Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America, and by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Danny Shurst, and he writes for us at Antiwar.com.
Of course, he's the author of Ghost Riders of Baghdad, was a major in the U.S. Army and combat vet in Iraq War II and Afghanistan.
Both surges there, and finally got out of the army.
He's been writing anti-war stuff for quite a few years before he got out, and now we're happy to feature him every week.
You can also find him at Truthdig.org, where he has a million part history of the United States of America and all kinds of other great opinion pieces as well.
Welcome back to the show, Danny.
How are you doing?
I'm good, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Oh, and I should have mentioned TomDispatch.com.
He writes there all the time, too.
Okay, man, so let's talk about this situation in Syria.
Donald Trump has pulled the troops out of one of their theaters of operation inside Syria, right?
Yeah, so we pulled back from the northeast, but a lot of people forget we still have a force down kind of in the southeast of Syria.
I think the base is called Tanf.
I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that right.
But yeah, at the same time, though, I mean, I'm glad on some level, as I've written, that he's following through on something that he tweeted about.
You know what?
Back in December, Mattis resigned because Trump even hinted at pulling back from Syria and downsizing modestly in Afghanistan.
If he really pulls out of Syria—and there's problems, and we're going to talk about that.
But if he pulls out of Syria, it would really, from my knowledge of the administration, be the first time he followed through on his anti-interventionist rhetoric on the campaign.
He largely promised no more dumb wars and the forever wars.
I mean, that resonated with a lot of people, but up till now, he hasn't really followed through.
He's had some false starts.
He's come close, the negotiations in Afghanistan, et cetera.
But if he truly did pull out of Syria, it would be a profound thing, I think.
And that gets me in a lot of trouble when I say that, because God knows, especially as a person who's somewhat left-leaning, you can't say that.
You can't say anything positive about Trump in this political space, or you just get annihilated by one side.
And the opposite is true as well, but I think it's a pretty profound thing.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, the whole partisan thing is just all of America's albatross that we're stuck with.
But on the subject here, going back to a year ago when Donald Trump said that this is what he was going to do—last December, not quite a year ago—and this caused Mattis to resign.
And I noted just a couple of weeks ago, I guess it was, a week and a half ago or so, Mattis was asked, and I guess he's talking—what, did he write a book or something?
So he started talking again, and one of the things he said was that he had told Trump that, that you're going to have to find another Secretary of Defense to lose to ISIS.
And this was, you know, as of last December, when the Islamic State had been completely obliterated.
Whatever ISIS fighters were around had by then almost entirely fled back into Iraq or, I don't know, wherever the hell they're hiding out.
But there sure weren't too many in eastern Syria then.
And so that just brings up the whole matter of the complication.
Of course, the American people can never be expected to keep track, and TV's never even going to try to explain it.
But it's a double-level kind of a bait-and-switch, where Mattis swears we're there for ISIS, and the others, too.
They swear we're there for ISIS, and then they conflate that with then, so we have to stay embedded with the Kurds forever, even though we're embedded with the Kurds to keep the Turks out at this point, not really to fight ISIS anymore.
But even then, all that's a bait-and-switch, because what they really want is to stay and keep that al-Tanf base, because in their eyes, that's how they check Iran.
I don't know how that really works in practice, but they say that's to limit the influence of Iran.
And occasionally, when you read these talks, you find out that that's what this is really about.
You know, Votel had one in Defense News, a former commander of CENTCOM.
The other day, he goes, oh yeah, Kurds, Kurds, Kurds, crocodile tears, Iran, Iran, Iran, by the end of the article, you know?
Well, of course.
I think the problem with media coverage or most media coverage and then also American sort of knowledge is that it's absent any context.
They act like the problem started yesterday.
And so first, it's we have to stay because ISIS, right?
ISIS was this perfect canard because they're so brutal.
They make videos.
I mean, they're awful, right?
So it's easy to say we've got to do whatever it takes to beat ISIS.
Well, we beat ISIS.
I mean, we did what we could, which is we beat territorial ISIS.
Now, defeating the insurgency and the terrorism that will follow, that's guided by ISIS ideology.
That's a whole other problem.
And that's never going to actually work.
America's never going to be able to do that itself.
Second thing is then once that's not available, it's like the same thing we always go back to.
You know, in Afghanistan, it's, oh, women's rights.
But in Syria, it's, oh, the Kurds were betraying the Kurds.
And we are betraying the Kurds.
But the question becomes one of context.
Like, no one remembers the fact, no one considers the fact that our intervention and occupation in Syria is illegal.
I mean, unlike the Russians who weren't invited, like it or not, but Bashar al-Assad, and you pointed this out to me last week, he's the sovereign ruler of Syria.
Now, he doesn't control all of Syria right now because there's still a little, you know, Turkish-backed, very Islamist rebel stronghold in Idlib that they're currently fighting.
And then, of course, the United States decided to carve a third or more of Syria in the east, and the Kurds call it Rojava or whatever.
And no one remembers that.
The whole problem is that America is going around the Middle East and carving out little statelets, carving out little areas where they have control, they have some influence.
But you're right.
Ultimately it comes down to imperial hegemonic pretensions, but usually Iran is behind almost everything.
And you're right about the generals.
I mean, General Votel, I mean, General Dunford, they all say the same crap.
It's always like, oh, we must be in place in order to fight Sunni Islamism and check Shia Iranian influence.
