10/26/16 – Daniel Lazare – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, introducing Daniel Lazare.
He's the author of several books, including The Frozen Republic, and he writes often at consortiumnews.com.
This one is called Clinton's Slug, Deeper into the Big Muddy.
Welcome back to the show, Daniel.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Thanks for joining us again on the show today, and, well, listen, you've written a really great article here.
I basically just want to give you a chance to tell everybody everything that you wrote.
I guess you pretty much start off with sizing up who's who and where they are in the battle for Mosul in what used to be called Northwestern Iraq, now Eastern Islamic State.
I guess it'll be Iraq again here pretty soon.
Right, right.
It's just a mess.
It's a giant, giant mess.
What's happened is that the U.S. is trying to do this on the cheap, trying to force ISIS out of Mosul in Northern Iraq.
But of course, it won't do the fighting itself.
It's relying on various proxy armies on the ground, the Iraqi army, Kurdish Peshmerga forces, Shiite militias, which it maintains, which it tries to keep at an arm's length, et cetera.
But the point is that Turkey also claims Mosul.
It has a base in a town of Bushika about seven miles northeast of Mosul.
The Iraqi government is not very happy about that, but Turkey is refusing to leave.
And in fact, Turkey wants to be part of the thrust into Mosul.
So you have a bunch of different armies competing for control of Mosul, and they're all working across purposes.
The Sunnis, Mosul is a city of about 1.5 to 2 million people, most of them Sunnis.
They view with great fear the Shiite militias, which have committed atrocities against the Sunnis in other cities, like Tikrit, for example, or Fallujah.
And they don't like the Kurds very much, who looted the city dry when they took over in 2003.
They're not very happy with ISIS.
They may view the Turks as their protectors.
They view with scorn the governments in Baghdad.
It's just a giant, giant mess, a conversion of hostile forces that will only lead to a wider conflict.
Yeah.
All right.
So let's put off the serious side of this for a minute here and stick with Mosul now.
Joe Lauria, your colleague at Consortium News, reporting out at Earable, quotes some Peshmerga guys saying, well, they're pretty worried that the Shiite militias are just going to cleanse Mosul and try to keep it for themselves.
But then I've read some of the Shiite, I guess, army guys, not the Shiite militias, but Iraqi army, which is really just the bottom brigade anyway, saying, well, they're really worried that the Peshmerga are going to try to cleanse the city and expand the borders of Kurdistan out to Mosul.
So I wonder if you think any of those are very likely, either of those two are very likely.
And I guess we could add the Turks and what Erdogan's plans are for the third possibility there.
What do you think?
Well, I think everybody is suspicious of everybody.
And there's basis for each person's suspicions.
I think that the Sunnis in Mosul have considerable reason to fear the Shiite militias, which have committed atrocities in the past against Sunnis and look like they could very well do so again.
In fact, the leader of a Shiite militia recently gave a speech in which he said that the conquest of Mosul will be an opportunity to wreak vengeance on all those who are guilty of the death of Hussein, that's the Prophet Muhammad's grandson, more than 1,300 years ago, as if you had a Christian army poised outside a Jewish city, saying, you know, once the city falls, we're going to wreak vengeance for the death of Christ.
Now, if I was a Sunni in that circumstance, I'd be deeply frightened.
And the Sunnis of Mosul probably are.
But these conflicts are just multiplying throughout the region, and everything the U.S. does only seems to add to the problem.
Alright, now, so one thing is, it's going to be really hard to cleanse Mosul unless America just carpet bombs the city the way they did Ramadi, the city's full of millions of people.
And, I mean, I don't know, I guess they weren't powerful enough to chase the Islamic State cops off the street for the last two years, so maybe they won't be strong enough to resist an occupying force of Kurds or Shia Arabs or anybody else.
But, I don't know, I mean, the reason the Islamic State was able to take Mosul in the first place was because the Shiite Iraqi army was really way out on the frontier, out in foreign territory, you know, far from their own lines.
