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All right, introducing Rajan Menon, and he's written this great article for the National Interest at nationalinterest.org, American Military Intervention Can't Save Syria.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
I'm doing well.
I really appreciate you joining us here on the show today, and I really like this article.
There was one particular fact in here that you mentioned that really piqued my interest, and I'll just go ahead and start with that.
I'll let you do your whole narrative of the war and all that as you tell it is very compelling, but the one thing that really piqued my interest was that you said that Erdogan's apparent interest in going after Assad was that he was really upset that Assad was moving forward with allowing or enabling, as you put it in here, a Kurdish statelet in northern Syria.
The reason this is so interesting to me is because we kind of talk about it on the show at least once a week here or something, just how counterproductive this has all been from Erdogan's point of view, or we would assume, since that's his greatest fear in the world is an independent Kurdistan in Syria, and yet that's exactly what he's created by this war and limiting Assad's influence over the Kurdish parts of Syria.
But what I think you're saying here is he was already moving that way in the first place, which is what got Turkey to, well, Erdogan go ahead and shoot himself in the foot and make things worse from that point of view.
But is that really right?
Could you explain what you mean about that, please?
Yes.
I'll give you some additional background.
I think when the rebellion against Assad began in 2011, initially it was not a violent protest, but the regime reacted quite drastically, and then it segued into a violent revolt.
And many of the people who were involved were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, with which Erdogan's party has long ties, and they were sympathetic to it.
Shortly after that, Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Qatar began funding what became a full-blown armed resistance.
In other words, they had intervened in what had become a Syrian civil war of sorts.
And Assad's main concern has been, I'm sorry, Erdogan's main concern has been that Assad at minimum is allowing a Kurdish statelet in the north, which is a big problem for Erdogan, given that southeastern Turkey is Kurdish majority region, and that in northern Iraq now you have a de facto Kurdish state.
Therefore, if he wasn't actively allowing it, promoting it, he was in effect allowing it to happen by focusing his guns elsewhere.
And this has been a problem.
This is also, by the way, a problem that's arisen between ourselves and the Turks, because our ground forces, in effect, in the war in Syria are the Turks, because we don't want to put our own troops on the ground, and for good reason.
Right.
Now, so, in other words, when the fighting broke out, Assad had to basically pick his enemies and who he was going to focus on, and he started to basically ignore the Syrian Kurds because they were the least of his problems when he's dealing with a bunch of bin Ladenite suicide bombers, etc., like that.
And then that's what made, that's what really convinced Erdogan to back the jihadists even more to go ahead and try to get rid of them so that, I guess, then they could go ahead and turn on the Kurds themselves, huh?
Correct.
I mean, the most radical elements in the opposition have been supported not so much by Erdogan, although he has.
It's really our good friends, the Saudis and Qataris.
And this is the reason.
For them, that is the Saudis and the Qataris, the Syrian conflict is not just a civil war in Syria, and their aim is not to protect civilians and so on.
They themselves have pretty abominable human rights records.
They see this as part of a continuing war between themselves and Shiite Iran for dominance in important parts of the Middle East.
Assad has long since had a very close relationship with Iran.
The group to which Assad belongs, the Alawites, are an offshoot of Shiism.
And the war has brought Iranian military advisors and some ground troops into Syria in a major way.
So what worries the Saudis and the Qataris above all is what they perceive to be an Iranian consulate, along with Hezbollah, the pro-Iranian militia-cum-political party in Lebanon.
So there's a larger context driving all of this.
And we have, in effect, been sucked into this.
Well, you know, it's interesting that George W. Bush used to pay Bashar al-Assad to torture and murder people for the United States, particularly these jihadi types and including some innocent people.
And so that doesn't make him really a sock puppet dictator of America's like Hosni Mubarak was or something like that.
But he was certainly compliant with America and the terror war.
And even though the worst hawks in America inhabited the Bush administration and were hell-bent on going to Syria and or Tehran, you know, Damascus and or Tehran, if they could, George W. Bush didn't let him do it.
George W. Bush, I guess, you know, we know from Seymour Hersh's reporting and others that he did support CIA covert action backing the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria to a limited degree, but nothing like this.
