Hey y'all, here's how to support the show.
First of all, check out my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
It's at foolserrand.us.
Sign up for the podcast feeds at scotthorton.org and check out scotthorton.org slash donate.
Anybody who donates $20 gets to the front of the list to get the audio book and it's really coming soon.
I'm done, my audio mastering dude has it now and it's gonna be soon.
So $20 gets you to the front of the list for that.
A donation of $50 to scotthorton.org slash donate gets you a signed copy of the book.
$100 gets you a QR code commodity disc.
No face value, you scan it with your phone and it tells you the instant spot price in real time.
It's the most brilliant invention ever.
And for a donation of $200 or more to The Scott Horton Show, you get a lifetime subscription to Listen and Think Libertarian Audiobooks at listenandthink.com and they're the ones putting out my book, my audio book too.
And I take all kinds of cryptocurrencies.
If you wanna donate them, I'll accept them.
All that's at scotthorton.org slash donate.
Shop amazon.com by way of my link.
Leave me good reviews on iTunes, Stitcher and Amazon if you read the book and yeah, you know, invite me to give a speech to your group.
War is the improvement of investment climates by other means, Clausewitz for dummies.
The Scott Horton Show.
Taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal.
They hate our freedoms.
We're dealing with Hitler revisited.
We couldn't wait for that Cold War to be over, could we?
So we can go and play with our toys in the sand.
Go and play with our toys in the sand.
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Today, I authorize the armed forces of the United States to begin military action in Libya.
That action has now begun.
When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.
I cannot be silent in the face of the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.
All right, you guys, introducing Reese Ehrlich.
All right, you guys, introducing Reese Ehrlich, the foreign correspondent.
His website is ReeseEhrlich.com and we run his syndicated column at AntiWar.com.
His latest book is Inside Syria and his book, The Iran Agenda, the updated version is coming out in the fall or late summer here.
Welcome back to the show, Reese, how are you doing?
I'm doing great, thank you so much.
Very happy to have you on.
And yeah, by foreign correspondent, we really mean that Reese has traveled all around the world and has been to all these places, including very recently, covering Iraq War 3, the very end of Iraq War 3, and all this kind of stuff.
And Iraq War 3, of course, includes eastern Syria as well, the war against the Islamic State there.
All right, so, just real quick, in northeastern Syria, this whole time since 2011, since the so-called revolution broke out, however you want to characterize it, the Syrian Kurds, they've not fought against the state army, the government in Damascus there, but they have sort of gained increased autonomy or even independence there.
And they were the Syrian Kurdish forces, the SDF, the YPG, and you can explain those initials on your elaboration if you want to.
They were really the primary force, backed and armed by the United States in the Americans' part of the war against the Islamic State in the capital of Raqqa and in east Syria there.
But these same Kurdish forces are the avowed enemies of the Turkish state, our NATO ally, and the Turkish state, certainly they're avowed enemies, and they have now, well, they already had a presence inside Syria, but they are now, there's a whole new invasion, basically, of Syrian Kurdistan and attacks on these Syrian forces, the Syrian Kurdish forces.
So I guess the first most important question is, do you think that there's a danger that the Turks and the Americans are going to end up trading fire here?
Or what is the status of America's alliance with these Kurds?
Is it now time to stab them in the back and leave them high and dry and let the Turks massacre them, or what?
Well, I don't think either the Turks or the U.S. want to get into a shooting war.
But the danger in this situation is that things can get out of control.
And the Turks have now sent in troops to an area called Afrin, which you've described there in northeastern Syria, and the U.S. has troops nearby.
The Russian Air Force controls the airspace there.
So in any kind of war situation, things can get out of hand regardless of what people may intend.
As to what the U.S. intention is, it's, if I was a Syrian Kurd, I'd be real worried right now because the U.S. had backed them in their efforts to get rid of the Islamic State.
And Trump and Tillerson announced that the U.S. would stay in northern Syria and would basically permanently, and would continue to arm the SDF or the Syrian Democratic Forces.
