10/31/18 Conn Hallinan on the Syrian Chessboard

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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 whose wings?
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, we killing them.
We'll be on CNN like say our names, been saying it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world, then there's going to be an invasion.
Okay, guys, check it out.
I got Con Hallinan from Foreign Policy in Focus and his own blog, which is Dispatches from the Edge.
And this one is called The Syrian Chessboard.
Welcome back to the show, Con.
How are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
I'm glad to be here.
I'm fine.
How about you?
Good, good.
I'm good, too.
Let's talk about Syria.
This is a great one because there are so many players on the board there.
So everybody, picture a map of Syria in your head as best you can.
Con's going to help break it down, who's who and where, and what's the state of what's left of the allied-backed revolt in Syria now.
Well, you start with, Patrick Coburn had a line about Syria, and he said that Syria is a three-dimensional chess game with seven players and no rules.
And to a certain extent, that's very true.
What is the case right now is that there are three kind of areas, theaters, if you want to call them, fronts, whatever.
There are different actors in all of them, although some of the actors are the same.
The three areas are in northern Syria, if you take a look at a map, it's the area that's up by the Turkish border.
And then there's eastern Syria, which is east of the Euphrates River.
Again, it's very close to, it borders Turkey but it also borders Iraq.
And then there's the area around the Golan Heights with the area that Israel seized from Syria in the 1973 war.
So all of these areas have sort of different actors, and some of them are on the same page, some of them are not on the same page.
But what you've got is, in the north, you have a situation with the Russians, who are providing air support and radar support and a certain amount of missiles, etc.
You have the Assad government, you have Turkey, and you have the Kurds.
So all four of these elements are right here in the north.
And this, the north, is the last stand, so to speak, of the anti-Assad insurgents.
They've essentially been pushed out of the rest of Syria.
The Assad government now controls about 60% of Syria, but probably closer to 80-85% of the population.
So you have this situation here, and the Turks are trying to occupy the area because they don't want the Kurds to be in there.
They're also anti-Assad.
The Russians and the Turks came to an agreement in which they would put off an attack by Assad in this last northern region, and that's been delayed by, well, it's not clear, but somewhere around a month.
Wait, when you say they hate Assad, you're saying...
But it may continue beyond that.
When you say they hate Assad, you're talking about the YPG does?
Yes.
So here you have this situation where Turkey and Russia were at each other's throats a couple years ago.
The Turks shot down a Russian fighter bomber, and as a result, what the Russians did was they bought in this very high-tech aircraft system called the S-400, and they also bought a lot of high fourth-generation interceptors to accompany their bombing missions.
And so the Turks have had to sort of pull back on that one, and this is a part of what they call Operation Olive Branch, the Turks call it.
So you have this sort of stalemate right now here.
You have, in theory, the anti-Assad people have withdrawn from the border, the northern area around Assad's troops.
They've moved out heavy equipment, heavy weapons, etc., and you have this temporary peace.
How long it's going to last, I don't know.
To the east of that, you have the Americans, the Kurds, the Turks, and Iran.
And this is an area which borders part of Iran, which the Iranians are very concerned about.
The Turks are extremely concerned about it, because this is the area where the Kurds are the strongest in Syria, and they have an alliance with the Americans to drive out the Islamic State.
So the Turks have also invaded this area, part of another operation called Euphrates Shield.
So here you have the Turks, the Kurds, the Americans, and the Iranians.
The Iranians and the Americans don't like each other.
The Turks and the Kurds don't like each other.
It's not clear whether the Americans are going to really back the Kurds, and the Iranians want the Americans out of there.
The Assad government is not really involved at this point.
They're just sort of on the edges, waiting to see what's going to happen.
Again, there's not a lot of fighting going on here, some against the Islamic State.
But you have these four actors, and all of them, to a certain extent, have different agendas.
The Turks and the Iranians are kind of on the same page.
They're not on the same page as the Americans.
Nobody's on the same page as the Kurds, except the Americans, maybe.
This is the situation in the east.
And then you have a very tense situation around the Golan Heights.
