11/11/16 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, November 13th, 2016.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright you guys, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
You can find my full interview archive at scotthorton.org.
More than 4,000 something interviews now, going back to 2003.
And so now to business here.
It's our friend Gareth Porter.
He is my favorite reporter, you guys know that.
And that's because he's always right about everything and he writes about everything that I care about the most, when I would have him do it too, incidentally, somehow.
Always great stuff.
His most recent piece is at antiwar.com, it's called US Hypocrisy, Bombing of Aleppo is no worse than what happened in Gaza and Iraq, and I think we could go on and on from there as well.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you?
Thanks, Scott.
I'm fine.
Glad to be back.
Good, good.
And I'm happy to have you here, and sorry I forgot, but now I'm happy that I remembered to say that you wrote the book Manufactured Crisis, which is the definitive account of the history of Iran's nuclear non-weapons program that they have had there, their relationship with the international community and the inspections and the sanctions and all of the safeguarding and all of the history of all of that, better than anyone else in the whole wide world, and everybody ought to read that book.
It's really great.
Manufactured Crisis, the truth behind the Iran nuclear scare.
Okay.
Thanks, Scott.
Thanks, Scott, as always.
Well, you deserve it.
So now it's a business, an article that you didn't write, but I know you read it, and it's at the Post, and it's huge.
I think, Obama directs Pentagon to target al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, one of the most formidable forces fighting Assad, they hasten to remind us in the headline.
It's by Adam Entwist at the Washington Post, and there's quite a few facets to this, Gareth.
If you want to just kind of take us through what you think are the most important points.
The bottom line, the claim here is that there is now a real pivot in American policy in Syria being announced.
Yeah, I think that's correct.
I mean, it certainly is significant that the Obama administration now has told the Pentagon that they want the US military to direct its attention more to al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria, al-Nusra Front, and to begin systematically to try to target the leadership of that organization.
The key thing here is, in my view, that what's so interesting, let me put it this way, what's so interesting about this story is the timing, of course.
This happens as soon as the election's over.
The story comes out in the Washington Post.
Now why is that?
Well, clearly, Obama had not wanted to have this policy go public when it was still in play in the election, because, of course, he was backing Hillary Clinton, and Hillary Clinton had made it very clear, not so much directly in her pronouncements, but through her surrogates, as we've talked about on your show, that she favored much more muscular military policy in Syria directed against the Assad regime.
I won't go into detail about that, but I think most of your listeners are well aware of that fact.
What happens here is that Obama is waiting until after the election to put out a policy, which I'm quite sure that he had wanted to have carried out well before that.
What we're seeing here really is the effect of electoral politics, party politics, on presidential decision-making, on war and peace decisions.
To me, that's the big headline here.
So in other words, is it fair to say then that Obama was basically probably on the assumption that Hillary was going to win?
He was leaving everything set for her to pick up this policy of focusing on Assad, and then once she lost, he decided, okay, good, I don't have to do that anymore, which I guess was his preference to go ahead and, you know, like in the deal that John Kerry tried to strike with the Russians twice, let's peel off the guys we like from al-Qaeda so we can bomb al-Qaeda.
And so in other words, Obama agrees with Trump that the war is against, well, now he more agrees with Trump, not like he hadn't been ordering the CIA to help these al-Nusra guys all along anyway, you know, by one pseudo degree of separation, I guess.
But he seems to have now really changed his mind and have a much more Trumpian policy on Syria, which is bomb the Islamic State and or now even bomb al-Nusra, but not Assad.
That's right.
And, you know, I think, in fact, you know, there was a conflict here between Obama's view on Syria, his policy on Syria and the policy that Hillary Clinton clearly favored.
So, I mean, he I think he did expect her to win, like most Democrats at this point.
I could be wrong about that.
And, you know, I think that he expected, I assume that he expected to have this policy come out once she was elected and to to make it more difficult for her to reverse it.
I mean, that's my guess.
Oh, now, so that's you're saying this isn't a result of Trump winning.
This is this was Obama actually even trying to block her before the election even took place here.
Yeah.