But now when push comes to shove, it's a hands-off because as the Turks move into that area of Afrin, the U.S. has not even strongly denounced it, let alone threatened to send troops.
So that's the immediate situation.
And we can go into the background to try and explain all this stuff if you like.
Yeah, let's do that.
But just on this most important point, I mean, at the end of the day, America's the world empire and all that.
So all the Syrian stuff is important, but the confusion and the contradiction in America's relationship with Turkey at this point, you know, I guess, is the most important thing.
You have some people saying, maybe we should kick Turkey out of NATO or suspend them or this and that.
They're out of control.
But America's really gone along with a lot of Turkey's policy in supporting the al-Nusra Front and even turning a blind eye to their support for the Islamic State for quite a few years there before it really declared itself a state, right?
Yeah, it sure did.
And the U.S., basically, when it comes to choosing between the Kurds and Turkey, Turkey has a key military base in Incirlik that the U.S. uses throughout the region and most recently in fighting the Islamic State.
And Turkey is a major NATO force in the area.
It's got a huge population.
And I think while there's a debate that's going on in Washington, the U.S., I think, ultimately, is not going to side with the Kurds against Turkey.
There's just too much, from an imperial standpoint, the U.S. has too much to gain from the Turks.
Yeah, I remember Phil Giroldi joking a few years ago that, I don't know, man, at the end of the day, the Kurds got oil.
What do the Turks have?
There's never a worse position to be in than a best friend and ally of the United States of America, right?
You never know when the knife is coming.
Yeah, you never know when you're going to get stabbed in the back.
That goes for both sides, right?
Absolutely.
Hey, listen, all right, so, well, what's really Turkey's problem here?
Because, you know, I know that they have their historical problems with the YPG, which I guess is basically the Syrian branch of the PKK, who are the leftist sort of separatists inside Turkey, and yet, I mean, what harm do they really pose to the Turkish state?
The Turkish state is not at war against the Kurdish population, not any full-scale war, like it was in the 1990s or anything, against the Kurdish population in Turkey.
They have pretty much a ceasefire reigning there, and it's not like these Syrian Kurds are going to invade Turkey.
Sorry, Scott, I've got to interrupt you here.
No, that's not true.
In the last roughly year and a half, the Turkish government has been waging a very fierce war against the Kurds in Turkey.
Oh, that's still going on?
I thought that was just kind of in the aftermath of that stolen election, but...
No, no, no, it's still going on.
You don't hear a lot about it in the Western press.
You sure don't.
In other words, it really is back like the 1990s, the Bill Clinton years, where they were just slaughtering people by the thousands?
Yeah, it's maybe not quite as bad as then, but it's quite severe, and there's a guerrilla war going on by the PKK.
There's towns being occupied by the Turkish army.
It is a war against the Turkish people.
It's not just against the leftist...
Okay, but my question still stands, even though my premise was wrong, which is, but what difference does it make about the independent Rojava in Syrian Kurdistan?
Because they're not trying to erase that border and foment revolution inside Turkey and all that.
They're taking care...
It's their own business, their own concerns.
They're taking care of that, right, or not?
Yeah, and this is where a little bit of background helps.
So the PKK, or the Kurdistan Workers' Party, was formed back in the late 1980s.
It was, at the time, called for independence for all the Kurds living in all four countries where they're located, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.
But roughly 20 years ago, after the arrest of Ocalan, their leader, they made a very significant change, which is ignored by pretty much all the governments and the mass media here.
They reject independence and call for autonomy within the countries that they live.
And that's a critical difference, because... and that's been going...
That's 20 years they've had that position, and that's what they carry out.
So whether it be in Turkey or in Syria, the PKK-affiliated groups want to call for autonomy.
Now, specifically in Syria, I think your statement is correct, which is they don't really pose any military threat to Turkey, as long as the Turks are not trying to wipe them out.
They focus...
They were one of the first groups to take up armed struggle in Syria at the time that Assad was repressing people.
They have promoted women in an unprecedented way.
They actually even defend gay rights, which is something in the Middle East that you never hear about.
And they've got plenty of authoritarian tendencies.
I'm not a big booster of the PKK.