And in fact, we may have talked about this before, how Patrick Coburn had reported a year before the fall of Mosul that Shia Iraqi army guys were going AWOL and were headed back down toward Baghdad, toward the Shiite lines, because they were just stuck way out on Fort Apache with no support out there.
Well, what happened with the fall of Mosul in 2014 is that the government garrison ostensibly had 60,000 soldiers and police under its control.
But when the ISIS attacked, it turned out they didn't have two-thirds or three-fourths of that number.
It was vastly undermanned, it was filled with no-show soldiers, and they fled at first contact.
So a few thousand ISIS fighters was able to panic and send fleeing some 15,000 or 20,000 Iraqi government troops.
Now the Iraqi government is trying to fight its way back into Mosul.
But this already fierce fighting has broken out in Kirkuk, where ISIS has launched some really ferocious attacks.
So it doesn't look like it's going to be easy, and in the process, it's going to really open up an Andorra's box of ethno-religious conflicts throughout the region.
Yeah.
All right, and real quick on Kirkuk, just how bad was the fighting there?
I saw some footage from Rudao of the big fight at that red building, but was there much more than that, like across the city, that kind of thing?
Do you know?
There seems to have been pretty serious resistance, and there appears to have been some anti-civilian atrocities as well by ISIS.
But it was a much stiffer fight than the Iraqi government expected, and they had a much harder time putting it down.
Well, and Kirkuk is officially ruled by the Baghdad government, right?
It hasn't been under Islamic State control this whole time, has it?
That's correct.
It was a sleeper cell attack, basically, inside the city.
Yes, but much fiercer than anybody expected, though.
And so it looks like the whole region could explode.
I mean, ISIS is not a spent force.
They've still got a curriculum of strength, so we don't know what's going to happen.
But I mean, we don't know what will happen in Mosul.
The assault is not going at all well now.
It seems to be going pretty smoothly two or three days ago, but now it seems to be bogged down, and everyone's kind of worried.
But no one can forecast the future.
But nonetheless, there's reason to believe that the fight will be really hard, and that in the process, all these other conflicts will be awakened.
And now, you know, there were questions about, well, I mean, there were Russian reports and there were rumors floating around in Erbil and so forth about just how many of the Islamic State's fighters had fled from Mosul to head to Syria, to head to Raqqa, basically, for the time being, in advance of the actual final siege and assault on Mosul.
But this Kirkuk attack makes me wonder just which all direction they fled or, you know, to what degree they really have fled.
Maybe they're really going to stay and fight for Mosul in a way that they really didn't for Fallujah, for example.
I just don't know.
I mean, your guess is as good as mine.
I have no idea.
One big fear is the U.S. is trying to herd ISIS back over the border to Syria, especially towards Deir ez-Zor, which could turn out to be an ISIS stronghold.
And the U.S. is trying to use ISIS to deflect ISIS and use it as a weapon against the Assad regime in Syria.
That's kind of very speculative at this point.
I'm not really sure it's true.
It's not impossible.
But we'll see over the next few weeks.
Yeah.
Well, it's funny because that was really the policy in 2012-13 and the beginning of 2014 was helping Maliki with some advisers and with some drones to attack Islamic State fighters in Iraq to chase them back over the border into Syria, where at that point they were still the good guys.
Or at least not the good guys, but in a coalition with the good guys.
Yeah.
When ISIS converged on Palmyra in May 2015, the U.S. could have bombed its fighters if they were making their way over across open desert.
They were perfect targets.
But they did not.
And the reason they did not, they did not want to provide any advantage to Assad.
So they stood by and watched as ISIS took Palmyra.
In fact, even cranked up their support.
Was it you that was explaining they even cranked up their support for the CIA-backed rebels fighting up near Idlib in order to draw the Syrian army away so that they would not be able to divide their forces?
They would have to give up one or the other.
And they would, of course, choose to give up Palmyra.
Yes.
Well, what happened is the U.S.-backed forces were on the offensive in Idlib.
They seemed to have been making progress against Assad.