And, like, what no one really understands is that those two priorities are at odds with one another to a certain extent because ultimately Iran has the same enemy of, like, Sunni Islamism and Sunni Islamist jihadism.
And that's the threat to the homeland.
If there's any threat to the American homeland, and I think it's overblown, it's from Sunni Islamism.
It's not from Shia extremism or Shia Iranians.
I mean, they've never attacked the American homeland.
So you're right.
This is all about maintaining forever war, checking Iran, and ultimately just these guys are stuck in the box, these generals, these Pentagon civilians.
All they've known for the last 18 years is this failing playbook.
But instead of, like, kicking out the head coach and getting a new offensive playbook and turning it into a defensive playbook, we just keep using the—we run these same old tired plays into perpetuity, and it's mind-blowing.
Yeah.
Well, and also you talk about the whole history began yesterday thing.
Just go back to 2011, 2012.
That famous clip of Hillary Clinton that I play in the intro to the show is from February of 2012, from the beginning of 2012.
And she's asked, why aren't we doing more to help overthrow Assad?
And she says, well, geez, Ayman al-Zawahiri just endorsed the revolution in Syria.
Are we supporting al-Qaeda in Syria?
And so, yeah, that was right.
And she continued to support that policy anyway.
In that interview, she was being put on the spot to defend Obama's reluctance to go further, but he had already authorized the CIA to help organize all our allies and all their money and their guns to go in there and what have you.
So it made no difference anyway by that point.
But she was right.
And we know from her emails that she was referring to an email that Jake Sullivan had just sent her two weeks before saying, hey, boss, look, AQ is on our side in this one and has a link to al-Zawahiri endorsing the rebellion.
So it was, as John Kerry put it later, we saw the rise of ISIS.
We thought we could manage.
We thought we could use that to pressure Assad to step down.
But then, geez, that didn't work.
The Russians called our bluff, et cetera.
But the point being that, you know, as Michael Flynn said, he had been the head of the DIA at that time.
And in August of 2012, he wrote, look, they're trying to carve out an Islamist state in eastern Syria.
And the real danger is that they could roll in and conquer western Iraq.
And it was a full year and a half after that that Obama said ISIS is just the junior varsity team.
Don't worry about them, as he and the CIA, John Brennan, and then an alliance with Saudi and Qatar and Turkey and Israel are pouring billions of dollars and billions of dollars worth of weapons in to these jihadists.
I think in the case of Turkey directly.
I don't know about the others directly to the Islamic State.
Actually, in Hillary Clinton's emails, again, in the WikiLeaks, yeah, she says the Saudis are directly funding ISIS, too, in there.
And so talk about screwing over the Kurds, leaving them high and dry.
How about creating the Islamist state that they had to fight in the first place?
And then we come and say, oh, aren't you lucky that we're here to help you fight off the Islamic State?
Talk about breaking your legs and handing you some crutches.
Oh, you're absolutely right.
I mean, that whole context that you described is just vital to understanding what's really happening in Syria.
And yet it's mostly unreported.
Nobody remembers.
I'll tell you, it's interesting, though, to see the partisan outrage about the Kurds and then also like some people who support the Turks.
Like in my local relatively tiny New York borough paper, the Staten Island Advance, some Turkish citizen of American, Turkish-American, writes this article.
And I think the headline today was Turkey is in Syria to fight terrorists, not to kill Kurds.
And I'm like – and it was just an unabashed and vacuous defense of Turkey.
And I'm thinking, who is this person kidding?
Turkey, yeah, they'll say, oh, we're going to take over the ISIS prisoners.
They'll say, oh, we're really going to fight ISIS as much as we're going to fight Kurdish terrorism.
But the reality is it was Turkey, and it still is Turkey, that has supported the most Islamist factions of the rebels, whatever conglomeration makes up the rebels anymore.
They were the number one transit point for foreign fighters coming in to fight for ISIS and cut some people's heads off.
And so the fact that we talk about Turkey because they're in NATO as if they're some sort of ally and it's like, look, the reality is Turkey is engaged in a proxy war along with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states against Iran, Russia, and Assad.
I mean I find myself in this odd position of like I'm almost happy that the Russians intervened.
I mean I know that sounds crazy and it's going to get people fired up.
But, like, look, if the alternative was Islamic State or al-Qaeda's franchise in Syria, then, like, give me Assad, who is brutal but is a sovereign, maintains some stability and protects minorities and fights Islamists any day.
And so Russia comes in and holds up that regime.
And, yeah, like I don't love Russian interventionism any more than I love American interventionism.
But let's be honest.
I mean they may have saved Syria from falling into the hands of the most extremist rebels, which Turkey was supporting and still is in Idlib.
Right.
And as Hillary Clinton said in that CBS interview, when it comes to a credible alternative government, we don't see that.
There's no one available to create one, unfortunately.
And according to Obama himself, to Thomas Friedman, the moderate rebels were a fantasy.
They never were.
There's no such thing as an army of moderates in a rebellion like this.
A lot of them were foreign jihadist mercenaries, essentially, being sent in there from all over the Middle East, like Iraq War II and Afghanistan before that.
And so when you say, well, geez, I don't know.
I mean, it seems like possibly the alternative to Assad at that point, when Russia intervened, would have been Baghdadi or Jelani from the Islamic State or al-Qaeda.
Yeah, no, you're exactly right.
And there was no one else in the running.
Those were your two choices, essentially.
The Islamic State or those still loyal to Zawahiri, but who are the same thing.