But compared to a lot of the other groups in the area, they look a whole lot better, and the Kurds do have a legitimate case for autonomy and greater democracy within the Syrian state.
And it's true they didn't clash with the...
There were a few clashes with the Assad government, but basically both sides agreed to not attack each other for their own separate reasons.
Now that the Islamic State has been defeated and Assad is reasserting control through much of the rest of Syria, those contradictions are coming to a head.
So Syria and the Russians are allied with Syria in hopes that they're going to wipe out the YPG and the SDF, that is, the Syrian Kurds.
The U.S., supposedly on the side of the Kurds, is backing off at the moment.
Well, you know, I want to see footage of that, Reese.
American Marines withdrawing east toward the Iraqi border and telling the SDF, well, you guys can keep some trucks, good luck.
Just leaving them high and dry there.
Yeah, that might very well be the case.
The U.S., it was just about a few days ago that the U.S. announced that they were going to train 30,000 Syrian Kurds and their allies as border guards or border police or border army along the Turkish-Syrian border.
And now, a week later, when the Turks attack, the U.S. is backing off.
And, I mean, this is, frankly, this is what an empire in decline looks like.
You announce one policy, and then a week later, it flips and goes somewhere else, and who knows, a week from now, they'll go back again.
The U.S. is in a, you know, by sending its troops illegally, by the way, into Syria, they've created yet another war, another permanent war in the Middle East, along with Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention Libya and some of the other places.
And every time we send troops, it seems like it's going to, you know, the initial reaction in the U.S. is, oh, boy, we're going to really solve the problem now.
And then six months, six years, ten years later, whoops, what kind of a mess did we make back then?
Yeah, well, I'll tell you what, I mean, and this one is, since 2011, I mean, and I don't know if I've played this clip for you before.
Here, let me go ahead and cue this up, because I'd like to have you comment on this.
And if we've already gone through this exercise one time on an old episode, Reese, I think that it still bears repeating anyway, and the people probably won't mind too much.
Reese was elected president of the United States at the end of February 2012, the beginning of her last year in office there.
And she is, of course, a proponent of further support for the war against Assad and the backing of these so-called revolutionaries and the uprising there in Syria.
And yet she's, in this clip, she's being put on the defensive by the CBS News reporter who's asking her, why aren't we doing more?
Why aren't we prioritizing a billion dollars a year of covert support for these guys, but not a full-scale overthrow and this kind of thing?
So here's how she justifies her, or the administration's, unwillingness to go all the way against Assad the way that they did against Gaddafi.
We know al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting al-Qaeda in Syria?
Hamas is now supporting the opposition.
Are we supporting Hamas in Syria?
It's been from the very beginning.
For those of us, I know you know, and you wrote the whole book about it, but the reports came out about Prince Bandar bin Sultan was starting to support and send jihadists to go and fight in Syria beginning in late spring, early summer 2011.
These reports were coming out.
My friend Eric Margulies, also Foreign Correspondent is his title, he went to France and talked to all his buddies in the military and civilian intelligence over there.
They said, oh yeah, French special forces are on the ground helping to organize the revolution right now.
We knew this in the summer of 2011, that in the scheme of things, you talk about the policy flipping back and forth one thing or the other.
In the scheme of things, we had America taking al-Qaeda's side.
Just as Hillary Clinton said, supporting the FSA is supporting al-Qaeda in effect, isn't it?
Of course, she was right.
She continued to pressure Obama to double down on it anyway.
There's no question that Hillary Clinton was a hawk not only in Syria, but throughout the Middle East and general foreign policy, which is one of the reasons why I voted for her.
I was very wary of what would happen had she come to power.
Of course, the fact that Trump is in power, it's even 10 times worse.
This really is the ultimate bait and switch.
That's what Gareth Porter says.
Look, we had this war against al-Qaeda supposedly.
Then we go and we attack all these countries that not only did these state governments not back al-Qaeda nor did they threaten the United States or threaten to use al-Qaeda against the United States but actually by attacking Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad in Iraq, Libya, Syria we turned these countries into failed states.
