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We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, man, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys.
Introducing our good friend, Phil Giraldi.
He is the executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
At councilforthenationalinterest.org.
Used to be a CIA spy back when, but now he's a good guy.
And he writes for unz.com, U-N-Z, unz.com.
This one is called, Boy, is this stupid or what?
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How's it going?
Oh, I'm fine.
Looking forward to Thanksgiving.
Yeah, good deal.
Well, I'm sorry for taking up your week off here with work.
But hey, it's kind of important and interesting.
Yeah, this is an interesting story.
No question about it.
It is.
Well, lots of different questions raised from lots of different angles.
So the sub headline tells the story here.
Did the U.S. allow ISIS to escape to keep the fighting going?
Or let's just start with, did they allow them to escape?
And then we'll argue about the reasons in a minute.
But so America and our Shiite and Kurdish allies in Iraq smashed the Islamic State in Mosul, crushed them, and then I guess maybe some had escaped, but mostly they were just dead, right?
But then you're talking about, that's in northwestern Iraq, but you're talking about in western Islamic State, i.e. eastern Syria, and their very last holdout, the capital, their former capital there, Raqqa.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's right.
And so then it's the Marines and the, I forgot what they call them nowadays, the SDF, the Kurdish YPG fighters mostly, who were rousting ISIS out of Raqqa there.
I guess they beat the Syrian army in enforcing them out there.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's right.
This is the area that the U.S. was actually kind of strongest in, in terms of having resources.
The Syrian army and the Russians have cleaned up most of the rest of the population centers, but this area was, there were more American assets in place in this area.
All right.
So, and maybe later in the interview we'll talk about how the Islamic State came to take over this territory in the first place, Phil, but for right now we're talking about how they lost it and what happened to them, and you're saying a deal was struck.
Who struck a deal and what was the deal?
Yeah, this is all based on a BBC investigative report, which I would recommend people who are very interested in how this played out should read.
It's a bit long and it has a lot of evidence in it, actual interviews with people who were involved in this process, but- It's called Raqqa's Dirty Secret, the BBC story is.
Right.
Yeah, Raqqa's Dirty Secret.
And it's surprising because the BBC is not that courageous these days.
This is a story that really makes the U.S. government and British government look bad because the Americans and Brits were on the scene.
And essentially what happened was Raqqa, of course, has been bombed to hell by the U.S. and by the Russians and by everybody.
Raqqa as the capital of the caliphate has considerable significance for ISIS and for getting recruits and for attracting people to the cause and money and so on and so forth.
And the place has been bombed to hell.
There were a bunch of fighters still in place, many of them with their families.
The Syrian army was closing in from the western front.
The U.S. supported insurgents who were basically coming in from the other side.
And they essentially cut a deal to allow the remaining ISIS fighters to leave with their families.
There were conditions on it.
The conditions were that it was not to include any foreign fighters.
This was only a pass given to people, fighters from Iraq and from Syria.
And also they were presumably not supposed to be leaving with their weapons.
And, of course, what turns out is all these things were ignored.
And apparently with the United States and the Brits looking over the process and letting this, you know, happen, there was a procession five miles long of all these people leaving with all their weapons, with, in fact, loading trucks up with extra weapons.
And, of course, no one's quite sure where they wound up.
Five miles long?
Yeah, five mile long procession of trucks and buses.
And you're saying now they try to claim some deniability and say, well, this was the SDF that cut the deal.
And, jeez, we didn't know.
And by the time we got our A-10s up, they were all gone.
What's the story here?
Yeah, that was the first story they told.
And then they kind of backed off and said, well, the BBC account was basically correct.
The Pentagon backed off.
And, yeah, the thing was, you know, it was essentially it allowed these people to escape.
They could have probably surrounded the city and kind of starved them out.
But they chose not to.
They didn't want to storm into the city or to bomb the city anymore because it would have killed, this was the argument they were making, it would have killed a lot of civilians, which is certainly true.