I mean, Islamic State was just al-Qaeda in Iraq anyway.
And then that was it.
And these were the guys who, you know, their slogan was, what, Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave.
And they meant it, and they proved it with suicide attacks.
And at the time that the Russians intervened, again, innocent civilians died in the manner in which they intervened and all that.
There's no free pass for things wrong that they did.
But at that time they intervened in the fall of 2015, the al-Qaeda and ISIS forces were essentially on the road to Damascus, or they were severing the highways between Damascus and Aleppo and the rest of the cities in the west of the country.
And it was really coming down to it.
Putin really waited till the last minute.
And so, yeah.
I mean, you're right.
The alternative – look, Assad has killed probably a majority of the civilians in this war.
No doubt.
Don't like the guy.
But there would have been an Alawite genocide and a Christian genocide if Russia had not intervened.
And Druze and Shiites and other Sunni Arabs who didn't want to go along.
Oh, yeah.
The Mediterranean coast where most of those minorities live would have just been just devastated ethnic cleansing-wise.
And yet no one talks about that, right?
It's like it's always like Assad is bad.
Assad is bad.
Yeah, we get that.
But there's more to the story because you're right.
There were only two alternatives.
Now, here's what's interesting because you've got to bring Israel into it a little bit.
And I know you like to talk about Israel, and there's so much madness going on there right now.
You know, more than one – two particular quotes.
Credible, like former chiefs of staff of their army and intelligence officials at the top of their government said – and they even wrote this down publicly and no one noticed.
If the alternative is Islamic State or Iran in Syria, then we choose the Islamic State.
That's Israel.
And I'm blown away by that because Islamic State, yeah, they may have had like a tacit arrangement with Israel to like not really mess with them.
But if Islamic State wins, I mean that does not bode well for Israel either.
I mean their ideology is so at odds with the Jewish state of Israel.
And it just shows that this nexus between like Israel and Saudi Arabia, it's so nefarious and it's so just dark and cynical.
But it's real.
And so that's why I don't buy General Votel or whatever or any of these guys saying, oh, like ISIS is going to – Mattis was saying like ISIS is going to get a win from this and ISIS is going to re-rise.
And maybe they will.
I mean if the Turks play this wrong, and I don't like the Turkish invasion one bit, yeah, there's a possibility that in the chaos – because that's the best place for terrorist groups to breed, that ISIS may get a little more life into it.
But let's not pretend that the American intervention in Syria was about ISIS from the start.
Because if it was, they would have heeded the warning, like you said, of guys like Flynn or Hillary in secret.
So it's just a bit canard, the whole thing.
It's a charade.
It's just one more failed, tired old explanation that boils down to America wants to stay in the region forever.
Hang on just one second.
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Alright, and now, along those lines, and I know this is redundant for long-time listeners, but for people who haven't heard it, of course, you can Google the statements that Danny's referring to yourself, or Intelligence Chief, say this on the record, you'll find it repeatedly.
Asa Wynn Stanley has a great compilation of different evidences of Israeli involvement in the Syria war there.
And you can just, in fact, Google IDF chief admits Syria weapons, etc., something, you'll find it, no problem.
But here is their ambassador, Michael Oren, just, this is about six months after he retired, and he does say in this statement, well, I'm only speaking for myself.
But then he also says repeatedly, so from Israel's perspective, he's clearly speaking for the Netanyahu government and their perspective on the whole thing here.
And you know what?
It's so important to point out that this quote is from the end of June 2014.
So this is just after the Islamic State has conquered Western Iraq and actually become a state.
And their leader, Baghdadi, renamed himself the Caliph Ibrahim and announced the resurrection of the Caliphate, which necessitated, quote unquote, then the start of Iraq War 3.
And this is just after that.
And so there's no pretense, you'll hear, there's no pretense here that Oren is referring to any mythical moderate rebels.
He is talking directly about the Islamic State.
He refers to their atrocities before saying it's worth it anyway because they're fighting the Shia.
And by the way, it's extra funny that he's explaining all this to Jeffrey Goldberg, and Jeffrey Goldberg is like, whoa, you ain't speaking for me, pal, in this one.
So here's that.
It's only 40 seconds here.
We have to choose the lesser of evils here.
The lesser evil is the Sunnis over the Shias.
It's an evil, believe me, it's a terrible evil.
Again, they've just taken out 7,800 former Iraqi soldiers and shot them in a field.
But who are they fighting against?
They're fighting against a proxy with Iran that's complicit in the murder of 160,000 people in Syria.
You can just do the math.
And again, one side is armed with suicide bombers and rockets.
The other side has access to military nuclear capabilities.
So from Israel's perspective, if there's got to be an evil that's going to prevail, let the Sunni evil prevail.
There you go.
And just massacred the Air Force cadets in the field.
1,700 Air Force cadets in the field is, of course, a direct reference to ISIS and their recent victory in Western Iraq at that point.
And then I got to point out, too, that you know that Assad is responsible for every death in the war, according to this guy, and they have access to Iran's nuclear weapons, I guess, too, which is just make-believe stuff.
So that's the justification.
It's nonsense.
It's so incredible.
I mean, the subtext that just blows my mind, and I know that I'm beating a dead horse here, but Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons.
Israel developed its nuclear program in secret and illegally.
I've read the now declassified documents from the late 60s and early 70s when national security officials in the Kissinger Department and everything were talking about this.
I mean, they were saying, like, what should we do about Israel?
We know they're developing nuclear weapons, right?
