11/04/15 – Reese Erlich – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and it's my show.
The Scott Horton Show.
Now it's time for Reese Ehrlich.
And I thought that was cool when I saw that he wrote a thing brand new out in Politico magazine, how Putin is wooing America's closest Syrian allies.
Welcome back to the show.
Reese, how are you doing?
I'm doing fine.
So the thing is that you guys should know that Reese has written about 10 million books on the Middle East and the American empire.
He's got a real understanding of all this stuff.
And if I read this thing right, you just got back from Iraqi Kurdistan and or Syrian Kurdistan, both?
No, just Iraqi Kurdistan and Jordan.
Okay.
And all right, well, so it's a gigantic, complicated mess.
I guess I'll start us off here with Obama's announcement.
He's putting troops, special forces embedded with the Kurds.
But I got to tell you, Reese, I don't know if you saw the same things I saw.
I don't know if I did.
But I think I saw reference, possible reference to plans to embed these special forces with the so-called mythical moderates, meaning, you know, more or less Arar al-Sham and very possibly in alliance on the ground with al-Nusra.
It seems like, as you say here, the Russians get along with the Kurds.
So there's no problem there.
But we could get our guys bombed by the Turks if Erdogan follows through on his promises to attack the Kurds in Syria.
And then if they embed the special forces with the mythical moderates and their even worse jihadist buddies, then they could get them bombed by the Russians and get us into a real war, if you want to talk about real wars.
So tell me that I'm crazy and I shouldn't worry about getting into a war with our best ally, the Turks, or our supposed worst enemy, the Russians here.
You're crazy and paranoid and a conspiracy theorist.
Thank you.
God.
As usual, you have some insights.
Huge mistake, what Obama is doing.
I was there a year ago.
I predicted that when the bombing didn't work, they'd have to send in ground troops or find some ground troops to send in.
And sure enough, that's what they're doing.
It's a sign of weakness, not of strength or determination.
The fact that we're losing the war, you can't win a ground war without somebody on the ground.
And now they're putting U.S. troops on the ground.
As for who the U.S. is going to be aligned with, you were close, but not quite.
They're going to fight with the Syrian Kurds, who are led by the Democratic Union Party, or PYD.
And the PYD has, just in the last couple weeks, set up a new coalition that they claim includes Syrian Arab fighters who are not extremists.
However, these are the mythical moderates that you're referring to.
Nobody actually knows how many or how strong these groups are.
In fact, there's indications that they're quite weak.
Yesterday's New York Times had a front-page lead story on exactly this topic that I've been covering for a while.
And so the situation is the U.S. is going to be, indeed, putting its own soldiers in danger, not only fighting Islamic State, but, as you mentioned, the Turks, who hate the Syrian Kurds as they hate the Turkish Kurds.
Right.
And so, well, now, Erdogan has promised that he would attack the Kurds if they move west of the Euphrates River.
And there's got to be some kind of agreement with the Americans that you're at least going to wait until we're done using them against the Islamic State for a little while.
And then after we stab them in the back, then you can bomb them, but not while our guys are there, right?
Yeah, well, everybody's got their knives out and you better watch your back.
You're absolutely right about that.
Well, the problem is the Turks don't play by the same rules that the United States does, which doesn't, of course, play by the rules that anybody else does.
So even recently in the last few months, the Turks have been bombing the Syrian Kurds.
Even while the U.S. has been dropping 50 tons of ammunition and arms to those very same Kurds.
So the U.S. has not been able to stop them from bombing the Syrian Kurds because Erdogan, as you mentioned, sees the Kurds as big an enemy, if not bigger enemy, than the Islamic State.
So it's a very dangerous situation, very dangerous for U.S. troops and absolutely guaranteed to fail politically and militarily.
All right, and so now tell me more about these mythical moderates and their proportions.
And this just means anybody backed by the CIA, and does this include Ahrar al-Sham, or how do you break that down?
Well, it doesn't formally include those folks.
Again, for your listeners who may have already fallen asleep during this conversation with all these different names and acronyms and so on, the three strongest rebel groups in Syria now are the Islamic State, Jabhat al-Nusra, which is the affiliate of al-Qaeda, and Ahrar al-Sham, the group you just mentioned.
They are all right-wing extremists who use Islam as the excuse to basically put themselves in dictatorial power.
And they all hate each other, or at least everyone hates the Islamic State.
Now, in addition to those three major groups, there are some smaller militias.
There's kind of remnants of the Free Syrian Army.
There's these groups fighting in northern Syria.
What the PYD has said, that is the Kurdish, the Syrian Kurds, say that they have helped local Christians, Yazidis, and others to form militias, or they've worked with tribal chiefs to form militias who will fight the Islamic State in alliance with them.
That's who the U.S. is betting on as the so-called moderate forces, not the extremist groups.
The problem is those folks don't actually represent much.
They don't have much in the way of discipline or armed presence.
They certainly are not armed.
And to bet the farm on such an untried, untested group and declare them as the new saviors of the moderate elements is a serious mistake.
All right.
Well, now, so there have been contradictory statements, of course, all along about this.