And yet Barack Obama has been perfectly willing to just run with this thing, as he told Jeffrey Goldberg, really in the context of what you were just saying about the regional civil war going on here, that, yes, getting rid of Assad would help take Iran down a peg.
And I guess since Bush had just given Baghdad to Iran, then taking Damascus from them was supposed to be the consolation prize, something like that.
Correct.
The real question is, once President Obama's term is over and he has, as you pointed out, not been inactive in the war on Syria, but he's in some sense held the line when it comes to no fly zones and airstrikes against Assad and so on.
The question I have about Secretary Clinton's administration is that it has within it both a strain of liberal internationalists and neoconservatives who really do believe that American military power can be used to shape outcomes in societies and move them toward democracy, notwithstanding the experiences we've had in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in Libya.
So time will tell.
But I rather suspect that we are possibly in for a more activist phase should she win the election.
Yeah.
You know, it's really too bad that the quote other side of the argument from the D.C. consensus is basically right now being represented by the big orange clown, Donald Trump.
And, you know, Stephen Walt had an essay in Foreign Policy saying, stop calling yourself a realist or stop saying things that sound sort of like what I say sometimes because you're making me and all the reasonable people look bad, that kind of thing.
And it really is reinforcing, right, the idea that all decent, humane book readers on the East Coast know that we've got to get rid of Assad.
And then there's, you know, Boobus Americanas, the the right wing redneck Donald Trump lover who doesn't want to do the right thing, but never mind them.
And it just seems, you know, when I see Hillary and I and I follow these liberal journalists on Twitter all day long, the group think and the consensus is so thick.
There's just there's basically no question that everybody knows that this is what must be done is we must save the jihadis from the Baathists.
Right.
Steve Walt is quite right in the sense that if one makes the case for non-intervention in Syria these days, one has to immediately say, now, I want to qualify this by saying I'm not a supporter of Donald Trump.
So when it comes to the realist non-interventionist case, he certainly made it harder for those of us who take that position to make it because his association with it has sullied the case.
You also then have to defend yourself against the preposterous allegation that if you don't favor intervention in Syria, then you are an isolationist.
I don't know what it means to be an isolationist.
Does that mean that you we sit at home and have nothing to do with the outside world?
I don't know any reasonable person who really thinks that.
It's the degree to which our foreign policy ought to be militarized and whether we should be doing all things for everybody everywhere using principally military means.
I mean, that is what the debate is about.
Right.
Well, and of course, yeah, I mean, among the isolationists, not even at the American Conservative Magazine, where you have Pat Buchanan and Daniel Larrison and the anti-war right, they favor trade and engagement and travel and education.
And they recognize it's a round planet that we're all living on.
They just don't want to get involved in in every kind of war.
And so, yeah, the isolationist smear is it.
It seems pretty ridiculous at this point, since no one can find an example of anyone saying that we should have no trade, no engagement.
We shouldn't even have ambassadors to Canada or Mexico.
You know, correct.
And even beyond that, neither the realist nor the anti-war right, which in some limited sense come together on certain issues, has argued that we should under no circumstances use military conflict.
I mean, I don't think very many people on either camp would take the position that when confronted with a threat like Nazi Germany, if there had been no other alternative, that war is not necessary.
I mean, one of the things that I will say that the far left needs a better to do better is to explain not only, well, what do they not like about what's happening, but if they were in control, what would they do?
Should we have an army?
Should we ever use military force?
And they haven't done that very effectively.
But in principle, I don't think any sensible person would say we ought not to have a military and we ought to never use force.
The debate is about when and for what purpose and at what cost.
Right.
Well, you know, I'm a libertarian and I do argue for the abolition of the entire national security state.
We don't need them.
We could defend ourselves better without them.
But you're right that that itself is a long, in-depth argument.
On the surface, we're all arguing from right from the assumption that the Constitution has not been overthrown.
The U.S. state is going to exist.
It is going to have some kind of army.
But then the question is, as you put it, really, you know, is collective security of the entire planet their mandate?
Or is it the defense of the lives and the liberty of the people of the United States of America?
And this has been a big discrepancy since the end of World War II, not just since the Bush administration.
Correct.
Even Scott, I take it that libertarians such as yourself, going back to classical libertarian theorists such as Robert Nozick, they don't make the argument that there should be no military.