And then we just decided to look the other way.
And then now, to this day, Israel, which just cries foul that Iran might even consider nuclear weapons, even though it has none, they do that while at the same time maintaining a, you know, we refuse to say whether we do or don't have nuclear weapons.
But it's such a farce because the whole world knows they do, and nobody questions that.
Nobody says, like, well, Israel is the ultimate illegal nuclear developer in the world.
I mean, right along with India and Pakistan, and everyone always talks about, like, India and Pakistan's nukes, and I understand they're aimed at each other, but no one ever talks about Israeli nukes.
It's wild that they would say that the Shia are more of a threat than the Sunnis.
I mean, it's so obtuse.
And why is he speaking from Israel's point of view and not America's point of view?
I want to hear someone say, look, I mean, Israel's got their challenges, and we basically back them, but, like, we're not going to be ruled by them.
They're not going to drive our foreign policy.
From an American perspective, Michael Oren, from an American perspective, Sunni Islamism, Sunni jihadism has always been the greater threat to the American homeland, which is all that should really matter to us.
But, no, we're too busy, you know, spreading the Netanyahu line rather than the what's good for America line.
I mean, it makes me want to stand up and cheer and say America first, like Trump, you know.
I mean, and for me to say that is a big deal, right?
I'm not a fan of the guy, but, like, it makes me want to cry out America first, you know.
Why are we talking about Israel's interests?
Yeah, well, that's the whole thing of it, too, is this whole thing.
I mean, just look at just in the last few weeks, Israel's attacking Shiite militias in Iraq.
When Iraq War II was launched, at least one solid third for Israel in the first place because their partisans in America said that the Shia are going to be really compliant and great friends of Israel and the U.S., and that's why we needed to do this.
And so then we do it, and it turns out the guys we put in power are the ones the Israelis hate the most.
And now we got the Israelis attacking the very regime that America installed there on their behalf.
Yeah, it's so twisted.
You know, speaking of interventionism, you know, everyone cries to the Russians for getting involved.
You know, using their air force to prop up the Assad regime.
But, like, nobody cries foul when, like, the Israelis bomb, you know, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq.
I mean, they're killing Iranians and even Iraqi homegrown, you know, Iranian-linked militiamen, like, wholesale.
I mean, they're violating the sovereign airspace of, like, one country after another, but they get a pass because, you know, they got the blue and white flag, and they're under Uncle Sam's wing, or maybe we're under theirs, who knows at this point.
But the reality is that no one calls out Israel for this massive violation of national sovereignty.
But that's the whole deal, isn't it, right, Scott?
Like, this whole idea of sovereignty, it's a myth.
I mean, America only trots that out when it's useful to them.
They only trot it out, they only care about national sovereignty when it's their enemies or their purported enemies who are violating it.
But, like, when American drones do it wholesale or when Israel does it or when the Saudis do it, like, suddenly it's okay, which just proves that we don't really believe in any semblance of international law to the extent that such a thing is even possible.
But it just blows my mind how hypocritical we are.
And again, no one talks about it, and it's just like, well, what about the Kurds?
You know, and it's like, once someone says that, it's like the argument's over because you can't get through to them any longer.
That's just, like, that's their last card.
And when that card runs out, it'll be women's rights or something.
But, you know, it blows my mind.
So in Afghanistan, we're worried about women's rights, apparently, right, even though we're not.
So if we're worried about women's rights and minority rights like the Hazaras, like we're worried about the Shia Hazaras getting wiped out by the Taliban, right, how come we don't have the same concern for minority rights and women's rights in Syria where it's the Assad regime that, while imperfect, is the greater friend to secular women's rights and to minorities?
So why do we have two different standards between Afghanistan and Syria?
It just shows that we don't believe in any of it.
It's all about money and power.
Yeah, they, you mean, not we, but yeah.
Yeah, they, they, yeah.
You know, the United States government in Washington and the military industrial complex.
Yeah, and the partisans who follow this stuff.
I mean, you know, I'm so glad I quit Twitter, but I've had reason to peek at it in the last couple of days and, in fact, just looking at some of Trump's tweets and stuff.
And then to see all the liberals saying, oh, you're betraying the Kurds in this way.
I read a thing where Max Blumenthal this morning was talking with Aaron Mateo.
It's a transcript of their talk or something.
And they're talking about how Common Dreams is retweeting David Frum and saying, oh, no, the betrayal of the Kurds.
People just get so twisted about this stuff.
But, you know, so we do need to talk about what about the Kurds, though, because it almost seems, I stress almost and not really, but come on, in the construct, you could frame this as, you know, a Trumpian sabotage of withdrawal from anywhere.
That instead of trying to figure out a way to really negotiate a peace between the Kurds and the Turks and perhaps the government in Damascus on the way out of there, instead he does it as a surprise.
And, in fact, even says, hey, you guys want to invade green light.
We'll get right out of the way and essentially concedes to the invasion.
And then only later to say, by the way, you better not go too far, or else I'll wage a total economic war against Turkey in revenge for that.
What a ham handed disaster.
And where Obama gave him the talking point that withdrawing from Iraq is, you know, what caused the rise of ISIS.
And he gave him that talking point not by withdrawing from Iraq, but by supporting the rise of ISIS and their friends in Syria, leading to the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq as well.
But anyway, he discredited the Iraq withdrawal with that.
And then now it seems like Trump, you know, again, like wink, nudge, joking around, could be deliberately, you know, sabotaging withdrawal from Syria just with the public relations.