Because here you have the Assad government in alliance with Iran.
Now, the Israelis have been, well, really for the last two years, more than two years, I guess, they've been carrying out bombing missions inside Syria.
And they've generally targeted the Iranians.
They've targeted weapon systems.
They've targeted anti-aircraft systems.
They've targeted interceptors.
They've targeted arms depots, et cetera.
All this is, of course, informal.
They don't say they do it, and the Syrians actually don't really accuse them of doing it.
They've been very quiet on this.
That kind of changed recently, but what happened was that the Russians had an electronic surveillance plane with a crew of, like, 15.
And it was flying around, sort of monitoring communications and radar systems and all this kind of stuff.
And a couple of Israeli F-16s slipped in to the radar shadow of the airplane.
The Syrians picked up the F-16s and fired at it with an old system called the S-200.
Actually, the same one that shot down Gary Powers, I'll show you how old it is.
And it didn't hit the F-16s, but it got the Russian plane.
The Russians blamed the Israelis.
They said that it was, the Israelis were using the plane as a shadow.
And as a result, what they did was that they upgraded the Syrians' anti-aircraft system.
So you have this tense relationship here now.
The Russians really don't want to fight the Israelis.
The Assad government definitely does not want to fight the Israelis.
They've been absolutely quiet about this.
They have never responded in any way to these Israeli attacks, because they know they wouldn't stand a chance.
And the Iranians, the Russians are trying to lean on the Iranians to get away from the Israeli border.
But the Iranians are claiming that they, the Iranians, that the Iranians have to get out of Syria.
The Americans have suddenly started demanding that.
So if this sounds like three-dimensional chess with multiple players and no rules, then you've got a pretty good idea of how incredibly complex this is.
And solving it is going to be extremely difficult, though it is doable.
Yeah.
Well, I'm reminded of what Patrick Coburn said at the start of this thing, which is he feared it was going to be like Lebanon, where it lasted 15 years, and there's too many factions that once they start fighting, that their differences will just be too irreconcilable.
But it certainly could have been worse.
It's been really bad, but at least they didn't get, you know, Ayman al-Zawahiri on the throne in Damascus, like Hillary wanted, huh?
Yes.
Yes.
Yes, indeed.
And I think that in some ways, there is a kind of move toward a resolution.
The Islamic State has been pretty much defeated.
Now that doesn't say I think the Islamic State is going to go away, because the Islamic State is in places like Yemen.
It's all over the place.
And you know, it's not like it was a national organization, like the Taliban, something like that, which really had a geographical location.
For a while, it had a geographical location, because it's set up in Emirate.
But that's been crushed now.
So now they're just really basically an ideological terrorist group, and they don't need territory to do that.
So they've been defeated, but they're still going to be a problem.
With the Turks, the Turks now have two occupations going on.
They've got this one in the north and the one in the east.
And Turkey's in deep trouble internally.
Their economy is in terrible shape.
They have huge debts.
The lira has lost 40 percent of its value over the last year.
So you've got a very difficult economic situation going on in Turkey.
And Erdogan's party, the Justice and Development Party, has always built this reputation on keeping unemployment down and the economy humming.
Well, it's not humming right now.
It's sputtering very badly.
And there are national elections coming up in next year, in 2019.
Erdogan wants to make sure that the Justice and Development Party does well.
And so they're concerned about this occupation and how it's going to sit with the current situation with the Turkish economy.
So you have to kind of throw that into the mix as well.
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All right.
So let's go back over some more of this stuff like what you said in the beginning.
So first of all, on the Kurdistan thing, it just seems to me, and we've really seen this coming all along, right, that the Americans have really gotten Syrian Kurds into a lot of trouble here.
When the war first started, they were kind of sitting it out, because as you're saying, they sort of have their own little geographical location.
So they weren't taking on Assad, but they were enjoying their new autonomy a bit.
But then American and allied support for the revolution ended up growing into the Islamic State, which was a bridge way too far blown up in Obama's face, kind of a mixed metaphor sort of thing.