It really is a question of the tradeoff between the state and the military component of the state and the surveillance component of the state and individual liberties.
And that's where the debate is joined.
So the idea that people who are critical of the Iraq war are woolly headed individuals who think that the world can be dealt with purely from a pacifist position.
I mean, that's an argument not even worth engaging.
It's not really a serious argument.
Yeah.
And I don't think you hear you ever hear libertarians arguing for a naive sort of utopia.
It's more like, actually, our government doesn't really defend us.
It only gets us into trouble.
And that really we're so our country is so big and so isolated from any threats in the world that really the best way to defend ourselves is to not even have a military.
We don't even need one.
The less government we have, the less government there is for some foreign power to come and try to take over.
And we all own guns anyway, so we can all defend ourselves from anybody who ever tried to attack us.
So right now they just they're planting nuclear missiles in silos all up and down, you know, the middle part of America, basically just making H-bomb targets out of the American people.
That's not really defense.
That's putting us all in much more danger.
But anyway, I don't want to get too far off into the theory where, because as you were saying, you know, there's there's woolly headed theory.
And then there's what we're talking about, which is the difference between can we have national defense without having a world empire, without trying to have preeminence and dominance in the Middle East, which is actually where we don't live.
You know, we're from North America.
The Middle East is the Middle East for a reason.
Right.
You know, I think underlying all of this is a broader problem.
That is, the Cold War is that has ended or so we are told.
But I frankly, you know, to 20 years now after the Cold War, don't really see in the country a fresh stock taking where we can speak about a post Cold War foreign policy.
In other words, very few people have answered the question.
The Cold War is over.
The Soviet Union is gone.
What ought to be America's purpose in the world?
What tools are appropriate to deal with what problems?
What is the role for military force?
And when should it be used?
And so we are kind of coasting on some version of a containment plus with tweaks here and there.
Right.
Yeah, well, and that's the thing is at the table there sit the neocons who never concede an inch and will never go away and always know they're right.
Like Helbrin's book says.
And then you have the liberal interventionists are the supposed opposite.
And they're just as much hawks.
In fact, of course, a lot of the neocons are still card carrying Democrats like people like Richard Perle.
Yes, it's not an accident, by the way.
Yeah, we have not an accident, by the way, that in both the Iraq war and the Libyan war, they came together.
Sure.
Well, and they and they still will.
And of course, when Hillary is the president, she'll be able to get nowhere on domestic policy.
So just like Obama, she'll have one place where she can be bipartisan and work with the opposition.
And that is in doubling whichever war.
I'm sure she'll have to do another whole surge in Afghanistan.
What's she going to do, leave again?
So she's going to do it.
But the non interventionists have no place at the table at all.
I mean, you have Ron Paul's Liberty Report.
But basically, even Stephen Walt is for, you know, containment with adjustments.
Right.
And that's as that's as dovish as you can get from the real foreign policy, so-called experts in the world.
And Doug Bandow is there at the Cato Institute and Ted Carpenter.
They make a great case for peace and non intervention, but they're not really part of the conversation.
Yes, that that that definitely that definitely is true.
And that has been true for a long time.
The other question to be addressed in the case of Syria is this.
Those who question the wisdom of military intervention are often put in the place of being, as I said in the piece, you know, latter day Chamberlains or completely, completely heartless individuals.
Underlying the critique of military intervention in Syria is not an endorsement of Assad.
I mean, you would have to be completely blind not to recognize what is happening in Syria and the number of people who have been killed.
So it's the argument is not Assad is a good guy or not.
It really comes down to a kind of tragic observation of what follows him.
There is there is talk about moderate Syrians, not quite sure exactly what that term means, which hasn't been defined.
But the choice confronting us is not between Assad and some secular liberal Syrian group that controls a lot of territory and can give Assad a run for his money.
It is the groups that the Saudis and Qataris and others have funded are Alsham and the Nusra Front, which has now changed its name and other groups like that.
So this is the situation.
It's not an argument that Assad is a nice person.
Yeah, of course.
Now, let me ask you this.
What is the purpose of one?
Look, I know a lot of it is is probably blown out of proportion.
I mean, the the media on this side certainly is is single minded in their determination to, you know, push for hawkish responses and all that.
But it seems like the Russians and the Syrians fighting the CIA back terrorists in East Aleppo.