But it sounds like they've decided that they want to keep the state but still get rid of Assad.
And it even sounds like maybe they've convinced the Russians that they can do that, too.
Forget de-Baathification and abolition of the army.
They learned that lesson, at least.
But it seems like they still are intent on getting rid of Assad.
But I wonder whether you think that they can do one and not the other.
You're talking about they being the U.S.?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well.
I mean, I guess it sounds like they've almost convinced Putin that it's possible to do, no?
Well, Putin ain't that stupid.
Here's what I think is happening.
One year ago, the U.S. made a massive shift in strategy.
Instead of calling for and arming groups to overthrow Assad, they said the Islamic State is the main enemy and, to some extent, al-Nusra.
And for the last year, the U.S. has tried to build up forces and ally with people who want to fight the Islamic State, putting off the overthrow of Assad until somewhere down the line.
Now, that could coincide with what Putin wants, but probably not, because Putin can see through that and says, yeah, well, today you're fighting the Islamic State, but tomorrow you're going to come after our guy, Assad.
And when Putin started bombing at the end of September, what he was doing, that was a massive admission of failure.
You know, you don't introduce new arms and troops and bombing raids when you're winning.
You actually decrease that.
You only do that when you're losing.
And Assad is down to controlling roughly one-third of the country, and Assad is basically stepping in to save his bacon.
So the problem, of course, is the U.S. doesn't want Russia to have any more influence in Syria than they want Iran or Assad or anyone else.
So the U.S. is stepping up its military game.
And there's the real danger, which is that there's so many folks bombing in Syria and so many fighting that the chances of running into each other and killing each other, even by accident, has increased.
Well, apparently they even did a little drill with American and Russian planes, practicing what happens if they get too close to each other.
There's a story about that on Antiwar.com today.
That's kind of good news, I guess.
That makes life encouraging, doesn't it?
Yeah, yeah, a lot.
All right.
Hang tight.
We'll be right back, y'all, with Reese Arilich in just a sec.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
So, yeah, we're talking about the tangled mess in the Syria war there with Reese Ehrlich.
And so now the Russians obviously have called America and its allies bluff on invading there.
But, you know, as soon as they did, and I should have thought of this before, but I just didn't think the Russians were going to go that far.
But once the Russians went that far, it occurred to me that, hey, man, is it possible that my government is run by people who are slightly more evil than stupid?
And that maybe they actually had a deliberate plan, as Zbigniew Brzezinski at least claims he had before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, to back the Mujahideen, to make them a bigger nuisance in order to provoke the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
And maybe that's what they're doing here, backing the Mujahideen to make them more of a problem.
They threatened the Najibullah slash Assad regime there in Damascus.
And then, oh, it wasn't Najibullah then, but you know what I mean, the Khamenei regime.
And then provoked the Russians into invading.
And then, ha ha, good luck fighting a bunch of Mujahideen backed by American and Saudi money, just like the old days.
And who cares about September 11th?
That was mostly just a bunch of non-government employees who died.
So they don't really matter in our government's policy.
And so, but anyway, I'm sorry I went off track.
But the point is, I thought, nah, you know, that's a little too fanciful that they would have done this on purpose to lure the Russians into this trap.
But then I saw a story in Defense News about how Robert Gates said to the Senate that he thinks, I guess his language was from the outside, it looks to him like, apparently, that was his word, apparently this is Obama's policy, is to draw the Russians in and bog them down.
He didn't think it was a very good one.
He thought we should flex our muscles and force them out.
But that was what he, how he characterized Obama's policy, Obama's former Secretary of Defense Gates.
So what do you think about that?
Well, I think that's giving the U.S. and Washington in general too much credit.
It's pretty Machiavellian to have intended to lose the war to increase groups that are murdering not only Syrians, but Westerners and Americans when they get a chance, and as a way to encourage a Russian invasion.
I think there's a much more straightforward way to look at it.
The U.S. operates Plan A, Plan B, Plan C.
Plan A was to provide arms and training to pro-U.S. rebels who would overthrow Assad and install a pro-U.S. regime in Damascus.
That didn't work.
That almost fell apart almost immediately.
Plan B tried to weaken the Assad government, allow the Saudis and the Turks to take the lead in promoting extremist groups and not doing anything to stop that, and that way overthrow Assad and have a pro-Western government.
That Plan B didn't work either.
So now we're down C, D, E, and we're down to Plan W, and that consists of trying to prevent the country from fragmenting entirely.
I think the U.S. wasn't intentionally trying to provoke the Russians.
I'm sure they had some scenarios in which that would happen, but it's not a good thing for the U.S. that the Russians are sending in troops and Iran is sending in troops.
It makes the imposition of a pro-U.S. regime all the more difficult.
Well, you know, I mean, part of the problem here is this entire policy has been completely insane in the first place.
You would think from the point of view of the government, not from the point of view of a non-interventionist, but from the point of view of the government that, hey, the enemy here are the Sunni jihadists, bin Ladenites, and so whoever's fighting them, at least we're going to stand out of the way.
And, of course, I don't know what you think about this.