But the fact is that the U.S. basically sort of sat there and let these guys go.
And so the question becomes, what exactly was he thinking?
The one thing that Trump has said over and over again is that he will destroy ISIS.
Here they were, guys, you had them.
And my theory of it is that essentially the U.S. wants to have a continuing problem in Syria for any number of reasons.
And it makes the U.S. a player in what's going on and also as a justification for staying in Syria.
So that's kind of how I'm seeing it.
Well, yeah, certainly one possible explanation.
Of course, the U.S. has no permission or the U.K. or any of our other allies have no legal standing for being in Syria whatsoever.
Right?
I mean, do they even have a pretend invitation from the Kurds at this point?
Not that they have, you know, internationally recognized sovereignty anyway.
Yeah, well, I mean, the fact is Mattis last week made a speech and he said that the U.S. was in Syria because it's allowed to do so by the U.N. sanctions.
And that's nonsense.
It's not true.
By the U.N. sanctions resolution against Syria?
There are some sanctions in place, yeah, against Assad that go back a few years.
Well, didn't he just cite the AUMF and pretend ISIS is al-Qaeda and that kind of thing?
Well, al-Qaeda is there too.
Yeah, I mean, I guess he could do that.
But the fact is he's still in Syria illegally.
Yeah, sure.
But I just mean it's funny that he came up with such a pathetic excuse.
He might as well have cited the town charter back in Virginia somewhere.
That's right.
It goes back to Roanoke.
Yeah, it's incredible.
I mean, the stuff they come out with.
The fact is the Russians are there because they were invited by the Syrian government.
But under international law, they're there legally.
So are the Iranians.
So is Hezbollah.
But the U.S. is not.
And the Turks recently had an article in which they pinpointed 13 U.S. military bases, some of which appear to be prominent with airfields and the whole damn thing inside Syria.
These are all illegal.
Oh, man.
All right.
Well, so we've got to get back to that in just a second.
But let me rewind to this escape here.
I'm going to try to make some excuses and you tell me what you think.
Well, but, Phil, I mean, what are you saying there?
I had to do just a turkey shoot like the highway of death out of Kuwait and just slaughter all these people and their men, women and children, you know, that they're bringing with them.
What if they didn't?
Maybe they didn't have enough Marines to surround them and demand surrenders and take them prisoner.
And so it was either, you know, wholesale slaughter like ISIS would do of a bunch of, you know, innocent people who were with them.
You know, at least the turkey shoot on the way out of Kuwait.
They were all combatants, even if they were just poor conscripts.
You know, they were at least Iraqi army.
Right.
But in this case, they got their wives and their children with them.
And so maybe they just had no choice but to say, OK, guys, as long as you leave Raqqa, we'll just have to deal with you later.
You know, catch up with you in the Idlib province or something.
Well, you know, that's that's a plausible argument.
But the fact is, they're talking, the BBC is claiming that there were the convoy consisted of about 4000 that included families.
So we're talking, again, according to the BBC, of something like about four to 500 fighters.
And it's inconceivable that the U.S. did not have sufficient forces in place with the Iraqi militia, with the Kurdish militias and with also U.S. assets to just kind of blockade them and keep them in.
Because these guys also knew that the Syrian army was approaching from the other direction.
And the Syrian army was not about to give them any kind of quarter.
That would probably would have killed all of them.
And then so where do they go?
Well, they went to ISIS controlled territory, pretty much out in the desert, not too far from the Euphrates River.
That's as far as I could tell from the press accounts.
And I would bet the U.S. probably followed them with drones and that sort of thing.
They probably know a lot better where they wound up.
But the the thing was that, you know, again, these people were these fighters were supposed to be Iraqis and Syrians.
In other words, they were being given kind of a, hey, if you guys just get rid of your weapons and disappear into the population, we'll let you go.
But as it turned out from the BBC account, a lot of these fighters were Egyptians.
