case wasn't there, and that more and more evidence came in that it was, in fact, opposition fighters with help from Turkey that concocted this kind of homemade sarin precisely to get Obama to take a more active U.S. military role in the conflict.
I think it's a very strongly reported piece.
Now, it was already reported, I mean, even at the time it was obvious, right, that they had the government report instead of a CIA report.
There was a problem over there at CIA, and Philip Giraldi reported in the American Conservative Magazine that some of them were actually going to resign and protest over this.
And so we knew about that, that they kind of weren't buying it.
But I wonder whether you know anybody in CIA or the circles that you run with, State Department people, former friends, whoever, is that what they think, that the Turks did this?
Can you verify even with hearsay that this comes from anywhere other than Hirsch by any chance?
I'm not saying you've written about it before.
I mean, I have heard what I would call informed speculation about that.
I'm not, you know, I'm not privy to classified information anymore.
But I think you're right.
I think there has been strong suspicion within the U.S. intelligence community about the claim that, you know, various attacks in Syria last year that Syrian military forces were using, were the ones using Farran.
The Russians investigated this.
The U.N. investigated this.
Some of the U.N. inspectors actually came out in public and said they thought it was the opposition that was doing this.
But no one here wanted to hear that.
And so that really didn't get followed up.
But I think there's tons of room for, you know, questioning the case that Obama made last summer.
All right.
Great.
Well, thanks very much for your time, Flint.
It's always great to talk to you.
Thank you, Scott.
It's good to talk with you.
Thanks again.
All right, everybody.
That is Flint Leverett, former CIA State Department National Security Counsel.
He and his wife, Hilary Mann Leverett, are the authors of the book Going to Tehran, which is really great.
And that's also the name of their blog, Going to Tehran, where they write many great things.
This piece, it may well be there.
I didn't get a chance to look.
But this piece is at worldfinancialreview.com, worldfinancialreview.com.
And the West get out of its self-made cul-de-sac with Syria.
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