I mean, as I say, I think they have very different policies, policy approaches.
Well, I mean, I agreed with that part, but I guess I just thought that, you know, they're on the same team enough that he was leaving the options open for her.
But then once he found out she lost, that was when he went ahead and went this way with it.
But you're saying not look like he was even trying to block her before.
Well, he he has a contradiction here between his policy preference and his political commitment to supporting her for president.
And so I think what that produces is a policy decision to go ahead with the policy of targeting on this front much more directly in Syria, but doing so after she's elected and hoping, as I say, that this will have some influence on her policy, because, look, I mean, one of the things that happens here now is that the CIA is going to be more involved in going after Al-Nusra Front and giving it a new political interest, really a bureaucratic political interest in a policy other than simply supporting the the opposite, the armed opposition groups that the CIA has been backing in the past.
So is that really right?
I mean, the article says that this order went to the Joint Special Operations Command.
Did it go to the CIA, too?
I mean, you know what, Garrett?
I just want to see actual pitched battle between JSOC and the CIA paramilitaries on the ground at this point.
But that's just me.
Yeah, I think the CIA will will definitely be involved in supporting, you know, in supporting that effort in in gathering intelligence from drones and so forth.
And so, I mean, you know, it's not it's not going to totally change their viewpoint.
But, you know, I would suspect that it's going to complicate the internal bureaucratic politics of U.S. policy in Syria.
So, I mean, I don't know if if, you know, Obama actually calculated it that way.
But, you know, certainly he has to believe that putting this policy into effect, you know, builds a certain momentum which will will be at least will complicate the the policy shift or would have complicated, let me put it that way, would have complicated the policy shift that he expected to take place under under Hillary Clinton.
Yeah.
Now, you know, not to give credit to Trump, I mean, the fact of the matter is that America's Syria policy has been absolutely insane and stupid and completely upside down and ridiculous on the face of it.
So any idiot could say what Donald Trump has been saying since 2013, which is I saw somebody retweeted a tweet of his from three years ago that said the rebels, quote unquote, ironic quotes, rebels in Syria are made up of jihadist terrorists.
We shouldn't be backing them.
So any, you know, complete dolt, including even Donald Trump, noticed that, hey, Bashar al-Assad shaves his chin in the morning and wears a three piece suit.
And so maybe why would I be backing the butchers of New York City against him?
That doesn't make any sense.
So not that, you know, you or I support war against the Islamic State or al-Nusra either, but at least, you know, backing off from supporting these guys against Assad is the right thing on the face of it.
And it seems like, I mean, I don't know what else is going to happen with his national security cabinet, but but Donald Trump even understands enough to know how crazy this has been and that he doesn't want to continue it.
Yeah, I mean, what you're what you're pointing to, Scott, is is a very important reality, which is that people who are outside the the national security elite and the media elite and and the political elite and and, you know, Trump is, you know, has positioned himself as an outsider.
And in fact, I think it's fair to say that in many respects he is an outsider.
Grasp the fundamental reality in Syria much more readily than the political and national security elites themselves do.
And why is that?
Because of the same phenomenon that we've talked about over and over again, which is that the vested interests that the national security state acquires in programs and policies that are going to build up their power, their authority, their money, you know, the resources that they can dispose of at the expense of the interests of the American people.
So, yeah, you've got it absolutely right.
You nailed it.
All right now.
So, well, I want to get back to the question of Trump and his insane national security cabinet, as it's already coming together here in a few minutes.
But when I go back to this Washington Post article, I really like the audience to read it.
It's at WashingtonPost.com, Obama directs Pentagon to target al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria.
And as they hasten to point out there at the Washington Post, one of the most formidable forces fighting Assad.
And you can tell in the way the article is written.
And you don't have to be a regular reader of the Washington Post editorial page to be able to tell here that they are really lamenting this change in policy.
And or at least they're very torn about it, that, OK, well, maybe these guys are sworn loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the butcher of New York City.
But on the other hand, they're so good at fighting Assad, which is actually is that not the same thing, Gareth?
Really?
The way this article is written, are they not really conceding that al-Qaeda dominates the field when it comes to the rebellion so-called against Assad?