We turned them into failed states.
We create the growth of these al-Qaeda jihadist movements sometimes quite deliberately, like in Libya and Syria to help them in their fight against these governments that never would back them or pick a fight with us in any circumstances.
Well, I think I would shade that argument just a bit.
When the Arab Spring demonstrations took place throughout the region, including Saudi Arabia Bahrain, as well as Libya and Egypt and Tunisia and Syria they were genuine mass movements not controlled by al-Qaeda by the U.S. or anybody else or Israel.
The local dictators were hated, including Assad.
That popular movement included both what we call civil society activists and conservative political Islamists people like the Muslim Brotherhood.
But had Assad not cracked down on the Syrian uprising I think there could have been a reasonable new government with elections, with a new constitution something along the lines of what happened in Tunisia.
But two things happened.
The Assad government cracked down very, very hard and people were very angry and turned to armed struggle and at the same time all the outside powers you mentioned got very active in trying to promote their own interests, their own armed groups and Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey all tried to back proxy forces and of course the U.S. was very much involved in there certainly within a year of the uprising its character had changed decisively.
And the U.S. I don't think sets out to create failed states, but it would rather see a failed state than a government that is unfriendly to the U.S. and so that's the net result of the policy in Libya and could potentially be the case in Syria that's still up for grabs.
It's certainly the case in Afghanistan where the opposition forces to the U.S. recently attacked the Intercontinental Hotel just over the last couple days and Trump has said that we're going to keep troops there permanently and frankly an empire in decline can't continue to support all these multiple military efforts all around the world and in the region and I think Trump is going to end up paying the piper on that in the not too distant future.
Well you know, I mean for all of her dastardliness, Hillary Clinton I think could at least understand that sometimes we fight for the Shiite side and sometimes we fight for the Sunni side and this kind of thing.
I don't know if she could justify it, but if you explained it to her she would go okay yeah that makes sense or something but Donald Trump and his guys they don't even seem to know what planet they're on or who is what.
I mean Trump, you probably noticed when he congratulated the president of Lebanon for defeating those evil terrorists, ISIS and Hezbollah when it was actually Hezbollah that defeated ISIS in Lebanon and had driven them out and he didn't know what the hell he was talking about.
Yeah, no Trump is just a real piece of work I mean the guy is the most unqualified president we've had in a long time and he's got some stiff competition when you look at George Bush and some of these other guys.
Obama for that matter.
Well Obama was smart, I mean I didn't agree with his policies, in fact I was very critical of his policies.
Because he can read books and stuff.
He knew the area, he could find Iraq on a map I'm not entirely clear if Trump could do that but once you get a click below Trump to his advisers, they're smart people, they're evil but they're smart and they're playing the imperial game in the region in hopes that the US is going to emerge controlling the oil fields establishing the military bases and having governments that are favorable to the US and if that's not an option then you just make it a failed state and the people suffer.
Alright, hang on just one second.
Hey guys, I got a new sponsor, Zencash, a new digital currency but it's got the great privacy protections built in and it's a messaging service and you can send documents and all kinds of things.
It's really great so check that out at zencash.io also buy the book The War State by my friend Mike Swanson The history of the rise of the military industrial complex after World War II you'll really enjoy it and check out his great investment advice at wallstreetwindow.com and when you follow his advice you'll want to get at least some medals and you do that from Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc and they've been around for 40 something years it's a great company, they charge a very low premium to get you platinum, palladium, silver and gold and whatever you need there and when you buy in bitcoin, there's no charge that's at rrbi.co rrbi.co for your precious medals and get your anti-government propaganda from libertystickers.com if you want a brand new website for 2018 expanddesigns.com slash scott will save you 500 bucks The dynamics were a little bit different a year ago when Trump bombed Damascus because you have the whole new president, the partisanship and whatever had flipped and so it was a little more muddy water but in 2013 there was only the Israel lobby in America, the neoconservatives and their think tanks and acolytes and the weekly standard who wanted to attack Assad over the fake sarin attack there in Ghouta, the Turkish al-Qaeda false flag there and in fact I had a speculation, it's not ironclad or whatever but I had a little theory at the time that in fact there was a report that Obama had asked the Israel lobby for help on pressuring people into Syria and I thought that at that point maybe he had already decided not to do it and he just wanted to encourage them to go out on a limb and really kind of show that no one else in all of American so-called civil society on either coast wants to attack the government in Syria only the neoconservatives and the Likudniks and their pressure groups inside this country.