They seemed to have been tied down.
The U.S. was quite jubilant.
It was yet again convinced that Assad's pace were numbered.
And one of those who took notice of what was happening in Idlib, which is in the extreme northeast of northwest Syria, was ISIS, which then took advantage of Assad being tied up there to launch an attack on Palmyra in central Syria.
And Assad's troops were caught unawares and they were quickly driven out of town.
But the point is, the U.S. could have stopped that assault if it wanted to, but chose not to because it preferred to use ISIS to apply pressure to the Assad government.
I mean, this is just this is there is such backstabbing going on and the U.S. is among the biggest backstabbers there are.
But you're quite right.
You're absolutely correct.
The U.S. has a bifurcated policy where it is opposed to ISIS in Iraq and tolerant, sometimes even encouraging of ISIS in Syria.
Even at this late date, that's the thing about it that blows my mind.
I mean, on one hand, we're talking about back in jihadis, not in the 1980s, but in the 2000s after, you know, I never even mind the first World Trade Center bombing and the Khobar Towers and the Africa embassies and the coal and 9-11.
But even we're fighting on the side of actual al-Qaeda in Iraq, guys who led the Sunni based insurgency that killed 4000 American troops out of 4500 approximately during Iraq War two.
And OK, we'll just don't keep going.
We'll just keep backing them.
And then the Islamic State goes from being a highfalutin name of a militia to an actual place for two years.
The Islamo fascist caliphate that only ever existed in David Frum and Osama bin Laden's fevered dreams actually comes to reality.
And now here's you and me.
And we're in the last quarter of 2016.
The Islamic State is being destroyed before our eyes.
And yet still overall, you know, the policy that they're not so bad when they're in Syria is still in effect is mind blowing.
I mean, isn't it just treason?
I don't get it.
I do get it.
But it seems extreme to me.
That's all.
It's well, I mean, it is really amazing.
It really is mind blowing.
You're absolutely correct.
But of course, bear in mind that in Aleppo, I mean, the U.S. is in a de facto alliance with al-Nusra, which is another branch of al-Qaeda.
And the U.S. is now furious that Russia is bearing down on al-Nusra.
I mean, who would have thought in 2001 that America would be defending al-Qaeda against Russia?
It's just that the whole thing is mind blowing.
But the only way to understand that, understand what's going on here, is that the real driving forces behind the Syrian policy and Iraqi policy are Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Both countries want Assad out.
Both countries are for Assad out.
So therefore, the U.S. finds itself with no alternative.
That, you know, logic be damned, it's got to push Assad out.
That's just what's happening here.
I mean, Israel and Saudi Arabia, this is the only way to understand what's happening in these two countries, especially Syria.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's interesting, too, though, that especially Barack Obama, I mean, I understand the politics of it.
He's working on the Iran nuclear deal.
He's the president in an era just following when George Bush had handed two thirds of Iraq over to Iran and they're sock puppets.
He's trying to make things up to the Saudis and the whole, you know, GCC alliance a little bit and all of that.
And yet at the same time, he's the same guy who is not even really shy about publicly explaining why what he's doing is a horrible idea.
You know, the idea that we could, I got the quote here, that there's some, to Friedman, the notion that arming the rebels would have made a difference has always been a fantasy.
This idea we could provide some light arms or even sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to battle not only a well-armed state, but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, backed by battle hardened Hezbollah.
That was never in the cards.
And yet and not only that.
OK, so he's saying it's impossible.
There were no moderates to work with, but even he could have, you know, gone on to explain.
He's willing to go along with our allies backing our enemies and really even helped them to back our only real enemies in the world, the American people's only real enemies in the world, the al-Qaeda guys who are still attacking us over what George Bush's father and Bill Clinton got us into in the 1990s and what Bush's son and Obama-Clinton have done this whole time, still coming after us.
So he's himself explaining there's really no one there but anti-American terrorists to back, but he's going to do it anyway.
And at the same time, he could, it seems to me and what do I know, Daniel, but it seems to me that he could just explain maybe in a speech that, yes, our allies want to do this, but we don't.