And so then he had to launch Iraq War III on the Iraq side of the border, and whatever you call the Syrian side of that, the ISIS war or whatever in Syria on the western side of the border there.
And that meant mostly backing these YPG Kurds and their armed group against the Islamic State, which really built up their power and only made them more and more and more of a target for Erdogan, the pseudo-president kind of sort of dictator of Turkey there.
And so now it seems like the only thing that could protect the Kurds from him going ahead and really invading would be if they had a new deal with Assad that said, okay, you can be the government of Kurdistan again, give us some kind of autonomy, but we'll let you go ahead and have SAA bases in the region here and this kind of thing, if nothing else, to keep the Turks out.
But you emphasize that, yeah, the YPG, they really don't get along with Assad at all these days.
But I'm thinking, you know, in the scheme of things, they're going to have to make that deal or not.
Is that just my imagination?
Is there a move for them to make that deal?
No, I think, as a matter of fact, Scott, they've already made some movement in that direction.
One of the things is that the Russians have been leaning on the Assad government to come to some kind of agreement with the Kurds, because the Russians' opinion is that if there's a war on the Kurds, it's just a big section of the population.
You know, of course, as you know, it's divided between southern Turkey, northern Iraq, some in Iran, western Iran, and of course in eastern Syria.
But if there isn't some kind of resolution of the Kurdish question, you're just going to have an ongoing, you know, low-level civil war that runs on.
And the Russians are convinced that that's going to be a disaster.
So they're leaning on Assad to come to some kind of agreement.
And preliminary talks have taken place, and nobody is at this point saying exactly who's proposing what.
But I think you're right.
I think your point about the autonomy is right.
I think the Kurds will cut a deal with Assad, because they recognize that the Turks, and particularly Erdogan, are, you know, you can't deal with them.
Erdogan is just totally focused on the Kurds as a danger.
And so the only thing they can do is to cut a deal there.
Now there, I think, the Iranians and the Russians can play a positive role.
The Iranians don't care much about the Kurds.
They have a Kurdish problem in their west, but it's relatively small.
And they don't have any particular thoughts, one way or the other, about the way the Kurds are going to act in Syria.
What the Russians are pushing, and if the Iranians get in and lean a little bit, then I think what you're going to do is you're going to kind of force the Turks out, and you're going to get an agreement between the Kurds and Assad, although, you know, there's an old expression in Kurdish that the only friends that Kurds have are the mountains.
And there's a certain, you know, they've been double-crossed by everybody, as you said.
Especially the USA.
They've been double-crossed by us.
How many?
Three times they've been double-crossed that I can remember.
And they're going to, you know, they're going to get double-crossed again.
But this time, I think they're in a better situation.
They are really the only effective fighting force against the Islamic State.
They are allied with some Syrian groups and some Arab groups, but, you know, the Kurds have a lot of experience fighting, and they're a very well-trained group of people.
And they've been given some heavy equipment by the Americans.
Now, the problem, of course, is the Americans have said nothing on this.
Well, and how bad do the Americans still need them?
We have Marines there in Kurdistan with them.
And the Islamic State, they're rousted out of Raqqa.
They're basically at some holdouts out in the desert.
Almost completely liquidated by now, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't think, you know, at this point, I think one of the reasons why the Americans have not said anything is because I don't think they need the Kurds.
The Kurds did what they wanted to do.
We have about 2,000 troops in Syria at this point.
Well, and they say now, and this goes straight to kind of what's going on in D.C. where Trump has said at least a couple of times, as soon as ISIS is defeated, we're leaving.
And then Rex Tillerson announced, belay that order.
We are not leaving.
We're there for Iran.
That's why we were backing al-Qaeda there in the first place, to try to check Iran.
And that hasn't changed.
And then he got fired.
I don't know if that's why he got fired, but that was one thing.
But then this happened again just recently, what, a couple of months ago.
Trump said, we're only there because of ISIS, and now that ISIS is defeated, it's time to go.
And they said, nope, we're there because of Iran.
And they announced, they had this guy announced in the Washington Post, this whole new policy that's basically, never mind anything, history's starting all over again, again.