They were you know, they were Turks.
They were they were anything but Syrians.
They were Chechens.
They were Egyptians.
They were all of the people that basically have flocked to ISIS.
They all escaped.
And these guys have no home to go to.
So, you know, they're going to they're going to continue to be a problem.
Or if they do go home, they might be a bigger problem.
So it was, you know, this kind of funny thinking about what kind of solution you would seek to have to keep these people from being an issue downstream.
And this this would seem to me to be probably the worst choice you could possibly make, because here you let them escape and you're not only let them escape, you let them take all their weapons with them.
All right.
Hang on just one second again.
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You know, it's funny, man.
I remember you and me warning them in 2011 and 2012.
Don't do this.
Phil Giraldi, everybody.
He's the guy at Washington's Secret Wars.
It's the NATO versus Syria.
Those two stories at antiwar.com and the American Conservative Magazine.
He's the guy that broke the story that Obama had signed a new finding authorizing CIA to start screwing up, you know, making things worse again in Syria and backing the rebels there.
Those stories came out in December of 2011.
And we warned them that, well, wait, we already saw what happened when the Mujahideen came home to the Arab Afghans came home from the war against the Soviets in the 80s.
They turned into al-Qaeda.
And so we had a problem with them.
And then we already saw what happened when the guys came home from Iraq, war two, where they had fought with Zarqawi there.
They came home to Libya and to Syria and they started problems there.
Now we're going to take their side and build up their side in this war in Syria.
And then what happened two years later, which is now four years ago, three, two years later was the first attack in 2013, where ISIS guy who had fought in Syria went to Brussels and attacked a Jewish community center or a synagogue or something.
Remember that?
It was like a Jewish museum or something.
That was the first blowback attack from ISIS in Europe was in 2013.
And we said, boy, you better stop doing this back in these guys.
This blowback's coming.
You might love them, but that doesn't mean they love you back.
You're still the Roman Empire or whatever in their mind.
And so look at what we're doing now.
We're in 2017.
ISIS, you know, what we warned finally turned into an actual caliphate for three years, Phil.
Now it's finally gone.
And when they finally smashed the damn thing, they let the guys scatter.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's incredible.
I mean, if you look back, we don't even, you know, we can go back even farther.
We go back to 2001.
We can see that every one of these interventions by the United States has turned out badly.
I mean, we created Al Qaeda before 2001.
And then we created ISIS by invading Iraq, basically.
And it's just and now we're doing the same thing is playing out right now in terms of what's going on in Lebanon.
There's going to be bad news coming out of Lebanon pretty soon.
We're going to have either the Israelis and the Saudis working together and suckering the United States into this.
And it's going to be another bad scenario.
Just take my word for it.
And it's we can't seem to ever get it right.
We can't separate our genuine national security interests from meddling in these places in the belief that we can fix it.
We can't fix it.
Man, so and now this is really a worrisome thing.
And by saying, you know, take the fight to Lebanon, you mean attacking Hezbollah, right, who are the ones who are keeping ISIS out of Lebanon, keeping Al Qaeda out of Lebanon right now?
Right.
Because what you've seen here is that the people who've defeated ISIS basically are all Shia.
I mean, it was it was Iran.
It's the Alawite government of Syria and Hezbollah coming from Lebanon, aided and assisted admittedly by the Russians.
But the fact is that these are the ones who defeated and destroyed this threat that we have been talking about for years now as something that we want to deal with.
It's been it's been the guys that we're labeling as bad guys that have actually dealt with this.
And the Sunni states like Saudi Arabia, they've been funding the bad guys.
So, you know, it's like, my God, when does this ever end?
Yeah, well, of course, that's why they attacked us in the first place, right?
Because we were our government was too close to their governments, right?
It wasn't because they were the the terrorist auxiliary forces of Iran, Iraq and Syria.
It was because they were the auxiliary forces of Saudi.
But they just didn't like King Fahd basically, right?