And here's why, you know, not that we're cozying up to Iran or anything, but we hate al-Qaeda the most, even more than Assad.
That's why Bush paid Assad to torture and murder al-Qaeda guys for us, because we hate them the most because they're the ones what knocked down our towers.
Any questions?
And he would have all the political backing of the American people and screw the lobby.
What's the lobby really going to do?
Argue with a straight face against the president that al-Qaeda is the lesser evil?
I mean, they say that, you know, to Jeffrey Goldberg at the Aspen conference or whatever, but they don't outright make that position.
They couldn't in defiance of the American president.
And yet he goes along anyway.
When we know he knows better.
So what's the deal?
You're absolutely correct.
But he can't say those words.
If he says those words, he'll throw the entire U.S.-Saudi-Israeli alliance, you know, he'll toss it out the window.
And they can't do that.
That alliance is the pivot of the basis of 70 years of U.S. involvement in the Middle East.
And the U.S. can't afford to throw that overboard.
I mean, I mean, wait a minute, though.
I mean, is that are you sure that that's what would happen?
What if he didn't give a speech?
What if he just sent his people over there to say, listen, man, the American people are going to kill me if I do this.
I can't back al-Qaeda, guys.
It's treason.
And so I know we hate Assad.
Let's let's pressure Assad to behave how we want him to somehow.
But we can't do this.
Number one, Israel, as you know, I mean, it has more power in Washington than Obama has.
I mean, every time Obama, I mean, every time Netanyahu addressed U.S. Congress, he gets a standing ovation.
I mean, listen, Obama can't get that.
And and so so Netanyahu has more power, has more power in Washington than Obama has.
And and as we as regards Saudi Arabia, you've got to bear in mind, America is terrified of one thing.
That is, what happens if the Saudi regime collapses?
And believe me, that's not an unrealistic prospect.
But what happens if the Saudi regime collapses?
Who takes over?
Will ISIS march into Riyadh?
And the very idea keeps Obama awake at night.
But this is their this is their greatest nightmare.
Their greatest nightmare.
And so what do they do?
They send all their most dangerous revolutionaries off to Syria to learn how to fight and kill more efficiently before they come home again.
I mean, we've seen this movie before.
Right.
We saw this in the back.
The blowback from Afghanistan and the blowback from Iraq war, too, is what we're dealing with now.
That is 35 years of Saudi experience summed up in a single sentence.
Yes, their whole strategy is to send the young troublemakers off to Syria, to Afghanistan, to the Balkans, whatever.
Let them cause problems in someone else's backyard so that we can have a bit of peace in our in our own neighborhood.
Yeah, that's what they do.
That's their specialty.
And they write them checks and they do all kinds of things.
But that's exactly what the Saudis do.
But the but the the problem is, with the price of oil plummeting, the U.S. is terrified, is terrified that this game may be coming to an end.
So the so the terrible fear is that the the the the price of oil has fallen 50 percent since since mid 2014.
And that's the the only asset the Saudis have, the only asset.
So when your only asset collapses in price, you're in big trouble.
They're they're cutting out.
The Saudis are cutting back, instituting economic austerity right and left.
They're trying to do everything they can to shore up their finances, but they're really in desperate straits.
They're getting their ass kicked in in Yemen.
The Yemen, the Houthis have fired, I think, like one hundred and thirty missiles over the border into Saudi Arabia.
The whole thing that that venture is turning into a into a real quagmire.
So the greatest fear, the greatest fear of Obama is that the regime will collapse.
And then no one knows what will happen next.
But conceivably, ISIS could launch into town, launch into Riyadh.
This is the this is the fear that that that keeps Obama awake at night.
So the U.S. will do anything it can to prevent that from happening.
So if the Saudis want to bomb Yemen, well, then Obama can't say no.
And if they want Assad out in Syria and it's already caused 400,000 deaths, well, Obama says, you know, well, OK, well, we'll throw in a few other a few more hundred thousand dead.