The military was against it the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dempsey said well I don't know why we have to do this now and that was it, right?
That was a real nadir in US policy in the Middle East because the American people were fed up with the war in Iraq and as were people around the world and when the US threatened to bomb Syria because of the so-called chemical weapons attack the people in the United States overwhelmingly opposed it and that's why Obama ended up backing down on that case it wasn't because he was in weak need it's because people were fed up with American troops dying in the Middle East and continued military occupation Trump to some extent has been able to reverse that but I think the key factor is going to be when American troops start dying.
We saw that happen in Niger when four troops were killed.
We saw it with one special ops person killed in Syria it's not going to take much to anger American public opinion once again So what is the status of the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda?
I guess first one then the other Sure.
It's no longer a state, I know that Yeah, nor is it Islamic The Islamic State obviously has faced some very serious setbacks They don't control any significant land area anymore.
They've been driven out of Raqqa and the parts of Syria that they controlled and as we mentioned the Syrian Democratic Forces control a significant part of that area They have basically been defeated in Iraq and they are still carrying out terrorist attacks for example in Baghdad and a few places and groups that have claimed affiliation with them in other parts of the world for example in the Philippines have carried out horrific attacks on civilians and I guess in Afghanistan similarly they have some presence but they are significantly weakened.
They're not able to attract the international financing and recruitment that they had before and other groups are taking over in their stead somewhat moderate or other extremist groups but the Islamic State is still there, it's still a danger but it's far weaker than it was even a year ago Al-Qaeda has tried to fill the gap They were fiercely in opposition to each other.
They came out of the same group, they were split and they were fighting each other in Syria for example and in other places.
Al-Qaeda never declared itself an Islamic State that was one of the big differences they had but they were operating as a national group for example in Syria and other places in other countries in Jordan and so on but Al-Qaeda is weakened as well in Syria they controlled much greater areas for example in southern Syria and in parts of the eastern part of the country and they've pretty much been constrained now to the Idlib province which is north of Aleppo so they also are operating of course in places like Yemen and are far from defeated but in general they're weaker than they were a year ago as well Alright so now boy old Rex Tillerson, I mean I guess you must have read or seen this speech that he gave where he is explaining about how yep, well as simple as that we're turning on a dime and the new mission now is somehow to limit the presence and the power and influence of Iran inside Syria when of course their power and influence has only grown as a result of this attempt to limit their power and influence in Syria just like everywhere else If you could take any kind of objective look at what's going on in Syria, Assad, Russian the Iranian side has won or at least made significantly more victories than the U.S. Turkish-Saudi side And we've really made the Syrian state more dependent on Russia and Iran Thanks Goods Force for your help He must be saying to them every day, right?
Yeah, not only in Syria but in Iraq as well And Nasrallah too The Iranian government openly credits Iran, not the United States to defeat the Islamic State So again, the more troops we send, the more people we kill the angrier people get and the declared enemies of the U.S. become stronger So now, well I don't know, let's go back to that bigger picture thing about the failing and flailing empire as you describe it, because I'm really interested in that kind of big picture stuff too.
I wonder not to get all too conspiratorial or whatever, but just The way I look at it, all bureaucracies in monopoly government power fail upwards until they get to ultimate failure, right?
War is the health of the state unless it loses and gets conquered, but otherwise it helps to centralize corruption And the U.S. military budget is the greatest honeypot in the history of the world As William S. Lynde once called it, I think, a trillion dollars a year up for grabs and all of the power and perks of being a general or being an admiral and having a fleet and having a base and all of these things And so, yeah everything that they do, they sure screw up and yet they stay busy Isn't that really kind of the point?
Sorry, one more thing.