And now all we know is Iran, for some reason, has gained in power and influence in Syria, and something's got to be done about that.
And then that's the pretext for keeping the bases in Kurdistan there.
Yeah, you're absolutely correct.
And I think that, you know, Bolton, who's the new national security advisor, Trump's new national security advisor, he's the one who made this big statement about Iran, we're going to stay in until Iran is out of there, and he's pushing that very hard, etc.
And of course, he's the one who's, who led, did everything he could to undermine the US, the Iran nuclear agreement between the US and the UN and Germany and France and Russia, etc.
And he's also the person who, in the process of dismantling a whole network of nuclear agreements.
So this is a guy who, in some ways, Trump says he wants to get out, but Bolton is one of these, these people that's kind of old fashioned, Cold War hardliner.
Yeah, he's the type to say, why even bother regime changing Assad, just kill the Ayatollah, then it won't matter if Assad is friends with Iran or not.
That's right.
And he figures that they can bring, he actually believes this, that they can bring Iran to its knees with the sanctions.
And then the same thing goes with the Russians.
And he's the guy who doesn't agree with international agreements.
He's gotten the INF agreement, the Intermediate Nuclear Force Agreement, which the Trump administration is withdrawing from.
It's just, he was opposed to that, Bolton was opposed to that, back in 2011, before they even had come to the conclusion that the Russians may or may not have been cheating on the INF agreement.
And so this is a guy who's opposed to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
He has put the brakes on a new START agreement to reduce the number of warheads.
He strongly supported getting out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
I mean, what's next?
I think the gloves are coming off, and I think it's only a matter of time before we're going to get out of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
We've got to test a new generation of nuclear weapons, and I think that's next.
And then it's going to be a world with not just two people, not just two forces like we used to have, Russia, the Soviet Union, and the United States in a nuclear arms race, but a nuclear arms race between Pakistan and India, a nuclear arms race that involves North Korea, a nuclear arms race between China, the United States, and Russia.
That's going to be a pretty scary world, Scott.
Yeah, but don't overlook how good this is going to be for nuclear weapons salesmen.
They are going to be doing great.
Oh yeah.
Well, they've already come up with this plan.
All the job holders there at Lawrence Livermore, you know, who don't want to have to work for a living.
Yeah, and they, see, they've been opposed to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty all the way through.
Because they want to test these things, and what they recognize, and this is why it's really important, is that one of the things the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty did was, if you can't test a nuclear weapon, you're not absolutely certain it'll work.
They're very delicate things, actually.
And you don't want to deploy a whole new weapon system unless you had an opportunity to test it.
And they're getting around that by using computers, the ones out at Livermore, to do that.
And doing that, they've redesigned this new nuclear warhead that they're going to be using in Europe, the B61.
And they've made it from a sort of a city killer to a penetrator, destroying underground command posts, and all of that kind of stuff.
They did that with a computer, but that wasn't particularly difficult.
But they want to design a whole new set of small nuclear weapons, with a minimal amount of blast and damage, so that they could be used without triggering a general exchange of nuclear weapons, of strategic nuclear weapons.
They can't do that, really, unless they can test them.
And that's why I think the next target here is the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
And if that goes, I don't know, I think we move to Antarctica, Scott.
Yeah, seriously.
Well, I mean, if anybody survives, it'll be in the Southern Hemisphere, yeah, but it might not even be them.
On this side is what...
We don't even know what is happening.
It's just that there's been a huge volume of...
Well, so the joke here, right, is that we really have nothing to fight about.
I mean, the Soviet Union really always was a paper tiger, other than their H-bomb arsenal.
And yet, they did occupy millions of people in Eastern Europe.
You could point to red parts of the map and say, listen, there's a threat there.
There's something there.
But now, there's no real reason, is there, to think that the Russians are coming West, that they have any interest whatsoever in blowing themselves up in that way.
Well, the other side of it is, look at a map in 1986, say, okay?
So look at a map in 1986 of Europe, and now look at a map today.
Tell me, who's going in what direction?
Yeah, exactly.
NATO went East.
Right.