I mean, yeah, yeah, exactly.
So it's just incredible.
And we get it wrong every time.
And we're continuing to do so.
And I can't see that Trump is going to change that in any way.
Man, well, look, I mean, he said to the president, I guess it's the Christian president of of Lebanon, Aoun, General Aoun.
And he said, yeah, you know, you guys have done great fighting again.
Or maybe it was Hariri that he said this to the prime minister.
I forget.
Anyway, he goes, you guys have done a great job defeating terrorism like ISIS and Hezbollah.
No, man, it was Hezbollah that defeated ISIS and drove them out.
But he didn't know that.
Yeah, he's the president, Phil.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, now we have the Saudis.
The Saudis over the weekend went to the Arab League and they got Hezbollah declared a terrorist organization.
And and and they want Hezbollah out of the Lebanese government.
That's what they're pushing for with all this what they've been doing, basically kidnapping the prime minister and and then sending him back home with the message.
Well, no.
Yeah.
Oh, so did they they have sent him back home now?
I lost track of that story, I guess.
Yeah, he arrived last night.
Oh, OK.
Wait, so go back.
Go back and tell this story real quick about the forced resignation of the prime minister of Lebanon here.
This is incredible.
Yeah, this was, I guess, a little over a week ago.
The the Lebanese prime minister, Assad al-Hariri, fled or was ordered to go to Saudi Arabia.
And once he got there, he read a statement saying he was resigning for fear of his life back in Lebanon because the Iranians are taking over the country.
And it turns out that this was all kind of scripted, as one might expect.
And under considerable pressure from the world community over the Saudis kidnapping a prime minister, he was allowed to leave.
He went to Paris.
He was there for a couple of days.
And then last night he got back in Lebanon.
And apparently he he then said he was reconsidering his his resignation and there would be discussions.
And but the the Saudis have laid down markers on this.
They've said they do not want Hezbollah in the country, in the government in any way, shape or form.
And and that's their condition for not considering the language is incredible, not considering Lebanon to be at war with Saudi Arabia.
Can you imagine that?
This is the stuff that's coming out over the last 48 hours, just amazing stuff.
Well, man, I don't want to taunt them or anything, but what the hell the Saudis going to do about it?
They're going to fly.
I mean, they already can't win this air war, this terror campaign that they're waging with American help against the people of Yemen, this starvation campaign.
And yet so what are they going to do?
They're going to, you know, launch a whole other air war against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon.
I mean, they'd have to I'm trying to picture a map.
They definitely have to have access to Jordanian airspace.
And then I guess if they, you know, stayed over eastern Syria, well, they'd have to tangle with the Russians to get across Syria to get to Lebanon there.
I don't know.
I don't have a perfect map.
I'm just searching around in my brain.
I don't have one in front of me.
But it seems like that would be a problematic problem from the Saudis point of view, trying to figure out how to wage an air war against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Now, the Israelis, you know, they could certainly try.
But then again, we saw what happened 11 years ago when they tried it.
Right, right.
Yeah, well, the Israelis would provide the muscle potentially.
And it's clear that the Saudis and Israelis have an understanding about where they want to go with this, which is basically to get get Iran out of out of that area, starting with Lebanon.
And but but the real, of course, story is the back story about how they're going to sucker the United States into this deal.
Apparently the from what I'm hearing, the the Pentagon and the White House have basically been talking to Israelis and and Saudis about what can we do to help you?
You know, the usual kind of line.
So it's a it's another one of these developing situations where the big loser is going to wind up to be Washington.
Yeah, man.
All right now.
So, well, and this is part of that whole thing, right, is and as we've been talking about this whole time, just as everything America has done has benefited Osama's men well before and since September 11th.
Same thing for our Iran policy, too.
We're trying to hurt Iran by getting rid of Saddam.
I don't know.
David Wormser and Richard Pearl seem to think it's a good idea, guys.
And so they get rid of Saddam, which just empowers the Iranians.