These other so-called rebel groups are just adjuncts of al-Qaeda.
And it's just amazing to read the Washington Post complaining that Obama is changing the policy from high treason to more of a low level treason.
And they're really sad.
Well, first of all, you're absolutely right that the Post editorial line and, you know, news coverage line, it clearly supports the general national security state viewpoint and interest in portraying the al-Nusra Front as somehow, you know, a necessary evil.
Let's put it that way, that we should simply not really think about the fact that they are, you know, terrorists and basically are prepared to, at the very least, you know, force non-jihadist Sunni and all Shia non-Sunni in Syria to abandon their fundamental beliefs or even worse, to punish them for their fundamental beliefs.
And so, you know, this is part of a broad news media, you know, sort of quality news media line that they have hewn to very closely for many, many months.
And you're right that this article reflects that very clearly.
You know, they don't say, in fact, that the armed groups that the United States is supporting are totally dominated by the al-Nusra Front.
They wouldn't go that far.
There is a formula.
I don't remember exactly what the wording is at this moment, but it's much more anodyne and doesn't really recognize fully the truth.
So, I mean, what interested me was, you know, just how clearly they were, as you put it, lamenting the new policy shift.
And by the way, I mean, you know, the Post story is written by Adam Entous, who, you know, used to write for The Wall Street Journal.
It's sort of like the New England Patriots trading their quarterback, their star quarterback, to the Seattle Seahawks or whoever, you know, the opposite is on the other side of the ledger at National Football League.
It's like trading among the three top quality newspapers in the United States.
And so they all share this same trope, the same line with regard to Syria.
And clearly he's picking up where he would leave off.
He had left off in The Wall Street Journal covering this story.
And by the way, his story just completely fabricates a narrative that is in line with what The Washington Post has done in the past on the whole question of negotiations between the United States and Russia in Syria.
And that is, you know, he claims that the negotiations broke down over the Russian bombing of Aleppo, which, of course, is totally false.
That's not what happened at all.
Yeah.
And we can all remember because it was just a few weeks ago.
What happened was the Americans bombed the Syrian army when they were in the middle of a battle with the Islamic State.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And of course, that is that's simply not going to be mentioned by The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times in their coverage.
That's not the way it works.
All right.
Now, so let me ask you about this here.
Again, Washington Post, Obama directs Pentagon and toward the end of 2016 to begin stabbing in a big Bay of Pigs style betrayal.
Our al-Qaeda allies in the back in Syria.
And the excuse here, it says, is, oh, CIA has been warning Obama the past few months that al-Nusra is turning parts of Syria into a new base of operations for al-Qaeda, which I don't know exactly what that means.
And that's different than al-Nusra has held territory for years now.
But now they're saying the territory that al-Nusra holds.
Oh, look, it's al-Qaeda holding territory.
Safe haven myth kicks in in full speed and helping them overthrow Assad goes away.
And now we got to keep fighting them in Syria or else we'll have to fight them over here.
Yeah, that, of course, is the is the convenient justification for for what the White House wanted to do anyway.
And has anything really changed, though, along those lines in terms of al-Nusra carving out more territory?
Not for many, many months.
I mean, this has been the case.
And in fact, it's been in the news.
I'm sure you've seen stories that have, you know, have referred to the fact that al-Nusra front was allowing some top operatives of al-Qaeda to come from Pakistan to to into Syria to to take advantage of the very wide expanse of the zone that they've controlled now for, you know, completely since the spring of 2015.
I think that would be the key turning point when they had this zone of control that allowed them to bring in a lot of the people from elsewhere, from from al-Qaeda.
So so this is a year and a year and a half old story, basically.
Well, yeah, I mean, and people remember that they said, oh, it's the Khorasan group, the Khorasan group.
And we had Mitchell Prothero, who was then writing for McClatchy newspapers, explain that, well, the group is real, but the name isn't.
The name was invented by the American intelligence officers.
To say these are guys, Khorasan is a region that's bisected by the nation states in Central Asia now.
But it's like Northeastern Iran and parts of Afghanistan and whatever is the Khorasan region.