But it seems like this is all this all makes collapse and the rise of the Islamic State in Arabia more likely, not less, just not today.
Right.
Yes, exactly.
Yes, exactly.
Exactly right.
Not today.
You know, so, you know, so they so they so they put a buy time themselves.
They're they're they're definitely in a losing strategy.
This is why this explains why their behavior is so, so erratic.
I mean, no one can understand what is the U.S. doing backing Al Qaeda?
Doesn't make any sense, right?
But the point is that they're trying to buy time for themselves to have this incredibly shaky regime in Saudi Arabia.
They've got to do and they can't do anything to tip it over and to collapse.
So they'll do whatever the Saudis want them to do right now at the beginning of your article, they were bombed.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Well, let's let's not go too far off onto that tangent.
That'll be the whole a whole other interview.
But I want to get back to something that the very start of your article here where you quote Hillary Clinton.
And I guess I just dismiss this as lip service.
But I think, you know, you give some gravity to it.
And I think that maybe you actually do have a pretty good point here about Hillary Clinton saying that no boots on the ground in Mosul.
Not just, you know, in other words, she's not just saying, no, I promise not to send your boys to any foreign wars.
She's saying that would be counterproductive.
That would be a bad strategy for fighting.
The Islamic State would be putting American soldiers on the ground that would provide them with a rallying point is how you put it.
There's no direct quote marks there, but close enough to what she was saying there.
So that's interesting to me because it raises a question of, well, I mean, I guess we know that Robert Pape has been talking to the DOD and to the National Security Council and that kind of thing.
And it seems like maybe they finally started paying attention to Robert Pape, that combat forces on the ground in other people's countries are likely to get you a suicide bomb, especially the greater the difference between the two societies, the more likely the result, etc.
I'm sure you're somewhat familiar, at least.
But I wonder, though, whether they don't get it that special forces count, too, and drones count, too, and B-1s count, too.
And people also really don't like being bombed from the sky just as, you know, almost or damn near as much as they don't like being occupied.
And I just wonder whether you think that, you know, in D.C. it's actually the lesson is finally getting through here a little bit, at least, where even Hillary Clinton kind of obliquely refers to the idea that it's the intervention that causes us the trouble, even if they can't go back and say in the first place.
I think that I think I think, first of all, Hillary knows that that intervention about boots on the ground is deeply in the U.S.
America is war weary.
They just sick and tired of these wars.
These wars go nowhere.
They're losing propositions.
Americans have Americans have no faith in the ability of the elected leadership in Washington to carry these things out.
So Americans don't want any more wars.
They're sick and tired.
But the fact is, you know, Americans will put up with drones and B-1 bombers and the rest.
Right.
And cruise missiles, you know, don't quote those don't cost American lives.
So so the U.S.
That's what the lies on on shaky militias on the ground.
In other words, paint nothing.
This is just domestic politics.
I think I think the domestic factor is very important.
Very important.
Americans are tired of these wars and forces there.
It forces the government to fight them by other means.
But the other means are the other means are not proven to be very effective and are just bleeding, bleeding to more and more problems.
All right now.
So what do you make of Hillary's and really the establishment's seeming commitment to escalation in Syria against Assad and flying planes up there, possibly in conflict with the Russians and the Syrian air force?
It seems like there's a little bit more frank talk about what this would really mean.
And we have the secret Goldman Sachs speech that leaked that shows that she really does know and understand the context of what it would really mean to escalate to that degree.
And yet she even running as a Democrat against a Republican in this race continues to emphasize this most, you know, more hawkish stance, at least compared to Donald Trump when it comes to dealing with Assad.
In fact, giving him an opening to say that she's being reckless again.
Quite right.
Trump, in an interview in Florida yesterday, told Reuters that Hillary is reckless.
She doesn't know what she's doing.
And she could very well cause world war three if she continues on this path.
I mean, I think that I think things are very dangerous.
I think you're absolutely right.
There's been a real upsurge in Washington foreign policy establishment, which is sometimes known as the blob.