That we can't just leave.
We have to set these guys up for disaster on our way out the door.
Yeah, it seems to me that there's really only three options in Syria.
And you and I did talk a little bit just before I published my last anti-war article on the subject.
But, you know, we can attempt a cleaner exit.
Cleaner, not clean, which would involve what you're talking about, some sort of, you know, deal making between Assad, the Kurds, the Turks, like find a way to leave without green lighting, ethnic cleansing, you know.
The second option is to betray the Kurds.
And the third option is to stay forever.
And, you know, I don't know about you.
Well, I do know about what you think.
But like the second and the third options aren't so great.
I mean, yes, the Kurds, you know, they're not – there's no way that without American air power and special forces and top cover, there's no way that the Kurds could maintain some sort of independent country.
Now, they may be lucky enough to get a degree of autonomy from Assad, you know, because Assad, even though he's winning, he's worn out.
So I think that you brought up a great point that I sort of added in the article of, you know, look, expect the Kurds, if they do get like fully betrayed by the United States, expect them to reach out to Assad rather than, you know, fall under the thumb of the Turks, especially because, you know, and we haven't mentioned this yet, but I think it's really important.
Turkey has like 3.6 million Syrians, refugees, mostly Sunnis, right, in their country, and they don't want them there, right?
They want to get rid of them.
And so they're talking about like resettling these guys in the 25-kilometer safe zone or even maybe a little deeper in eastern Syria where they're not from.
I mean, this is like settler colonialism.
I mean, it's going to totally upend any sense of stability in that region.
And so I think you're right that there has to be some sort of grand bargain with Assad and Turkey.
And oh, by the way, Russia's probably got to be involved in that conversation as well.
And we've just got to get over this obsession with Russia and say, look, they're credible players in Syria.
I mean, they hold a strong hand and they're going to have to be involved.
And the threat of Russian power is going to have to be involved in keeping the Turks in line to some extent.
Yeah.
And look, before the war, I mean, things weren't great, but everything was perfectly stable before 2011 there, at least in terms of the Kurdish relationship with Damascus and Turkey.
So there's your status quo ante to, you know, try to get back to.
It makes perfect sense that the Kurds would have a certain level of autonomy, but that the Syrian army would guarantee the border there with Turkey.
And the Turks, as well as the Americans and the Saudis and everyone else, ought to realize, obviously, that the game is up by now.
I was talking with Reis Ehrlich and he was saying that, well, you know, obviously the reason that the Turks are still back in Al-Qaeda in Idlib is because they might need them to fight against the Kurds or at least keep them as leverage to, what, keep Assad busy to keep Assad from making an alliance with the Kurds?
I don't know what all.
But it seems like the Turks ought to be persuadable at this point that the war is over and that they don't, if the Syrian army can fill in that border space instead of the Turkish army, then, you know, their alleged concerns about Kurdish power there should be allayed and then they have no use for Al-Qaeda anymore.
And so those guys can finally get hung out to dry and the war could finally be ended.
Yeah, there's a level of dishonesty and self-delusion about this war.
Idlib is like this final little, you know, carved out section of rebels, you know, and it's just like the war is over, guys, you know.
But I'll tell you how desperate Turkey is.
I always get a kick out of, like, people making, like, very honest threats.
You know, I like it when, even if I don't like a guy, if I don't like a certain authoritarian, I find it refreshing when someone is, like, honest about what's really going on.
And I thought Erdogan yesterday was just so funny.
I mean, it's sad.
But he goes, he's making a speech, I believe, like in their parliament, and he threatens the EU.
Did you hear this?
He said if the EU keeps referring, if the EU refers to our operations in Syria as an invasion or an occupation even one more time, then we're going to send 3.6 million Syrians in their direction and we're going to destabilize them.
Because what Erdogan knows is that Europe doesn't want to touch these Syrian refugees.
And in fact, the flood of Syrian refugees and Libyan refugees into Europe has destabilized a lot of those governments and put a lot of right wingers in charge.
And so I just thought it was a brilliant, you know, I mean, it was desperate, but it was like he is not afraid to threaten the EU.
He says if they even use the word invasion one more time, he's going to unleash the refugees.
Now, I don't know that it'll really do that, but it's an interesting thread.
And it points to just the mess that has been created over the course of this, you know, now eight year civil war.
And most people just do not understand that context.
And that's, I think, what you and I are here to do is just rip down some of the veneer and show like what's really going on and that it has some long roots.
And that America, like you pointed out, I mean, it almost makes you want to believe in conspiracy theories because it's like America in every one of its actions in the greater Middle East.
And Syria is maybe the worst example as like empowered or created the very enemies that we then have to intervene to fight.
And it almost makes you want to believe that like this is all purposeful.
You know, like it's like a formula for forever war or something.
I mean, I don't always necessarily want to go that far because I am a little bit of an Occam's razor guy.
But, you know, it's hard not to start feeling that way.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, look, it's basic economics that all government programs are dependent upon not solving the problems that they're created to solve.
Otherwise, they go out of business.
They lose their monopoly and their budget gets cut.
And so it's, you know, it's not always as deliberate as, I know, let's create a giant new battle space for al Qaeda.
So we have a problem to fight five years from now as much as just, hey, if we want to check Iran by hurting Assad and that, you know, leads to the rise of ISIS, we can manage.
You know, and they just they just figure it's as a side effect.
They don't aren't that concerned.