And also, in the case of China, one of the things, you know, this whole drive now against the Intermediate Nuclear Force Agreement is so that we can deploy ground-based nuclear-tipped missiles in places like Japan and the Philippines and South Korea, etc.
Now, there are already, we have lots of intermediate nuclear-tipped missiles, but they're on airplanes and on ships.
And so, if we get rid of that agreement, we'll be able to not simply do, bring Russia, we'll be able to do the same thing with China.
And they say, well, the Chinese have lots of intermediate nuclear missiles.
Yeah, because they're not, they don't have an international kind of strategy of rule the world.
They probably are wanting to rule the world, but they want to do it through trade.
Their intermediate missiles are directed at those people who are their potential enemies in their theater, which is Japan and potentially India.
So, of course, they're intermediate nuclear.
That's the distances that we're talking about here.
For the United States to say it's unfair for the Chinese to have intermediate missiles and the Russians have these intermediate missiles, we don't, none of those missiles can strike us.
Yeah.
And as you're saying, the Russian ones are for the purposes of deterring the Chinese.
They're not facing West toward Europe.
No.
And the Americans know that.
And you know what is funny?
I don't know who it was, but I read some wonk talked about the five very serious things that you can do if the Russians are cheating on a nuclear treaty that are far short of withdrawing from the treaty, but that are very serious things.
And I forget what they all were, but it was basically made it clear that quitting and blaming it on them is just an excuse when, as you're saying, they want out of this treaty that Ronald Reagan signed with Gorbachev.
Absolutely.
I mean, the first thing you could do, Scott, is you'd say, okay, the Russians say that they're not cheating.
And they say that the anti-ballistic missile system that the Russians put up in the Czech Republic and Poland and Romania and the Czech Republic, that these are potential launchers for nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.
Okay.
So first thing you do is you say, all right, let's everybody get together and investigate.
Then we'll just have a meeting.
We'll send, it's all in the treaty that you have the right to inspect.
We won't do that.
We're not going to do that.
And we're not going to do it because we don't care.
Yeah.
That's even the first step, right?
Right.
That would be the first, that would absolutely be the first step.
The second thing you also do is you say, okay, let's talk about a worldwide ban on intermediate nuclear missiles, not simply on land, but also sea-launched and air-launched.
I mean, okay, that's a way to do it, isn't it?
We'll get rid of all, but they're not trying to do it.
They're not trying to renegotiate the agreement.
They're not trying to really investigate whether the, we haven't seen the evidence that the Russian missile violates the intermediate standards, you know, from 500 kilometers to 300 miles to like 1500 miles.
And so we haven't seen the evidence.
Now, maybe it does.
I mean, it's perfectly possible that this missile does that.
One of the things that the reason why I suspect it probably does is that when the Bush administration withdrew from the anti-ballistic missile treaty, what they did was that they moved these anti-ballistic missile launchers into Eastern Europe.
The Russians look at those as threats against their strategic nuclear missile force.
And they're correct.
They are.
They also deployed the anti-missile systems in Japan and in South Korea.
So from the position of China and Russia, what it looks like is they're being surrounded by these ABM systems.
At the same time, the United States is going on this big, massive push, $1.6 billion, to upgrade their nuclear forces.
Even if you don't like the Russians and the Chinese, you have to give them a perfect right to be paranoid about this.
They don't have to have conspiracy theories to think we're being surrounded with ABM systems.
And there's a new arms race in nuclear weapons.
It is not in anybody's interest.
And it really...
I got four grandkids, Scott.
I don't know what kind of world I'm giving them to inherit.
Certainly, this is one that we don't want to do.
Hey, tell me this, man.
Do you know, back at the time that they were pushing START II through the Senate and Obama, it was basically these Republicans, Democrats, to really push that, okay, we'll pass the START II treaty that had some pretty modest reductions in certain types of deployed nuclear weapons.
But in exchange, you have to give us this trillion, now already, as we could have predicted, $2 trillion project to completely revamp the entire arsenal and entire industry for making them, even.
But I wonder, did that just straight come from Honeywell and all the contractors?