Is very excited at the prospect that Obama is leaving because Obama had had applied some small restraints on their activities.
But now that he's out of the way, they have one of their own.
They will have one of their own White House, assuming Trump is defeated.
And and they're very excited at the prospect.
But I think that.
I mean, I may be going out on a limb here, but but I think the truth is seeking in that a no fly zone would be expensive, would be risky as all hell, because it involves shooting down Russian airplanes and she would not really do much in terms of dislodging Assad for power, which remains the overriding U.S. goal.
So so there's been a lot of chatter recently about the fly zone.
But I don't really think that the U.S. will go ahead and do it.
But, you know, I just don't know.
I just don't know the answer.
And I'm afraid I could be wrong.
I could also easily be wrong.
Yeah.
Well, you know, that's the thing about is how wrong these people are.
You know, Bob Perry calls it group think.
It's a great term for it from the Bay of Pigs fiasco, right, where we all agree.
Right, everybody.
And then do something stupid.
And yeah, I mean, there's it seems like there's a lot of dishonesty, like with Hillary.
Again, the secret Goldman Sachs speech, her private position is much more realistic.
Sounds a lot like something you would have said maybe compared to her public position.
But I don't know, man.
It sure does seem like a lot of people agree with her public position.
It's sort of, you know, goes without saying.
It's like on on the movie Idiocracy.
Like, well, first of all, your honor, just look at him.
You know, obviously he's guilty.
Everybody knows that.
And that's the start of the thing is everybody knows that.
And so, yeah, I don't know the reality sinking in the general warning the senator that, geez, that could mean war with Russia, Senator, a few weeks ago.
But.
I don't know, consensus and social psychology and all of these things, they can be a lot more powerful even than an H-bomb.
And I think also what's important to keep in mind is that the US has made such a massive thing in that part of the world that it would take a massive effort to begin to undo the damage that's been done since 2003.
So.
So without that massive effort, the destruction has a momentum of its own and sort of like it keeps moving, moving forward.
And the different parties find themselves sucked deeper and deeper in.
Right.
So I think that's the kind of thing where we're we're facing now.
I mean, no one wants an escalation.
I'm not sure if anyone wants an escalation.
No person of the right mind wants escalation.
But it seems that an escalation is coming.
Right.
And yet, you know, like on Twitter, any hesitation on Obama's part or on the anti-war movement's part or anything else gets the blame for basically causing whatever violence.
What went wrong in Iraq?
We left.
What went wrong in Syria?
We haven't done enough to back the farmers and pharmacists.
Yeah.
Or, of course, the classic example is the is the alleged sarin gas bombing in in Gouda in 2003, August 2013.
You know, the one the one good thing Obama did was to restructure the bombs for what turned out to be almost certainly a false alarm.
And yet yet that is being held up.
But by all of Washington universally as his great failure.
It's a failure to follow through.
Supposedly everything bad that's happened in Syria since then all follows from that one moment of hesitation.
It's it's really a sick example of a group thing.
But this is what you guys.
But the bottom line is this is an empire which is grossly overextended.
Its two chief allies are holding its feet to the fire.
There's a man on Assad and the U.S. can't say it has painted itself into a corner.
And I think that fact is what explains all the all the erratic behavior we've seen over the last two or three years.
Yeah.
Well, you know, there's got to be some real cognitive dissonance in there, too.
Right.
Where and they know that it's the Al-Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham that are the forefront that I mean, some of the I mean, I guess some of these people just know nothing and just they fill in their imagination with a big white space where what happens next is supposed to go.
But for some of these people, they got to understand that if Obama had bombed Assad out of power in 2013, Ayman al-Zawahiri would be the king of Syria right now.
That is that is the most perplexing thing of all.
I mean, anybody who thinks about it for more than two minutes knows that if Assad goes, you'll have ISIS or Al-Qaeda, you know, in the presidential palace in Damascus.
I mean, I mean, and what sane person.
And genocide against the Christians, the Druze, the Shia.