Again, back to Mike, what Michael Oren says, you know, I always pick on him for saying, oh, Iran's nuclear technology, where he's playing up Assad's side of the war.
But what he says about the jihadists is revealing to where he says essentially what something like they have rifles and RPGs.
In other words, even when they have a state, they don't really have a state.
They're a bunch of nobodies.
They don't even count as infantry, these guys, essentially.
And so what threat could they ever really amount to?
You know, as they used to say in the Bill Clinton years in the Pentagon, that terrorism is a small price to pay for being a superpower.
So it's not like these guys really have a state that can really wage a war in any sense.
The worst thing they can do is stateless type attacks, the worst of which would be knock down our skyscrapers with hijacked planes.
But, you know, there are other things that they can do.
But from the point of view of a strategist, that's nothing compared to the Iranian axis, which stands in our way of regional hegemony.
And especially when everything we do to confront them only backfires and empowers them even more.
Right now we've got more Iranian influence in the region than ever and more Al-Qaeda type jihadists in the region than ever before.
Right when you and I are saying it's time to call this whole thing off, things literally are as bad or worse than they've ever been.
And so the hawks have a point that, no, look at how bad we've screwed everything up.
We can't stop now.
I'm not saying I buy it, but I'm just saying they can sure point to quite a few continuing problems around the region.
Yeah, you know, it kind of reminds me of like their strategy.
It basically amounts to that country music song, you know, if you're going through hell, keep on going.
Like they've ruined everything they've ever, you know, recommended has turned to just crap.
Right.
And then they have the argument that like, OK, we messed it up so bad before, but trust us now we need to fix the problem.
Right.
And so to me, they've lost all credibility, though, being their point is basically like, well, yeah, we're screwing it up, but we just got to follow through.
We just got to see it through.
There's no turning back now.
And I'm like, no, there is, though.
I mean, there is like just stop.
Stop.
How do you how do these how do these, you know, neocon neoliberal retreads even get airspace, you know, in the media?
It's mind blowing.
These guys, they should be discredited once and for all.
And yet they still dominate.
And so, again, here I am with Trump.
Like, I think there's a lot of ways to read what he's doing.
And I'm not sure.
I mean, the man is almost unknowable.
But there is a part of me that got a lot of joy out of reading the accounts of these anonymous American commanders in Syria, you know, because they all said to the media, of course, they did it under anonymity because they're still on active duty.
They said, oh, we were blindsided by this.
We had no idea.
Like, we had no idea he was going to do this.
You know, we were totally blindsided.
Isn't that awful?
But then there's a part of me that's like, maybe that was Trump's point.
Maybe he doesn't trust them.
Maybe he doesn't buy their advice anymore.
Maybe he he he felt that he had to do it suddenly in order to get it done because he would have lost so much political capital if he'd like, you know, if he announced it far ahead of time so that by the time it was time to go, he might have been either dissuaded or, you know, sort of politically forced to pull back.
I actually got an incredible amount of joy out of the defense officials being blindsided, you know, because I just don't feel bad for them.
You know, I don't feel bad for them and I don't think that they have any they don't have any useful advice and they haven't for 18 years.
So I was almost like, good on you, Trump.
You know, I don't like how he's doing it, of course.
And we've talked about why.
But I didn't I thought it was just almost it was really satisfying to see the defense officials be blindsided.
I hope he did it on purpose almost.
Yeah.
Well, and so, I mean, this is the thing is, you know, he doesn't really have a doctrine or ideology or anything, but he does have some feelings like this costs too much.
And what are we getting out of it?
Is that a feeling?
I think that's a feeling when it comes to Trump.
Right.
This has been going on too long and it's costing too much and we don't even get to steal the oil.
So what's it all for?
You know, this kind of just attitude.
And then I don't know if you saw this clip, but it was believable where he was talking about going to Dover and going to Walter Reed and seeing the grief of the mothers and the wives and then seeing the wounded soldiers who've given everything.
And then for what?
And, you know, repeated that, you know, as he said in the campaign, he said a few times more recently, you know, as president, that as he puts it, going into the Middle East was the worst decision ever made.
You know, I guess he doesn't know about Woodrow Wilson, but still, you know, worst thing America ever did was go there at all, have anything to do with this stuff, which you could even interpret as him throwing Bush senior and Iraq war one under the bus too, that after the Cold War, we just should have had nothing to do with going to Arabian lands.
This whole thing is nuts.
And, you know, boy, you can see why they hate hearing that.
But, and he knows why we love hearing that.
But apparently, he just doesn't have the wherewithal to see it through.
And I guess you're right that I guess one way to interpret this was he knows that if he's going to do this, and maybe parentheses anything like it in the future, he's just going to have to spring it on them and, and let them know kind of at the very last minute.
But I keep saying, because I can't think of anything else to say here, that we got so many wars to end, that he could end a war every couple of months between now and election day, and he'd be Trump the Great.
And every time they're still complaining about him ending the last war, he could announce the end of another war.
And he could just say, you know what, I don't give a damn if Al-Shabaab takes over Mogadishu at all.
Shrug.
We're leaving.
Bye.
And, you know, I don't know.
I think he would get reelected.
That would probably at least, politically speaking, would be the best thing that he could do for himself at this point is give the state a real reason to hate him.
You know, they want to overthrow him, make it worth it to even have this fight.
But he just, he's just too, you know, self-centered of a person to see this path, I guess.
He just can't see it.
No, he can't.