Couldn't they be doing a much better job just sending in some infantry and and backing up infantry with?
I mean, obviously, I'm skipping the idea of everybody just cease fire, but I'm just saying in terms of the battle itself, why such terror bombing when it's actually and never mind morality, it's actually changing the balance of the argument back toward further American intervention against Assad when it's not like they're about to lose West Aleppo at this point.
And yet they're just slaughtering the hell out of people.
It just doesn't seem militarily like it makes much sense.
Yeah, I don't think it does.
And I think there's a huge civilian toll that's been taken.
And I do think I hope this doesn't happen, that there will be blowback against Russia for what has happened now.
Why are there not ground troops such as you've suggested?
The Syrian army is run ragged and they are largely dependent and people don't understand this, not on the regular Ba'athist army, which still exists, but on a hodgepodge of militias that the state has paid and that back Assad.
There is not enough firepower or manpower there to do the job.
Then you have Hezbollah and the Iranians.
Add them together and you don't have a kind of unified cohesive force, nor do you have enough firepower.
The Russians have no intention of getting involved in a ground war.
Now, when you go into a place like Aleppo, which is the largest city in Syria, you know this quite well, but urban warfare is a bloody business.
It is street to street fighting, fighting to take buildings, booby traps, assassins against groups that are very highly motivated and not afraid to die.
So you're going to lose a large number of people.
And so nobody wants to do that.
So then the question is, you start the bombing.
Well, then your opponent digs in and in effect uses innocent people as human shields and you have carnage on a mass scale.
And the tragedy of all of this here is that Syria was never, goodness knows, a perfect place, but it was a relatively prosperous country by Middle Eastern standards.
The status of religious minorities and women was fairly, shall we say, at minimum tolerable in some ways, advanced.
And now you have a shattered country that will take a minimum of a generation to right itself with very little possibility, actually, that the state itself may survive.
And the follow on effects of this, that is of a country that is turned into a war zone and possibly into multiple fiefdoms, is something that none of us can foresee.
But I rather doubt that the consequences will be good ones.
Yeah.
Well, now tell me this.
Do you know about the reports of the Al-Nusra Front basically refusing to allow the population of East Aleppo to leave, that they're basically holding them all there as prisoners?
Where, you know, some of the, I mean, obviously many have been able to escape to Western Aleppo under, you know, government controlled territory.
But there are some who say that really the entire population that's left in East Aleppo right now, they have no choice.
The Nusra guys will kill them if they try to run.
Yes, I think that that is the case because it makes for good press when large numbers of people are killed.
And it's not very easy in the middle of a horrific war with militias running around and bombs aimed without very much regard for civilian, non-civilian targets, to go to another place in the city, you know, their checkpoints and all of this kind of thing.
So you have a civilian population that is caught between the hammer of the air campaign and the anvil of the radical groups that are fighting Assad and the Russians and the Iranians.
So it is a horrific situation for people who are trapped there.
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Now let me ask you this because Gareth Porter had a great article yesterday in Middle East Eye about the incentive structure behind America going along with this policy basically of our allies even though as you said Obama has been hesitant to go full force with this policy as destructive as it is all this time and you know for pretty obvious reasons but you know we've been I've been covering this thing since well you know long before it broke out you know and since the days of the redirection and the just the beginning of the CIA support for the Muslim Brotherhood there back in 2006 and 7 and and all of that and so looking at the whole thing develop all this time it was clear in 2011 even that the CIA that the French that the Saudis and that the Brits were intervening there and there was a report in The Observer that named Prince Bandar and said he's sending Mujahideen off to fight.
We knew all this in in 2011.