Or was there like a big PNAC military doctrine that said why this was so necessary?
Was it simply about the money, really?
And then so that would mean the rest of what you're talking about is just the reaction to a big welfare program for H-bomb makers.
Well, you know, the thing is, Scott, I think it's all of that.
And that is, you have the arms makers, so they're pushing this.
And $1.6 trillion is a lot of money.
So you have the arms people, and they're certainly behind this.
Then you have the research community, which you already pointed out, you know, places like Los Alamos and Livermore.
You have the whole kind of research community, the lab community, et cetera, that wants in on this.
You have the weapons makers themselves, the Pantex plant, et cetera, where they're going to be designing these weapons.
Then part of this $1.6 billion is a replacement of what they call nuclear infrastructure.
So it means new airplanes, new boats, you know, new ships, new land forces, et cetera.
So that everybody tunes in on that.
Even if you're something like Lockheed Martin and you don't make nuclear weapons, you're still going to get a big hunk of that $1.6 billion.
So that's it.
Then there are people like Bolton and a lot of Democrats.
I mean, you're absolutely correct about that.
Democrats tend to be, you know, traditionally they've been worse on this stuff than the Republicans.
The Republicans have been more isolationist.
You have a whole community of politicians who have a vested interest in kind of restarting up the Cold War, and their view of the world is one in which American strength is going to eventually dominate the world.
We can spend the Russians and the Chinese into bankruptcy, because the myth is that it was the arms race around the strategic arms, the space-based stuff, that caused the Soviet Union to collapse, which is wrong.
It collapsed entirely because of internal reasons, contradiction that the system they set up wasn't working.
And it collapsed.
There are people who are saying right now, certainly Bolton is one of them, who thinks that they can basically drive the Chinese and the Russians into bankruptcy, and they can get the same outcome as they did when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
Well, it's a pipe dream.
Hey guys, check out my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, by me, Scott Horton.
It's about a year old now.
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I just have to edit it a hundred thousand times until it's good enough to put out as a book.
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Good work bringing it back to the Iran question there.
Yeah, we're just going to make this thing happen again in the same way.
It's going to be easy.
Just like they said about North Korea all this time, everybody but Trump, I mean, that don't worry, if we just crack down on them a little bit harder, the regime will fall over any minute.
It seems like killing them with kindness is working a lot better there.
But now, so back to, from globalized thermonuclear holocaust to the more localized one here in Syria.
I'm perfectly willing to give up for thermonuclear holocaust.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I don't know.
I think they could give up all the H-bombs and just keep the A-bombs.
And then we'll just have nuclear without the thermo holocaust.
And that seems good enough to me, if you're going to have a genocide, you know, I don't know.
I agree.
But yeah, so now Idlib.
And I want to get back to Golan in a minute.
So don't let me forget.
But in the Idlib province there, help me imagine the lines on the ground where you have these and those different sorts of jihadists.
This is, we're talking about a Northwest Syrian now at the Turkish border there.
And there's a ceasefire deal that prevented, preempted a Syrian army and Russian air force attack on the last of Al-Qaeda and allied forces there.
But then this deal was hatched to prevent that.
So what exactly does this deal do?
And who's where and how many's left of the real Al-Qaeda guys?
Well, the thing is that it's an incredibly diverse mixture.
First of all, there's the insurgent groups.
And as you say, they run from Al-Qaeda affiliates to the Syrian National Army, in other words, the people in the Syrian army that broke away from Assad and are fighting the Assad regime.
But there's about six or seven different varieties of insurgent group.
A lot of them don't agree with one another.
Some of them are allied with the Turks.
Some of them are basically hostile to the Turks.
And in theory, what Turkey is supposed to do is that Turkey's supposed to keep all of these groups coordinated, not attacking the Assad, the rest of Syria, and sort of keep them calm with the Turks in charge.
I don't think anybody can do that.
I mean, one of the great myths in the Middle East is you can control insurgent groups.
It's never worked, Scott.
Every single time somebody's tried it, it doesn't work.
Especially when they show up going, yes, Zarqawi sent me.