Sometimes I wish that he was, you know, sly like a fox, you know, but I just don't think so.
I mean, I think he does have some good instincts.
No, he's sly like a thief, kind of, but not a very good one necessarily.
Yeah, exactly.
Sometimes I wish that he was playing some sort of long game and that he was going to surprise us all by doing what you're recommending because I think I would really find that refreshing.
But you're right.
I think it would be politically sound.
I mean, his people are going to stay with him.
You know, his people aren't going to abandon him because he gets out of Syria.
I mean, they love the guy.
And this idea that, oh, if he leaves Syria, then, you know, he's going to lose his right-wing support because they love Ward.
No, they don't.
I mean, maybe in the Beltway they do, maybe in the think tanks they do, but the Trump coalition is not like David Frum.
You know what I mean?
Like, he's the outsider.
He's the one that doesn't fit any longer.
And so I think he could win a lot of political capital landing.
And Warren has plenty to end.
You're right.
He could end one every three months until the election, and we'd still be in a couple.
But yes, he should just yawn when they say, oh, no, Al-Shabaab's going to take Mogadishu.
And he should say, that sounds like a Somalian problem to me because that's what it is.
Yeah.
And even better, he could say, yeah, but that's all George Bush and Barack Obama's fault.
Everybody knows that, you know, because it's true.
And he could say the same thing about Yemen and the same thing about Afghanistan.
And of course, all these things, as you said previously, and it's worth reiterating, all these things are just as bad or worse under him than the way he got them from Obama.
He's escalated essentially every one of these wars.
The war against the Islamic State has wound down, of course, just because it didn't last that long as a state, you know, from its height to where it is now.
But still, it's still true.
And he's Donald Trump, so he can spin everything all kinds of ways and phrase it however he wants in a way that other politicians probably couldn't, where he could just ignore his role in extending all this the last few years and could just blame it on dummy Bush and wimp Obama for not doing the right thing or following through or getting it done.
And then, so therefore, the American people agree and the Republican voters of America agree.
It's time to call this whole thing off, man.
Forget about it.
And that would absolutely be the best politics.
And it'd be such a great psyop on the entire left and the entire Democratic Party from a partisan Republican point of view.
I'm not one.
I'm just giving advice.
You know, this is the way that the Republicans, that the Trump government, the Trump campaign should see it.
What a great way to screw the Democrats is have to make them explain to the left that, no, no, no, we have to stay in these wars.
Vote for us so we can stop Trump from ending the wars and let that be the campaign slogan of the Democrats in 2020 and see how good it does them.
And the power of Trump to do that to them is right in his hands.
And you make it all personal, right?
He could do that to Pelosi or something.
I don't know.
Somebody tell him I said that.
Seriously, it's a winning line.
It's a winning narrative to blame it all on Obama and Bush, because the great thing about that is those two people are, I mean, even a lot of Republicans are frustrated with Bush at this point.
Like Bush didn't leave, you know, in the good graces of Trump's base largely.
And, of course, Obama is like the ultimate evil from their perspective.
And, you know, he wouldn't be wrong by blaming most of these wars, most of these foolish interventions on Obama and Bush.
And it sells.
It would sell.
And it would put the liberals in that crazy predicament of having to go—they have two choices, right?
If he starts saying, I'm running on ending these wars, then that means that, you know, the progressives in the Democratic primary, right, the more left wing of the group, would have to either double down and say, no, I'm going to end the wars faster, right?
I'm even more anti-war than you, but that's going to not play so well with the Democratic establishment, which still has a lot of power.
Or they could stay—they could take the Rachel Maddow angle and suddenly be pro-war, you know, suddenly turn on the very thesis of her book and become pro-war.
And it would be satisfying to watch the hypocritical Democratic Party have to do—you know, have to like jump through hoops in that way, you know, have to contort themselves because it would expose them for what they really are, which is just a more polite brand of warmongers.
Yeah.
Especially when you have, what, three or four handfuls of Democratic candidates still, and none of them are any good on this.
I mean, Bernie's slightly good on some things sometimes.
And, you know, Tulsi Gabbard is better on more things most of the time.
But the rest of them?
Absolutely useless on this and would be exposed as such, too.
Now, I'll give Elizabeth Warren a little bit of credit.
I think you and I may have talked about that before, where she at least—Rachel Maddow said, oh, don't you hate Trump for wanting to get out of Afghanistan and Syria, you know, last year?
And Warren said, nope, sorry, man, I'm for that.
I don't care if it's Trump doing it or anybody else.
Those are two things that we got to do.
So I give her a little credit for saying that.
I'm not saying I would count on her to implement the policy herself in real life, but anyway.
Yeah, I agree.
I've written so many times, I'm like sick of writing about it, that just like the Democrats lack a real foreign policy alternative and it's going to hurt them, you know.
And yeah, maybe most Americans vote on immigration, health care and taxes.
That may be true.
But the really important thing to remember is that it's Congress that does those things, not presidents, right?
And they can stifle even a popular president, right, because it takes two thirds to do some things and it takes 60 votes to do others.
And in tribal Washington, that's just not going to happen, right?
There's no one side is going to have that many votes.
So a president can be stymied on every single domestic proposal, but on foreign policy.
And it's not a good thing, but it's a reality.
The president has unlimited power.
And so that's what we should really be spending most of the debates on.
That's what we should really be focusing on as Americans voting for a president as foreign policy, because when you elect a president, you're giving him the keys to the national security state to some extent for four years, you know, and he's going to do what he wants.