It was in I believe late 2011 or very early 2012 that the State Department themselves had told McClatchy newspapers at least that yeah actually a big part of the rebellion going on here are members of al-Qaeda in Iraq who have now come from Iraq to to help fight in Syria and so this is a real problem and this has been from the very beginning they knew these are Zarqawi's men even if as you said yeah there were a lot of peaceful demonstrators at first and all that Zarqawi's men came to hijack the thing and yet American policy never changed it didn't escalate to to you know full regime change as it could have as you said and yet we still have the CIA backing Arar al-Sham and friends and in effect the al-Nusra Front as well who are running around with American supplied weapons and driving American supplied trucks that they quote unquote stole from the FSA or were given to them by defecting members of the FSA so that's the part that I just still can't get over is the part where the American president can't just say listen all our allies want to do this but it's al-Qaeda so all bets are off we hate them the most and that's our priority and so even though yes we would like to take Iran down a peg by getting rid of Assad keeping al-Qaeda down is more important and somehow that didn't they just completely ignore that as a priority it seems like anyway long involved question but I just wonder what you speculate is the reason that they're able to carry out such a you know insane policy on the very face of it a policy contradicting the entire framework of the war on terrorism right so as far as I can determine certainly by early 2012 this war had been become internationalized on multiple fronts including with our involvement now as to the direct support by the United States of al-Sham and the Nusra Front I'm not aware of direct arm supplies to those groups but here's the problem when you drop arms into a battle zone that is chaotic alliances are shifting front lines move around groups collaborate with each other and then stop collaborating with each other you're going to have to run the risk unless you have significant people on the ground to monitor the process and even then it may not work out that weapons go missing and end up in the hands of people to whom for whom it's not intended the the the the radical groups by the way are not lacking in funds and weapons because they're getting it not only from states in the gulf but also from private organizations that have been allowed by the Qataris and the Saudis and even the Kuwaitis to raise money so it's not I think that the U.S. government is directly supporting the Nusra Front or our al-Sham I think it is that what has happened is these have become the most effective fighting forces in terms of firepower manpower and control of territory on the ground one of the reasons why the Russians intervened in September 2015 is that these groups had established themselves in Idlib province north had begun infiltrating Latakia province which is the bastion of the Alawites and I think the Iranians and the Russians had a conversation and decided that the regime could collapse and they were not going to allow that for different reasons Iran because it's had long-standing ties with Syria Russia because it has had a relationship with successive Baathist regimes going back to 1954 the first arms sale agreement that the Soviet Union signed in the Middle East direct one bilaterally was with Syria so the idea that Putin got into this just to show that he's a tough guy or to deflect attention from Ukraine is preposterous I mean they whether we like it or not they believe that they had interest to to to defend and that they felt that Assad's collapse would lead either to chaos or the triumph of radical Islamists and they were not willing to do that having said that I don't think there's an easy out for them either and I think the bombing campaign and the killing of civilians because you drop bombs into a place like Aleppo and you perforce kill civilians is is going to have a blowback effect on them as well so this is there there are not very many heroes in this war here and it's a it's a very very difficult knot to untie it will take very very a very very long time well you know sorry I didn't mean to put you on the spot in a way overstating that I I tried not to overstate it uh the support there um I think you know what's what's really relevant at a time like this if I have to walk this back at all is to quote Hillary Clinton from February of 2012 when the CBS News anchor asked her why aren't we doing more to help the rebels to overthrow Assad she said well Ayman al-Zawahiri of Al-Qaeda is backing the revolution in Syria are we helping Al-Qaeda in Syria and what she meant of course was it was a figure of speech but she was saying if we are helping the rebellion in general and a big part of that is a bunch of Al-Qaeda guys then we're kind of helping Al-Qaeda guys uh and so that's what I meant and and I said you know equipment stolen and pilfered and delivered by defectors and so forth I mean I don't I don't think anybody ever said the CIA delivered trucks straight to the Al-Nusra Front just that we all know that hey look there's a Ra'ar al-Sham and there's Al-Nusra Front on video firing U.S. tow missiles that they got from the Saudis in cooperation with the CIA and you have you know the think tankers what's his name with the glasses I'm sorry I'm Lister talking about what he calls the joint U.S.-Saudi operations room in Turkey where they ran what was at that time called the Army of Conquest which you were just referring to actually there they were the ones who were pushing it in Idlib province a year ago it finally provoked the Russian intervention then so.
Josh Al-Fath is the name.
Right there you go so you know that's some you know that if on one hand like you know the FSA delivering some guns is one thing but creating really an umbrella group that's Nusra, Ra'ar al-Sham and the FSA and it's being run in a I don't know exactly what it means a Saudi a U.S.-Saudi room in Turkey but I don't know sure sounds like treason I don't know I don't want to overstate it because I know some people say oh the Islamic State is entirely a CIA plot or whatever a few people say that and I don't want to come off sounding like crazy I'm just talking about again in Hillary Clinton's words if we're supporting the revolution against Assad and the revolution against Assad is sworn loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri the butcher of New York City then don't we have a problem?