And they were saying, basically, these are OG al-Qaeda guys who have now come to Syria.
So we love al-Nusra.
But when it comes to actual best friends of Osama from back when, we don't want that.
And in fact, they were saying at the time, and I don't know if this part was ever really confirmed, when they originally attacked the so-called Khorasan group in Syria, that they did so because they had intelligence that these guys were planning attacks in Europe.
You can give us all the tow missiles you want.
We're still going to attack you anyway, was their doctrine.
And that was why Obama started bombing them then.
And then you want to talk treason, go back to the papers.
And everyone was saying, oh, no, don't bomb our friends al-Nusra.
Now they're getting mad at us.
Yeah, so this is really this fundamental contradiction here between the supposed central role that counterterrorism plays in U.S. policy in the Middle East and the reality that it doesn't play that role at all.
I mean, the reality is that it's not counterterrorism that motivates or that propels U.S. policy forward in Syria or elsewhere.
And Yemen, for example, has nothing to do with it.
It's really very complicated politics that have to do with bureaucratic interests that are diluted or contradicted in some ways by and reinforced in some ways by political interest, partisan and otherwise.
So that's the storyline that we all have to really understand and get to talk about much more aggressively with regard to the nature of U.S. national security policy, the fundamental contradiction between the supposed emphasis or belief that we have to pursue a counterterrorism policy in the Middle East and the reality that that's not what's going on at all.
Right.
Well, and, you know, I think this is the nature of my disorder, Gareth, is I know all this stuff and yet I can't get desensitized to it.
I'm still shocked.
I'm never surprised, but I'm still shocked by this every single time.
And then I want to just kind of smack everyone in the country with these quotes.
Lisa Monaco, Obama's White House Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Advisor, said Obama's decision, quote, prioritized our fight against al-Qaeda in Syria, including through targeting their leaders and operatives.
So what they're saying is in this article from November the 10th of 2016 is that now they've decided that the mission in Syria is a counterterrorism mission.
I mean, what are they telling you there?
They're admitting they're treason.
They've been backing the American people's enemies the whole time because that's what our allies over there wanted.
Well, you know, Scott, when I finally get my book on the national security state done, I mean, this will be the fundamental theme of it.
The fact that the national security state has pursued a set of policies and programs for generations now that are not only not in the interests of the American people, but which have over and over again exposed either large numbers of Americans or the entire population of the United States to threats or actual damage, physical damage to them that they never should have been exposed to.
And I'm talking about a whole series of episodes of which this is only the most recent.
I mean, look at the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. policy, the way in which the U.S. national security elite didn't care about the damage that that entire set of policies toward nuclear weapons imposed on many thousands of people, tens of thousands of people, Americans in many ways over decades.
Right.
I mean, this is just one example.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
I mean, people and the more one of the obvious examples in terms of terrorism, of course, is, you know, Reagan's support for the Mujahideen in the 80s and Bush senior's decision to stab them in the back by occupying Saudi and all that in the early 90s.
But people forget that Bill Clinton backed Al-Qaeda in Bosnia.
And in fact, that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who helped run the 9-11 plot for bin Laden and Zawahiri, he was a veteran of Bill Clinton's jihad in Bosnia in the mid 1990s.
He backed the Kosovo Liberation Army in 1999 in their war of secession against Serbia.
And they were working directly with the bin Ladenites all along.
They backed the bin Ladenites in Chechnya as long as they were fighting against the Russians in the 1990s as well.
I mean, so, you know, where this is what I like to talk about when it comes to the Islamic state is here.
George Bush gave half of Iraq to Osama bin Laden and Zarqawi because he's so stupid.
Right.
But Obama directly took their side in Libya and in Syria.
Right.
Because it was necessary to cover up for the for the the error.
The mistake wasn't really a mistake, of course, of the neoconservatives in his administration who got us into Iraq.
And once you do that, then administrations have to continue to do terrible things to the American people's interests as a consequence.
And instead of admitting the mistake, the system has to complicate it, to compound it by one policy after another that builds on the mistake.
Yeah.