It seems to me like if America had told Turkey and Saudi and Qatar and the rest of Israel to not back the jihadists all this time, that Assad would have won this war about 200,000 lives ago and it would have been a pretty rough peace.
But they've really just sustained this slaughter and basically for nothing.
Now you're telling me their policy is to prevent the breakup of Syria that they just cut in thirds?
Well, that's plan Y.
That is to split up Syria and take whatever portion of it they can to be a pro-U.S. enclave.
That's essentially what they've done in Iraq with the Kurdish region of Iraq.
But back on your main point, you know, from the very beginning, Assad got military and political support from Russia and from Iran.
The rebels got their support from the U.S., Israel, Qatar, Turkey, and the other countries you mentioned.
So it's very hard to parse out if no foreign powers have been involved.
I think it's quite possible that the civil society activists and the conservative Muslim parties, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, but not the extremists like the Islamic State, could have come to power.
I think in the first year of the uprising that was still a distinct possibility.
But Assad and his allies did everything possible to block that.
So, you know, I don't think it's given the history of it, I don't think it's possible to predict what Assad would have won or the rebels would have won.
Everybody got their international backing and that's just increased over the years.
And, you know, Assad is a brutal dictator.
He's secular, or he certainly was, but he now relies on appeals to religious prejudice to keep himself in power.
And the Sunnis who do live in areas that are controlled by the government are subject to massive discrimination and security checks.
It looks like what Israel does to the Palestinians.
I've interviewed people directly for that because all Sunnis living in the government-controlled areas are suspect of being supporters of the rebels.
So let's be careful, you know, Assad is certainly no great hero.
Well, I never said that.
I just said he would have won the war if America and its allies hadn't dumped ten zillion dollars and ten zillion bullets into the damn argument, that's all.
Well, maybe, but maybe if Iran and Russia hadn't backed him, he would have fallen very quickly.
Hard to say.
Although if Iran and Russia had backed him, then we still wouldn't be talking about the guys that did the 9-11 attacks and, you know, five before that and a thousand since then and fought against our guys for eight years in Iraq War II.
We'd be talking about, oh, Boohoo Hezbollah that hadn't attacked America since 1983 when America was in Beirut.
Right?
You lost me on that one, Scott.
I'm saying, you're saying, well, it all could have been foreign intervention this way or that.
I'm saying America and its allies intervention has been on behalf of the 9-11 attackers, on behalf of al-Qaeda in Iraq, in Syria.
The point you made earlier was valid, which is that when Turkey and Saudi Arabia in particular began backing the al-Nusra Front, which is allied with al-Qaeda and at that time was all, included the Islamic State people, the U.S. could have stopped that by laying down the laws, threatening to cut military spending and put other pressure on Saudi Arabia.
They could have stopped it.
They didn't.
They were willing to work with those folks against Assad in hopes that they would overthrow Assad and somehow they could change things later.
Same thing's going on in Yemen.
Today the Saudis and the Emiratis have invaded and bombed Yemen.
And who's flourished as a result?
Al-Qaeda.
The most dangerous al-Qaeda franchise in the world, the one that was responsible for the shoe bomber and the other direct airplane attempts at terrorist attacks on the United States.
They now control several cities and an area that they didn't control before because the Saudis are perfectly willing to work with them against what they see as a bigger danger, the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels.
Well, and that's the one where it's the most ironic.
If America's on split sides of the war against the Islamic State in a way, you know, sort of kind of supporting their side in a way, at least in against the Shia and the Baathists in Syria, while helping the Iranian-Shia side fight them in Iraq, in Yemen, America's fighting on both sides of the war with al-Qaeda at the same time.
Helping the Saudis fly as their air force while still doing drone strikes on them.
At least occasionally.
At least they're claiming.
So that's one where you can't get more ironic than that one.
Well, it shows you how confused this policy is.
They really don't, like I said, they've gone through their plans A, B, C, D and are pretty low into the alphabet by now.
Yeah.
Hey, I got a plan.
Just quit and see what happens, you know.
Not a bad idea.
Stop the bombing.
Pull the troops out.
Let the people try to resolve it themselves.
You know, we won't be, in a year from now, we're going to be talking about why the U.S. escalated its troop commitments to save our boys.
You know, the minute you put combat troops on the ground in Syria, what if some of them are wounded or killed?
Well, we've got to send in more to protect them.
We can't leave our boys isolated and pretty soon you've got a much bigger troop commitment.
And what are you going to do?
Well, stop it at the beginning.
It's like that movie V for Vendetta where it's the near distant future and on the TV news in the background, the American war in Kurdistan continues to rage today.
I saw that movie again recently.
You're right.
It's not a bad movie.
Yeah.
No, it's pretty good, man.
Hey, listen, man.
I really appreciate what you do, Reeson.
Great article here and great interview.
All right.
People can check out reeserlick.com.
That's my web page.
Oh, good.
Check out my articles and books.
Inside Syria is my latest book available on Amazon and bookstores around the country.
Yeah, there you go.
And check out that page on Amazon.com, y'all.
You'll be impressed for real.
Inside Syria and reeserlick.com.
Thanks again, Rees.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
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