And a wave of refugees, you know, pouring out of Syria into into Europe.
I mean, who wants it?
But that is the the answer is that Israel and Israel and Saudi Arabia want it, and therefore the U.S. wants it.
Yeah.
This is how to stop the violence is to escalate the war.
That's the basic fact.
I mean, I mean, I mean, Israel's greatest fear is Hezbollah and Iran in regards to ISIS and Al-Qaeda as the lesser of two evils.
And Saudi Arabia just like that, just just wants Iran, the Alawites and the Hezbollah, you know, out out out of power far away.
And both are demanding the U.S. do its bidding.
And the U.S. can't say no.
All right, so, yeah, let's talk about the Israeli angle there a little bit more, because, well, you know, people might think that that just comes off as simply an accusation that, oh, yeah, Israel something.
So can you back that up a little bit?
Elaborate about what you mean about that?
This is just a little question.
I mean, on top, Israeli officials have said this quite frankly, the most famous example is Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. who made this statement at the Aspen Institute.
And I think 2015 where he said, like, oh, yeah, I mean, ISIS is really a really a bad bunch.
But, you know, but we we regard them as secondary to Assad and Hezbollah.
So therefore, therefore, we essentially tilt toward ISIS.
Now, I mean, Israel fierce war against Hezbollah in 2006.
And they regard Hezbollah as a chief enemy and they regard Iran as a chief regional opponent.
So so all other forces are secondary.
So we so so we see this de facto Israeli-Saudi alliance, so it's a quite odd bet, fellows.
But but there it is.
And and both agree are of one mind on on on a in patriotism and both agree that that that the crisis or al-Qaeda are are secondary to the to the Iranian threat.
You know, I remember when this war first started and occasionally the Israelis would attack inside Syria and I would think just, you know, even though I know better, my own cognitive dissonance.
Well, I mean, this would be if they didn't announce what they were doing was hitting Hezbollah or whatever.
I think, well, maybe they're attacking this weapons depot because maybe the al-Qaeda guys were getting too close to it and they were worried about that or something.
But no, it's always Hezbollah was or the Assad government itself has been their target in every one of these strikes.
And then they've even resorted to providing medical care.
They say, oh, hey, no, we're just humanitarians.
We provide medical care for anyone, but they only provide it for al-Qaeda guys, not for Hezbollah fighters as far as that goes.
Yes, yes.
It's amazing to see because you would think that that would be a covert action or a clandestine operation or something.
But instead, it's on the front page of the Jerusalem Post.
You know, it's just really explicit.
And and they they just they just their main enemy is Iran and Hezbollah and that's their main concern.
And everyone else is secondary.
Everyone else they're going to work with.
You know, and frankly, the the the Salafist rebels in Syria are so disorganized, so self-fractious, so given to infighting that Israel would be able to control them if they took over.
But their policy now is sort of maintaining a dynamic balance with the sort of the two sides fighting one another indefinitely and would be happy to see that go on for years and years until everyone winds up dead in the battlefield and Israel is supreme.
And by the way, you know, I mean, Israel has Israel's position has never been stronger or more secure in the Middle East than it is today.
It has it has watched while its enemies destroy themselves on all sides.
Right.
Yeah, that's an important point.
I mean, you even have all their former spy chiefs and former generals coming out and saying they face no existential threats.
They're really fine.
Hezbollah's threat is that Hezbollah can keep them out of Lebanon.
Not that they can invade and occupy northern Israel, not in 100 years.
No, but Hezbollah could launch rockets.
But but I mean, but but you know, but Israel took care of that problem in 2006.
And since then, Hezbollah hasn't launched a single rocket, as far as I'm aware, into northern Israel.
But anyway, the Israelis don't forget the threat that Hezbollah represents.
Well, you know, it's interesting, there was a New York Times story back in, I think, 2013, or maybe it was 2014, where an Israeli, I guess he wasn't actually a government official, but he was cited as an Israeli military strategist who said, yeah, we want, like you just said, to leave both sides fighting and let both sides continue to hemorrhage to death.