And it's not like they have total sovereignty over Iraqi Shia stan.
But they got a hell of a lot of influence.
And we favored their favored militias and political parties this whole time, as you know, the Dawa Party and Supreme Islamic Council, the Bata Brigades and all of these guys.
And then we know that the reason that they backed the jihadists in Syria was to take Assad down a peg, which was to take Iran down a peg.
Even if they weren't going to completely overthrow Assad, they're going to weaken him.
And that was, you know, to placate the Saudis and the and the Israelis somewhat.
I guess it was the American policy, too, but over dealing with Iran on their nuclear program.
And yet what's that done other than in even in creating the Islamic State?
Now, three years later, now that it's gone, it's only enhanced Shiite and therefore Iranian power and influence in Iraq and spread their influence to Fallujah, Ramadi, Tikrit and Mosul in a way that is much more thorough than their domination of those areas had been before in this, you know, as the results of Iraq War three there.
And we have Iranian.
I don't know the full truth of this, but apparently there are Iranians could Iranian Quds Force have been helping the Russians and Assad in Syria.
And Hezbollah, too, has a whole new generation of battle hardened fighters, more or less fresh from their victory against Al-Qaeda.
And not that they're completely done with Al-Qaeda, but still, they have been fighting and winning against Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State for all of this time.
Or I don't know exactly Hezbollah versus IS.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
See, right on the border, as we were talking about, I don't know about in the east.
But anyway, Phil, I think what you get when you're picking up what I'm putting down, which is that now that America has done so much to benefit Iran's position here as the reaction, as the direct result, and as the secondary result of American policies against them there, then that becomes the excuse for, you know, treating 2017, 2018 like it's the beginning of history.
And now something has to be done about this massively expanding Persian empire, as they're starting to call it now, as though all of this is Iran's fault, not America's fault.
And as though all of this now puts America and our poor, helpless Israeli and Saudi allies on the defensive against Iranian aggression.
That's a hell of a narrative, you know, when so much of it really is true.
They really have gained in power and influence.
It's just never mind whose fault that is.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
Although I would, you know, I would caution against going too far with that argument, because the fact is, I mean, Iran is a relatively poor country.
It has a large population, but it doesn't really have the resources to be like an imperial power in that region.
And they keep throwing out the argument that there's going to be a land bridge between the Mediterranean and Caspian seas.
And this is going to include, you know, Iran and Iraq and Syria and Lebanon.
I mean, you know, it's easy to talk empire, but to be able to run it and administer it.
And these countries, Iraq and Syria and Lebanon, all have strong identities.
And they, you know, basically are not going to be completely patsies for the Iranians or anybody else.
But you're absolutely right.
I mean, we're the ones that by our interventions have created this situation.
And now we're going to say this situation is really bad and never admit that it was our fault.
And now we're looking for solutions to deal with the with the Iranian threat.
And this is precisely what's playing out in Lebanon.
And it's there are no goods.
I'm going to have an article appearing in the next couple of days.
I'll send you a link on how this is developing.
But the fact is that there are no good options for the United States or Israel or Saudi Arabia to deal with Lebanon.
I mean, unless you want a war and and even that is not a good option, because it's another one of these wars like the previous three or four wars that we've had that are unwinnable.
And so but this is the way it's going.
This is the way the the rhetoric one hears out of Washington and one hears out of Riyadh in particular.
Now, this is the way it's pushing.
All right, you guys, that's Phil Giraldi.
He's at the Council for the National Interest.
That's Council for the National Interest.org and at UNZ.com.
That's UNZ, UNZ.com.
This one is called Boy, is this stupid or what about America letting ISIS escape from Raqqa.
Take a look at that.
Thanks again, Phil.
OK, thanks, Scott.
All right, you guys, you know the deal.
Scott Horton.org.
Libertarian Institute.org.
Antiwar.com.
Fool's errand dot US for my book Fool's Errand.
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