There's a couple of great quotes I won't read them to you, but a couple of great quotes along the lines from a few years ago.
Well, now that we're drawn down from Iraq and Afghanistan, we're trying to find ways to stay globally engaged, so we're looking to Africa and see what we can do to expand there because it's just a jobs program, right?
It's just another government program, only it's a trillion dollars a year and a lot of violence Well, for sure that's a side effect When you have a trillion dollars, it's basically a slush fund to use whatever way you want Some of it goes to buy advanced weapons and you end up sitting on the board of that once you retire as a general or admiral you end up sitting on the board of that arms manufacturer and your personal wealth and well-being is guaranteed But I think the US empire is based on not just the military expansion, but frankly on the economics of control of vital resources particularly oil and in order to control the oil, you need to have a friendly government in power which means geopolitics and you need military bases or control of the sea lanes in order to make sure that those vital resources are under the control of the US and not only under control of the US, but denied to your enemies whether they be Russia, China, Iran or whoever and so it's an entire system all wrapped up of which the military is a key component and then of course the propaganda that goes out is that we're not an imperialist power like those other evil people I guess now it would be the Russians and the Chinese and the Iranians we're the good guys and the other side is the ones who promote dictatorship and authoritarian governments and so on and so forth but when you look at the actual governments that the US has allied with particularly in the Middle East you see one dictatorial monarchy or dictatorial power after another they're the emerging democracy whereas all the people that we're fighting are horrible dictatorships so you get on all those levels economics, politics, military, media and propaganda they all are united as part of one system and the problem is that you compare this now to the 50s, 60s, 70s particularly before the end of the Vietnam War and the US was actually able to impose its will on countries around the world and these days it's having more and more problems and fewer and fewer folks are going for it so back to the question of the Israel lobby there it does seem like there's honest belief sometimes, maybe not always but let's be charitable that Israel's interests and America's interests are one and the same thing all the time and yet obviously that's not true certainly it's not to me and you know me, I want to abolish the whole Pentagon and forget the whole thing but assuming even the premise of American dominance and primacy in the region what would be smart at least even in the short term would be to at least sit back and watch and laugh as Iran and Hezbollah and the Syrian army and the Shiite Iraqi government that we installed in power there destroy ISIS and Al Qaeda never mind backing them or anything like that but why would we be opposed to that Well that's a factor for sure I don't think Likud or the Israelis control US policy but they certainly are a powerful influence force and to go along with what you were saying what if the US actually helped the Israelis and Palestinians create a viable two state solution where the Palestinians had their own control of their own area the West Bank and Gaza it would pull the rug out from under all the arguments of Al Qaeda the Islamic State, the Iranians and everybody else that somehow they're the defenders of the Palestinian people if the Palestinians themselves reached a reasonable solution that was popular among the Palestinians it would do more to stop the wars of the Middle East and all of the US troops combined but of course the US isn't interested it's particularly not interested under Trump it wasn't interested in doing that even before him but Trump has made it really obvious with this move to establish a US embassy in Jerusalem which is a slap in the face of the Palestinians and the people of Israel would be better off living in peace with the Palestinians and Israel could be an economic partner but the folks running Israel are not interested in that they've made that very clear and that just leads to greater and greater instability for the people of Israel as well as the Palestinians In Gareth Porter's book Manufactured Crisis about Iran's nuclear program he talks about how Yitzhak Rabin wanted the West Bank to stop occupying it not give it up, it was his to give up to allow the creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip the revolution in 1979 made no difference the Israelis and the Iranians still got along fine Reagan used the Israelis to do the Iran-Contra missile hostage Contra death squad scam they got along fine Rabin needed Iran as a scapegoat when he was trying to do the right thing and create a Palestinian state and say the real problem is Iran everybody as a political thing but then one of Netanyahu's fans shot and killed Rabin and according to Porter all of the later prime ministers used Iran but not doing the right thing and giving up and allowing there to be a Palestinian state giving up that territory and allowing there to be a Palestinian state there but instead to distract from the fact that they would always deny independence to the Palestinians whenever anybody says anything about the Palestinians Netanyahu especially says what about Iran, what about Iran but I know that you also are a real expert on this going way back so I wonder what you make of that I reported from Israel in the 80s when unbeknownst to most Americans Israel backed Iran in the Iran-Iraq war when Iraq attacked Iran in 1980 and the war went on for 8 years I repeat, Israel backed Iran why?