Right you know the other piece of this is as long as you have total chaos in Syria and Sunnis who are radicalized by the utter unwillingness of a Shia dominated state to bring them into the tent as it were you will have a flow of armaments and fighters across the border from Iraq into Syria so what has happened in Iraq which certainly has a lot to do with the American intervention cannot be separated from what is happening in Syria because as you well know it was out of the ruins of Al-Qaeda in Iraq that the Islamic State arose and then it acquired real estate both in Syria and in Iraq and so this is a warning that it is maybe easy to take down a regime but you have very little control in what follows it and my worry is about people who feel that they have a very good idea of what will follow it and we've been down this path and you've been given these assurances before and I simply don't believe it.
Yeah well you know speaking of which I'm glad you mentioned that because there was a piece by the same Charles Lister about what should be done there and I saw a conversation I didn't participate but I saw a conversation on Twitter between some pretty high-level wonks talking about you know what should be done here I guess one was a New York Times reporter and the other was from a powerful think tank and the question was well geez I mean what do we are we really supposed to go to war with Syria and Russia over Aleppo and the answer was no we should just go to war with Syria not Russia but don't worry because if we do really flex our muscles and go to war against Syria then the Russians being actually a much weaker state than they're pretending to be will have to change their calculus and then they'll back down and then everything will be fine don't worry about it I read a article put out by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy that said that that's guaranteed is what's going to happen is Putin will flinch and so it's fine and I'm thinking that's yeah really they're gonna greet us with rose petals too huh that's absurd and it's an easy argument for people to make when they've never actually had to have been shot at the fact of the matter is that you can't draw a distinction between fighting Assad and fighting the Russians the Syrians have very extensive air defense equipment and the Russians do as well even in the event that we can suppress those air defense systems it means firing at Russian positions and taking on aircraft and surface-to-air missile systems so the idea that you can somehow build a Chinese wall between the Syrian state and the Russians is absolutely absurd it's not even clear to me that the Russians would permit a wholesale hammering of a state that they have gone in to save and invested a lot of their prestige in doing so the idea that this can be done in kind of installments with just the Russians standing off to one side and doing nothing I mean I just find that completely perplexing yeah well I'll tell you I mean it really seems to be the consensus and that's the part that's really bothering me about this is when you can see it's just like in the Iraq war where there's so many things unsaid that we know everybody knows and yet we're just going to go along right come on everybody aluminum tubes are a scary thing okay aluminum tubes look we all know that they were looking for the aluminum tubes they were trying to get aluminum tubes aluminum tubes aluminum tubes even though come on even an idiot knows that you would have to use those aluminum tubes in some elaborate project to make a nuclear weapon that couldn't possibly exist in the world that the USA wouldn't know all about it I mean give me a break here the whole thing was preposterous and yet everybody just went with we're just going to say the tubes thing and then we're going to move on the entire media and and the liberal internationalists too as you said not just the neocons but that that level of ridiculousness I think is is the part that scares me here where we're going to talk about Aleppo all day but we're not going to mention that it's Al Qaeda backed in essence sort of kind of at least by America and its allies that are being bombed there we're just going to pretend that Assad woke up one day and decided he was going to murder everyone in his country for fun all the civilians and and the younger and more innocent they are the better and that's the entirety of the narrative and something must be done about it the Russians will change their calculus I mean this is the kind of thing that could like it's it reminds me of the reading of the start of World War I something like that where people are just making really really bad calls unbelievably bad calls oh yes yeah yeah I know indeed I hear you anyway I'm sorry I should have come up with a great way to uh to end that with a question no no something like that is it is it am I am because I I sound hyperbolic I know it but am I right that that's kind of how ignorant the consensus is that we're just going to sort of pretend that we don't know it's Nusra and we're just going to sort of pretend that it couldn't possibly come to war with Russia and that they could really go ahead and get us into war with Russia the possibility of intervening militarily and escaping some kind of confrontation with Russia especially given the overall deterioration of our relationship with Russia because it's gotten to be very very bad um that at a time like this we can intervene and not have a not have a conflict the Russians is uh I I find that to be very very difficult you know if if American commanders are asked by the president commander-in-chief is to establish a no-fly zone which a number of people like Nick Kristof and others have have bandied about