Where do you want me to, who do you want me to shoot?
Exactly.
And so you've got this thing.
Now, the Russians are very clear.
See, they cut the deal.
Assad was going to launch an attack in northwest Syria.
And so the Russians sat down with the Turks and they said, okay, we'll come to this agreement.
You take these groups, you back them off the border, you get rid of their heavy weapons, and we'll have joint patrols in this kind of demilitarized zone.
But this is for a limited amount of time, and at the time they were talking about a month.
I tend to think it's going to last a little more than that.
But the Russians don't want it to be a permanent situation.
They don't believe, they're very opposed to any kind of dismemberment of Syria.
So while they're talking to the Turks, they are very firm about the fact that the Turks have to get out of the northern part of Syria and the eastern part of Syria.
Because if they don't, then essentially what you've done is dismembered Syria.
And the Russians are opposed to that, absolutely.
So the Turks are going to have to do one of two things.
Either they're going to say, no, we're not going to get out.
In which case the Assad and the Russians may decide to attack.
Now, are the Turks going to fight the Russians and Assad?
I don't think they, I mean, they're a much more powerful army, but I don't think they have the resources to do that.
And I also don't think they really want to get into a fight with the Russians.
They could lose a lot of airplanes.
And is it that the Turks really need these fighters for use against the Kurds later, right?
Exactly.
So if America maybe would help strike a deal between the Kurds and Damascus on the way out the door, then that would deprive the Turks of the necessity of backing the last of these al-Qaeda guys and protecting them from the Russians.
Exactly.
And you know, it doesn't mean that the Turks don't have to be involved in that.
In other words, the Americans can sit down with the Kurds, with the Turks and the Kurds.
And I mean, don't get me wrong.
I'm not naive that the Americans are looking to stay rather than to solve the problem.
But I'm just saying hypothetically.
That's the point, Scott.
I don't know.
I mean, here, you're, you're, when you, as you pointed out, Trump has said now a couple of times, right?
That we want out.
As soon as we get the IS out of there, we want out.
And then you have Bolton and Tillerson and, you know, at this point, we don't know who's going to end up being, you know, we don't know whether Pompeo's going to remain secretary of state or whatever.
Now, they're saying, well, no, we're going to stay there until Iran gets out.
Well, Iran's never getting out.
So this means we have a permanent American occupation in eastern Syria.
Well, now, let me ask you about that part, though.
Now, so Iran is really there.
I mean, they always were friends and everything and helped back Hezbollah together in Lebanon and all that kind of deal.
But the real presence of the Iranian Quds Force and whatever IRGC guys or whoever are there is really, has been over these years, to protect from the CIA and allied-backed jihadist types.
And so they're really not needed anymore there.
Do you think they've just carved out a position?
And so just like any other government, they want to not give up anything?
Or maybe they could just pack up and go, and that would help satisfy part of the crisis here.
Well, they could pack up and go.
And I think what it is, Scott, is I don't think there's agreement.
That is, I don't think there's agreement in the administration on this about what to do.
I think the military wants to keep a presence there because they see the Islamic State as something that can reconstitute itself.
They'd like to get out of Afghanistan because they don't see any, that's a tunnel with no light at either end.
And they would like to get out of Afghanistan.
I think they'd like to keep a small presence in Syria.
I don't think that's going to be acceptable to Iran and to the Russians and to Syria.
So are the Americans going to then ally themselves with the Turks in order to keep a presence of Americans in Eastern Syria?
I don't see that happening.
I think what it is, is that we have an extremely incoherent policy right now in regards to Syria.
And until we get some coherence on that, I don't see where they're going at this point.
I know the Americans have begun to withdraw some of their heavy weapons from Eastern Syria.
They had a lot of artillery.
One of the things that the Americans did was that the Americans provided a lot of on-ground artillery against the Islamic State.
So they're withdrawing some of that artillery.
But I can't imagine they're going to get into a tussle with the Turks.
They are both NATO members.
But this is still an incredible mess, Scott.
And I think that there are just a lot of wild cards here.