All right.
So now we get to freak ass the new president of the United States, Gareth.
And this, you know, he's got a couple of crazy ideas that, as we talked about before with his Syria policy, are still murderous, but are less on their face insane and treasonous than the current policy in that instance.
It seems like maybe if he really does want to turn over a new leaf with the Russians, then he'll probably get his way on that.
And if he if he really doesn't want to target Assad, he'll probably get his way on that.
But then, you know, unfortunately, I've been reading a lot of Bob Woodward books lately.
So I sort of have this kind of imagination about how this process works between the deputies meetings and the principals meetings and the National Security Council and the advisors and the National Intelligence Director and the generals and the chiefs and all of this stuff.
And everybody has their say.
And I wondered, you know, for good or for ill, and it could be really good or really bad either way on some of these questions.
Just how independent do you think an ego like Donald Trump could be as president when it comes to his relationship with the national security state?
You know, it's a it's a very important and very interesting question.
And of course, I have a great interest in this as a historian looking at various presidents and their relationship to the national security state.
The ones that I've been studying most assiduously, of course, are John F. Kennedy, LBJ and Obama.
And I mean, all in all three cases, all three Democrats with varying degrees of confidence or lack of confidence of LBJ being the one who had the least confidence in his foreign policy judgments.
You know, they were all subject to incredible pressures from their national security teams, their respective national security teams.
And in each case, they began their presidency with very strong views about not going to war or getting out of a war and found themselves under pressure from the teams, their national security teams, making very large concessions to the people who wanted war in each case.
And so if you look at that model and you think of Donald Trump as perhaps more like LBJ in the sense of somebody who, you know, is a strong ego, as LBJ certainly was, but who does not have the experience in foreign policy, who will tend to be less certain about sort of countermanding the views of his national security advisors.
So it's going to be very important who he names to his team.
And, you know, I don't know what's going to happen in that regard, but I think that that's going to be extremely dispositive in terms of the extent to which he will be under pressure to make concessions that will be toward the interests of the national security bureaucracies as we've known them in the past.
And so I certainly hope that John Bolton is not going to be one of them to start with.
Let's put it that way.
I mean, here's the thing.
I can tell you the future right here, right now.
It's easy because on the right, there's only maybe 10 guys who he could even go to who are either paleos or somewhat libertarian or are very, very restraint based realists who would fit with his, you know, sort of pretended idea of an America first policy and questioning collective security and questioning American hegemony and the expense of it all and that kind of thing.
But Donald Trump has never even heard of these men.
And there is a 0% chance, a 0% chance that Doug Bandow is going to have a good spot on the National Security Council to save us, man.
And so what do we got?
We got AEI and we got GINSA and we have Heritage and we have Bolton and Gingrich and the usual suspects because there's nobody else.
The best we can hope for, Scott, the best we can hope for is Stephen Hadley.
OK.
He's the guy that put the Niger uranium forgeries into the stream and made sure to start to lie us into war with Iraq.
And they're saying also maybe Bob Corker, the guy who the other day was saying that the Houthis might close the Straits of Hormuz because he doesn't even know where the Persian Gulf is.
Yeah, yeah.
I know we're in bad shape.
These are our senators in the United States of America.
They can't even find Arabia on a map, Gareth.
Yeah, I mean, we are we are living in perilous times.
I think we can all agree on that one.
All right.
So that's Gareth Porter.
He's my favorite reporter.
You find him at MiddleEastEye and at Truthout.org where he won the Gellhorn Award for all of his great work on, in fact, Mike Flynn assassinating a bunch of innocent people in Afghanistan working for Stanley McChrystal back in the day, Donald Trump's number one foreign policy advisor there.
He's the author of the definitive book on the Iran nuclear program.
It's called Manufactured Crisis.
And you can find all he writes at Antiwar.com.
Thanks again, Gareth.
Thank you very much, Scott.
Always appreciate it.
All right, Sean, that's Antiwar Radio for this morning.
Thanks very much for listening.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 4,000 of them now.
Going back to 2003 at ScottHorton.org.
Thanks very much for listening.
See you next week.