the first thing they will ask permission to do is to suppress air defense systems in airfield with interceptor aircraft well then you end up killing people who are manning those systems and some of them will be Russian so that that is the difficulty the other thing I just wanted to add is that look I want to make it clear that I hold no brief for Assad and what he's done is horrific I think even those who are anti-interventionists would agree with this but I think we framed it in a way that suggests that this regime has absolutely no support and that it's an Alawite minority regime pure and simple if Alawites were the only ones backing Assad he would have long since been looking at a collapsed state and he would be in exile somewhere maybe in Iran for complicated reasons the secular urban educated Sunni middle class or some proportion of it back him so do the Christians so do the Druze it is not because they think he's a wonderful person it is that they believe that the alternative to him given that they are in the case of the Sunnis urban and secular in the case of the Christians and the Druze minorities is far far worse so it's not accurate to say that the regime has no support it is also I think not accurate to say we have to get rid of Assad now we we've walked back from this and we're not obsessed with this anymore Assad has to go Assad has to go Assad has to go the idea that someone who's going to follow him is going to is not going to be equally hardline the most likely person is is probably going to be his brother Maher al-Assad the commander of the 4th armored division of the republican guard and these are guys who are going to play for keeps because as they see it if they lose this war they are going to be exterminated yet for the Alawites so getting rid of Assad is going to be a musical chairs game it's not going to the Ba'athist state is not going to allow someone to take his place who's going to give the store away yeah I mean that's the whole thing uh the interventionists claim I actually got in an argument with a guy from Amnesty International who's saying you know if you're pro-war then that means you're anti-war because you want to stop Assad's war with a war and if you're anti-war then that means you're really pro-war because you're pro-Assad's war against these people and of course Amnesty of you know supported the war in Libya as well I'm not exactly sure what their position was on Iraq and in 03 but that's the way they frame it that this is humanitarianism defined is uh the American empire must go and yet they never address what would happen if the Ba'athist state fell to all the Shia all the Alawites all the Druze and the three or four kinds of Christians and everybody else uh they never talk about that they never talk about the fact that there actually is no one to replace Assad on the throne other than I guess Ayman al-Zawahiri or his student Jolani they just say we got to stop the bombing in Aleppo uh yes I think I think that's true I said in the piece that I wrote that you've referred to at the beginning of the program that in some instances the interventionists have waged a kind of all heart and no head call for intervention but even that's really not true because uh there is going on now an air campaign by a state that we arm very heavily and therefore for which whose actions we bear some responsibility namely Saudi Arabia in Yemen and it is by no means a total approaching that of Syria should make that clear but a very large number of civilians have died munitions like cluster munitions are indiscriminate in their killing have been used and I am struck by the fact that the people who are calling for intervention in Syria haven't taken five minutes to say well what about Saudi Arabia where we do have a degree of control what ought to be done about that so it is kind of selective uh the moral outrage not not to equate Saudi Arabia's bombing campaign Yemen for a moment with Assad's bombing campaign in uh in in Syria well in in both cases the Obama administration has explained that part of their Syria policy and part and a big part of their Yemen policy is placating Saudi because if we're going to do the nuclear deal that actually protects their security interests but threatens their position in our imperial order in the Middle East then we have to make it up to them and so we'll make it up to them by taking Assad down and bringing Iran down a peg that way and we'll make it up to them as the New York they put in the New York Times it was not even a scoop it was an official leak from the White House to the New York Times explaining themselves that well we decided we had to placate the Saudis after securing their interests with the Iran nuclear deal that was their quote for for letting them have a war now in Yemen for 18 months and and with no end in sight so that's really something else American statecraft there where and I remember you know we argued at the time that actually you know the Iran deal in and of itself is all for the good but there could be a real negative response from Saudi and they could lash out in this way in that and here we are so yeah well they're certainly not happy about the deal have never been and never will be have they am I missing anything have they named any other American interest in bombing the Houthis whatsoever other than placating the Saudis in their own words well I mean Yemen itself is turning into some version of Syria in the sense that the Saudis are involved in backing a particular side that seeks to seize the Yemeni state and trying to put out of business the Houthis that they see as simply an extension of Iranian power which is something of an oversimplification so the question is you know on the one hand