And, you know, I think that's why we really should talk about foreign policy.
But the Democrats have ceded that ground to the Republicans since the middle of the Cold War.
Right.
The Democrats are soft on communism.
Now they're soft on terror.
They've handed foreign policy over to the Republicans on a silver platter and said, beat this drum over our heads anytime you want.
And we're not even going to fight it.
And it's pathetic.
Well, but you also have the whole social dynamic of essentially the rank and file of the right have been the biggest faction outside of power itself in the country in support of the wars.
And yet, you know, many of them are your contemporaries from the wars and relatives of them.
And it's them getting sick and tired of the wars and really supporting Trump because he had promised to end the wars.
You know, that is the most important turn in American politics right there, because if they don't support the wars, then who does?
You know, because even if the liberals can be made to sort of kind of, you know, certainly be quiet during Obama.
And, you know, as you said, you know, maybe turn a little bit mad out some of the time.
Essentially, their heart isn't in any of that.
But so wait, whose heart is in it?
If no one's heart is in it except Raytheon's, then that's not good enough.
And that can't not last.
You know, there has to be some segment of the population who can be identified as seeing things from the hawks point of view.
And that's shrinking dramatically.
But the narrative that it's shrinking and the narrative that the anti-war right is growing is, you know, really important to highlight and emphasize because I think it really is true.
And you can see that the mileage that Trump gets out of it.
It's not like he's appealing to left wingers with that stuff.
You know, it's his own people that rallied to that and say, yeah, that's right.
You know, I lost my little brother over there.
And so I'm not talking for me.
I'm speaking for some anonymous guy over there.
And so that's why I wouldn't support Hillary, who was going to try to get my other little brother killed.
You know, it's kind of.
Right.
But even they're tired of it after 18 years.
But the thing I've noticed with my friends, like with a vast majority of my friends, is they don't go where I went.
Right.
They don't turn, you know, left ish.
They are anti interventionist, but not in like an ideological sense, more in like a practical sense.
And they trust Trump more than they trust the Democrats.
OK, so these anti-war veterans, they're anti-war, but they're not like running to join Veterans for Peace and Kumbaya.
They've put their hope.
They've put their stock in Trump, who they find to be refreshingly honest.
And they think he has the better chance, and they might be right about this, of ending these silly wars.
And so it's put I mean, the Democrats have done a horrendous job of gaining the support of veterans.
Horrendous.
I mean, they've shot themselves in the foot over and over again.
And that's why organizations like Veterans for Peace are literally dying demographically.
Right.
Because they're all like leftovers from the Vietnam era.
And they're great guys.
But, you know, there's no young people in that room.
When I give speeches as a veteran for peace, I'm usually the youngest guy in the room.
I mean, always.
And these two thirds of Afghan and Iraq vets, I argue with my friends all the time because I'm not a Trump guy.
But they are anti-war in like an earthy, practical sense.
And they don't trust the Democratic candidates to do it.
Their heart is more with Trump.
And that's scary, but it's a reality.
And I'll tell you what, it should be like the canary in the coal mine for the Democrats.
But they won't.
They'll pass up the opportunity.
They'll lose again.
Well, and, you know, just think about what a commonsensical view it is that America cannot bite off and chew the entire rest of the world from here.
That doesn't make much sense over the long term, does it?
How long are we going to go on like this?
Through the rest of the century?
America must dominate everything in spite of the rise of, you know, China and India and, you know, Russia's still independent power in Eastern Europe and all of these things.
And what, we're going to go back to like the early 20th century policy in Latin America?
Or Cold War policy in Latin America?
What's the point of maintaining an empire that nobody wants other than paying a bunch of Raytheon stockholders and Lockheed stockholders their dividend checks at the expense of everybody else in the world?
The whole thing's crazy.
And that's not some kind of liberal hippie point of view.
You know what I mean?
That's perfectly Republican if you want.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, there's a reason why most of the anti-war traction on the Internet and on podcasts tends to come from like a libertarian bent.
You know, the left isn't paying a whole lot.
I mean, some elements are on the far left, but most of the left isn't really worrying about this.
It's not their priority, right?
They're like way more concerned about bathrooms and gender.
I mean, look, I'm in favor of a lot of the stuff they are.
So I'm not saying this is an attack on the left, but I'm saying as long as we're more focused on pronouns than ending war, I'm not saying that those two aren't linked or aren't important.
What I'm saying is from a practical point of view, it alienates many of the American people.
It alienates many straight white males.
I mean, none of that stuff compares to bombing people to death.
You know, so it's just a matter of priorities, too.
I like to call it policy triage, right?
That's what we need.
Yeah, there you go.
That's a good way to put it.
Practical policy triage.
I better triage my calendar for this afternoon because I'm late.
I'm supposed to be getting interviewed right now, in fact.
So I better cut you off and let you go.
But thank you so much for coming back on the show, Danny.
You're great on everything.
And everybody listen up here, too, before you click away.
It's Secretary of Defense Incorporated is another article after the United States' betrayal about the Kurds in Syria.
This one was originally at Truthdig, but it's also at Antiwar.com.
And this is all about the business end of the Pentagon and speaking of Raytheon and the boys over there.
Great piece.
So please go and check that out.
Sorry we didn't have time to talk about this one today.
But everyone, please go read it.
Thank you again, Danny.
Oh, thanks, Guy.
We'll talk soon.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