And I wanted to point out that there was this thing in the Jerusalem Post that Ramzi Baroud linked to in his last article for antiwar.com.
It's called May it never end the uncomfortable truth about the war in Syria.
And it's I'm sorry, Alon Ben David is the author.
And I'm sorry, I forgot what his title was, but I think he's a government official or former government official who is saying this here, that basically the same thing here to let the war to encourage the war to continue indefinitely, which, you know, I guess it does make sense, like you say, that if the Baathist government fell, and you just had some kind of Islamic State thing there, that the Israeli government would be much less worried about that a bunch of militia guys, although, I mean, I don't know, it seems like Assad.
I mean, I know he backs Hezbollah and all that.
But his army, it's not like they fight over the Golan Heights, try to take the Golan Heights back from the Israelis or anything like that.
It seems like he was, I mean, not quite Egypt, but still an OK guy to have on their border up there.
And and it seems like, yeah, OK, Al-Qaeda guys running around would be weaker, but they would also be a lot harder to control and a lot more unpredictable as opposed to a bunch of three piece suit wearing Baathists.
Right.
Well, I agree, actually.
And I agree with that, I think.
And I think one of the one thing that's so intrigued me is the possibility of a of a Russian-Israeli rapprochement.
You know, Netanyahu has met once with Obama over the last year and he's met four times with Putin.
And Putin and Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's foreign secretary, are actually fairly friendly.
And I'm always sort of I always remember that the one the one war memorial to the victorious Red Army outside the territory of the former Soviet Union in Europe is in Israel, in the town of Netanyahu along the Mediterranean coast, where there actually is a monument to the Red Army.
There's like one point two million Russians in Israel.
So it's always struck me there's always a possibility of a rapprochement between Israel and Russia.
And if that were to happen, the question would be whether Putin could somehow bring Iran around and could somehow bring Assad in from the cold.
And this would be a real Nixon to China moment.
But it's always sort of struck me as a possibility.
Yeah, you know, a friend was just writing at the new website there at the Libertarian Institute site about Putin making nice with the Turks and making nice with the Egyptians.
And basically looks like he's working to freeze us out of a lot of our former alliances right there in the region.
And I just got to say, hip hip hooray, man.
Let the Russians pay the Egyptians and the Israelis billions of dollars a year to pretend not to hate each other.
Why?
Why should we be implicated in this at all?
These are all Eastern societies, right?
Let them fight and let them ally and leave me out of it.
Well, you know, I mean, I mean, Putin is a very smart guy.
I mean, I don't want to exaggerate, but Russia doesn't have it doesn't have the enormous resources the U.S. has, and therefore it's got to be sort of smarter to be more careful, careful about what it does.
It's got to play its cards better than the U.S. has.
And the U.S. has played them extremely badly.
So but but but certainly it's too bad to to making up to improve Turkey to strengthen relations with Israel and to do whatever you can to bring Assad in from Africa cold.
That is the big thing, because no one no one can understand why Assad is this on this.
Is this seen as a spec war?
It's oh, it's all unconvincing.
I mean, I mean, Assad is not.
No, he's not.
He's not a Gaddafi.
He's not a crazy man.
He's a very sober political politician who is in a very bad spot.
He's been doing his best to stay on his feet, knowing quite well that if he goes, the entire society goes as well.
That's just a fact.
And so so Putin, who's now terribly worried about blowback and Chechnya and Central Asia, just wants to see the insurgency defeat, to see the South defeated.
And and he's.
He has limited resources, but he's trying to do best to bring that about the U.S. is the U.S., by contrast, is all over the map, doesn't really know what it wants and is just wreaking havoc as consequence.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I'm sorry for keeping you so long, but I like listening to you say things.
And also, I like talking a lot when I'm supposed to be asking questions, too.
Sorry about that.
But thank you very much for coming back on the show, Daniel.
You're great.
Thanks a lot.
All right.
So that is Daniel is there.
You can find him at Consortium News dot com.
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