you have this war on terror now President Obama doesn't use that term anymore but if you go around contributing to the instability and chaos in states like this you're simply creating a breeding ground for extremist movements and in the process a lot of popular resentment as well that extremists can tap so I don't quite understand how the blunt use of military power that then destabilizes countries can is consistent with the war on terror is Libya more or less now conducive to the growth of extremist movements you know none of us need be sympathetic to Gaddafi for a moment but it does bear asking the question what have we created in post Gaddafi Libya were we right to believe that there would be an orderly transition to a group of people who would hold the state together and rule it reasonably well in the event we have east versus west militias running all over the place refugees fleeing to Europe from Libya and ISIS having its constant self at least in a couple of places in Libya not what we were told we would get right well and you know back to I want to highlight the point here kind of that you made earlier as well about how unfair but necessary it is and this is a real measure I think of where we are now that you have to disclaim that you are not necessarily in favor of any government in the world that you don't want to go to war with which because in 2016 the default is permanent war by America against all of humanity all the time and the exceptions is when we don't bomb them and then you better have a real good reason why you're spinning for this enemy if you want to not start a war at any given time and I'm not saying we actually are bombing every country in the world where but that's the frame of mind of everything right to not you know Ronald Reagan bombed Libya for a few days a couple of days when I was in fourth grade and then that was it and George H.W. Bush didn't kill him and overthrow his country and neither did Bill Clinton and neither did George W. Bush George W. Bush made a handshake with him brought him in from the cold he'd been kissing up for years but then for some reason you're a much younger man than I am yeah well um but but now the idea is that you got to really disclaim and make sure that you're no one confuses you for a Qaddafi apologist just for saying we shouldn't have started a war against him because and especially in democrat you know liberal humanitarian intervention times that's the frame of reference for all of this stuff and just is insane it's quite obvious that people who are critical of particular wars are not endorsing what goes on in that country or making the point that military power should never be used or that we should withdraw into a tortoise-like isolationist posture I mean those are just kind of red herrings I think to discredit what ought to be really a serious argument and there hasn't really been any and yet serious what color is the herring when you and I have to always stop and address it anyway because it's that effective of a line isolationist this or dictator apologist that when the world there's 190 something countries in the world we're just one of them um you know we really supposed to overthrow every regime we don't like there's been quite a few democracies backsliding toward dictatorship around the world lately maybe we should just declare war on the whole planet rule the whole thing from DC I don't know make money for somebody uh listen I'm sorry I've yelled at you for way too long but uh thank you for coming on and sharing your time with us on the show I really appreciate Rajan thank you Scott take care all right that is Rajan Menon and I didn't give him a proper introduction there he uh actually is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer uh huh that's written wrong he teaches international relations at the Powell School at City College of New York City University of New York and he's a senior research fellow at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University his most recent book is The Conceit of Humanitarian Interventionism and that's the Scott Horton Show thanks y'all for listening 4,000 something interviews at scotthorton.org sign up for the podcast feed there as well uh help support at scotthorton.org slash donate and follow me on twitter at scott horton show hey y'all sky here first I want to take a second to thank all the show's listeners sponsors and supporters for helping make the show what it is I literally couldn't do it without you and now I want to tell you about the newest way to help support the show whenever you shop at amazon.com stop by scott horton.org first and just click the amazon logo on the right side of the page that way the show will get a kickback from amazon's end of the sale it won't cost you an extra cent it's not just books amazon.com sells just about everything in the world except cars I think so whatever you need they've got it just click the amazon logo on the right side of the page at scott horton.org or go to scott horton.org slash amazon hey y'all scott here ever wanted to help support the show and own silver at the same time well a friend of mine libertarian activist arlo piñate has invented the alternative currency with the most promise of them all qr silver commodity discs the first ever qr code one ounce silver pieces just scan the back of one with your phone and get the instant spot price they're perfect for saving or spending at the market and anyone who donates a hundred dollars or more to the scott horton show at scott horton.org slash donate gets one that's scott horton.org slash donate and if you'd like to learn and order more send them a message at commodity discs.com or check them out on facebook at slash commodity discs and thanks