I think that the Kurds, I think the point that you made early in the hour, which you said would be the most logical thing to do at this point, is to cut a deal with Assad.
And I think that's already in the works.
That would solve a lot of things, but wouldn't get rid of the Turks necessarily.
I mean, Erdogan has to withdraw those troops.
And he's an awfully stubborn guy.
Yeah.
All right.
Now on Golan, real quick here, Assad doesn't want the Golan Heights, right?
That's why this whole thing has been so stupid and horrible all along, because so much of it is to appease Israel and pro-Israel factions in the United States who demand this.
And yet Assad might as well have been Mossad this whole damn time.
So he's not going to try it.
He hasn't even taken the slightest move toward taking the Golan Heights, which is Syrian territory.
It's supposed to go without saying, but I guess it doesn't.
Yeah.
One of the things that the Syrians discovered early in the thing is, number one, you can't directly confront the Israelis militarily.
They tried to do that in the 80s.
And they got how many airplanes shot down?
I don't know.
Basically, they lost their air force.
And so they shifted from having an air force to having an anti-aircraft system.
And the Syrians have, in terms of anti-aircraft systems, Syrians have, besides maybe the Israelis, probably the most sophisticated anti-aircraft system in the Middle East.
And it's just being upgraded at this point.
They don't want the Golan Heights back.
I mean, they're not going to get them back, and they know that.
As a matter of fact, the Syrians have been keeping a distance from the border.
And there's been some tension between the Syrians and the Iranians on this question, because the Syrians are telling the Iranians, or Assad is telling the Iranians, don't provoke a fight with Israel.
Israel's looking for a provocation.
They want a provocation, so don't give it to them.
And at this point, I think the Iranians are going along with that.
Also, I think the Iranians are a little freaked about what's going to happen now in the next couple of days, because that's when these sanctions kick in.
And it's very unclear who's going to do what at this point.
At this point, the European Union, the Russians, and the Chinese, and the Indians have said that they do not intend to go along with the oil embargo.
But is that going to hold?
Don't know.
And I think the Iranians don't know either.
I think they're freaked about it.
I think they've got enough on their plate without getting in a fight with the Israelis right now.
Just to reiterate that, you're saying that, of course, they're not worried that the Syrians are going to try to reoccupy their territory on the Golan Heights.
They're just trying to see if they can pick a fight with Iranian forces in Syria as a pretext to launch a real war against Iran and drag America into one against Iran itself, not Iranian forces in Syria, but the nation.
And you know, that's exactly what Bolton has talked about quite openly.
They want a war with Iran.
Now, how are they going to get one?
That, I don't know, Scott.
I mean, the logical part of my brain says, oh, what?
Remember how Iraq turned out?
Wait till you deal with a country of 80 million people.
You know, it would be just...
Even just an air war would obviously spiral out of control in all kinds of directions.
It's hard to imagine what the outcome of that war would be, Scott, except that it's probably much worse than you can imagine, but they want to do it.
You know, that's some of them.
Yeah.
And I don't think Trump really wants to do it, but his whole team are a bunch of hawks.
I mean, the biggest dove is Mad Dog Mattis, who got fired for being such an Iran hawk back when.
Yeah.
And of course, you know, the Saudis are pushing this, particularly the Saudis in the United Arab Emirates are pushing for an attack on Iran.
You know, is it going to come off?
You know, I don't know.
I said at the beginning when the Bush administration was going to go into Iraq, I said, oh, you know, they're not really going to do it.
And then it is.
Yeah.
Oh, I knew they were.
Yeah.
Regime change.
That was the magic word.
I remember learning that in like 95 or 96 and going, oh yeah, this is irreversible.
You know, he goes and talks to the, you know, to the Iranian dissidents and he says, we're going to get rid of the mullahs and we're going to have a regime change in Iran.
Yeah.
I don't think so.
Yeah.
All right, you guys, that's Colin Hallinan.
You can check him out at fpif.org.
That's foreign policy in focus.
And also his own blog is dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com.
Dispatches from the edge.
Colin Hallinan.
Thank you very much, sir.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
Have a good one.
Okay.
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.