because they saw Saddam Hussein as the bigger enemy he was arming various Palestinian groups Iran and Israel had close relations under the Shah and Iran's whole military was US equipment and the Israelis provided the Iranians with spare parts and planes and missiles to fight against Iraq but that changed of course when the Iran-Iraq war was over and as you described with Rabin Israel has a history of trying to blame Palestinian unrest on Iran so it was Jordan, then Lebanon, then Iraq and now Iran instead of dealing directly with the Palestinians and resolving their problems they say if we only get rid of this outside power then we Israelis will be safe and secure and of course it hasn't proven true in the last 60 years and isn't going to be true in the future and what an important point Iran is no threat to Israel whatsoever they sell some missiles to Hezbollah even for whatever that amounts to that could be negotiated Hezbollah clearly is no offensive threat to try to invade and conquer northern Israel they simply have a defensive force there so what other threat is there?are they going to sail their giant navy through the Red Sea and the Iranian government contrary to what the Israeli leaders say has made it clear that they would accept a two state solution if the Palestinians accept it so it's really the Israelis who are blocking any kind of peace in the area to be fair Iran's leaders are extremists who use Islam as their excuse both to oppress their own people and to extend influence in the region but Iran is not anything close to nor is it going to be the kind of military power that Israel is it's the number one military power in the region it's going to be for some time and Israel particularly in alliance with the US could wipe out Iran fairly quickly I don't mean wipe them out and defeat them militarily but they could cause a lot of damage and the Iranian government knows that so while they have a lot of rhetoric against Israel in practice they're very cautious about what they're doing and what arms are involved and I think you're right Hezbollah has not attacked Israel despite all of the provocations that have gone on and I don't think they are going to go on the offensive against Israel if Israel attacks them which unfortunately may be there's a lot of talk in Israel about renewing the war in Lebanon going back against Hezbollah again I hope that doesn't happen I'm sorry for keeping you over but there's an important piece in the Intercept today about how the Israelis are expanding their so called safe zone from the Golan Heights I forget if it's 67 or 73 but it's Syrian territory occupied by Israel and that they're expanding down from there into Syria proper I guess as you'd call it It's very dangerous Israel seized the Golan in 67 there was some additional fighting in the 73 war and yes Israel has taken advantage of the instability in Syria and the fact that the Golan area on the Syrian side was controlled by various groups not the Syrian government and they may well try to extend that control beyond what had been settled or had been settled by the war in 73 so we'll have to keep a very close eye on that Israel was meddling in its own way supporting different rebel groups in Syria in hopes that they could defeat Assad and have a group if not friendly to Israel at least not antagonistic to Israel so that's an ongoing danger I'm sorry but are they really just only thinking two weeks ahead or what do they think they're going to do?
They're going to end up in a war with the Syrian army Iran and whoever else is going to back them there just colonizing how much further are they going to expand and take this territory?
Are they going to move civilians into it?
We'll have to wait and see they tried it in Lebanon it was a buffer zone against attack they were forced out by Hezbollah they defeated Israel in two different wars at the moment I think the Israelis want to take advantage of the weakness of Assad but if he's able to consolidate his control and continues to get backing from Russia and Iran then that becomes if Israel does try to formally seize new territory that's a very very dangerous move I gotta tell you, this whole clean break plan seems really stupid to me stupid like a fox as Homer Simpson might say have me back on the show and we can talk some more about it alright, thanks very much Rhys, appreciate it thank you Scott that's Rhys Ehrlich, foreign correspondent we run him at antiwar.com and his latest book is Inside Syria and you know me, I'm at scotthorton.org foolserun.us for my book Time Down the War in Afghanistan Libertarian Institute at libertarianinstitute.org and follow me on Twitter Thanks
