12/16/15 – Stephen Zunes – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, all.
Scott here for SamuraiTechAcademy at MasterSamuraiTech.com.
Modern appliance repair requires true technicians who can troubleshoot their high-tech electronics.
If you're young and looking to make some real money, or you've been at it a while and just need to keep your skills up to date, Samurai Tech Academy teaches it all, and they'll also show you the business, how to own and run your own.
Take a free sample course to see how easily you can learn appliance repair from MasterSamuraiTech.com.
Use coupon code SCOTTHORTON for 10% off any course or set of courses at MasterSamuraiTech.com.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
I like this song.
Anyways, hey, check it out.
First up on our show today is our friend Steven Zunas, and boy, I just realized I don't have your bio in front of me, but you're a professor at which university there in the Bay Area, Steven?
University of San Francisco.
University of San Francisco.
I was going to say that, but then I thought, that doesn't sound right.
There are a couple other schools in the area with similar names.
There you go.
All right.
Of course, you've got a huge archive at AntiWar.com and a lot of other places where you write.
You have a couple of new ones here, one at the Huffington Post about the rise of the Islamic State, and another one at Truthout.org, what we can expect from Hillary Clinton on Israel-Palestine.
I know, God, I'm putting off reading this one until another 10 minutes from now.
Listen, but first of all, though, I want to talk with you about this Ted Snyder piece that we ran on AntiWar.com and also ran at ConsortiumNews.com.
He goes into the history of the Olmert government in Israel and their attempts to negotiate with the Syrians for a permanent peace, I guess, along the lines of the Camp David Accord with Egypt, that kind of thing.
It's a very interesting history that he goes into there with a lot of different facets to it.
The reason it's so important is because it seems to me, in the scheme of things, that this process that you describe was a real, a very significant pause in what had been the long-term Netanyahu plan left over from his first prime ministership, which was regime change all around, and most especially in Syria, in order to undermine Hezbollah in Lebanon and all that clean break kind of stuff, coping with crumbling states and all of that.
Here was this attempt by the Olmert government, apparently, to try to come to a better solution, which not that his government was all that smart when it came to invading Lebanon or anything like that, but anyway.
Now we're back to the regime change policy, and this was made very stark in the debate last night when Ted Cruz said, hey, I'm for bombing ISIS, but not for bombing Assad.
I take Israel's position.
Noah Pollack, the prominent neoconservative, tweeted out, that is incorrect.
Israel's position is, get rid of Assad.
And he linked to a letter from Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the United States at the time, that he wrote to the Wall Street Journal correcting the record, and saying, again, I protest at you saying Israel is concerned about instability.
We want Assad gone.
Of course, he told the same thing to the Jerusalem Post, and he told the same thing on video to Jeffrey Goldberg at the Aspen Fancy Pants thing in 2004 there, which everybody can find on YouTube.
So just further footnotes and confirmation, and it just came up last night, so I was hoping that you could kind of fill in that detail, and it goes to show how unnecessary regime change is, if the entire Israeli establishment, after all, just a few years ago, was willing to shake hands with Assad.
It's very interesting, and things have evolved, actually.
Syria's had a reputation of being one of Israel's most hardline opponents, but starting in the late 80s, early 90s, the Assad regime decided that they're not going to be able to defeat Israel.
The Soviet Union is no longer supporting them.
Maybe they should make some kind of deal.
And they started to make peace overtures, and it became official in the late 1990s, and they went into negotiations, and they basically agreed to the whole 242 formula, land for peace, that if Israel gave back the southwestern corner of Syria, in the Golan province to Syria, they would recognize Israel, have normal diplomatic, economic relations, they would demilitarize the Golan, allow UN peacekeeping forces, etc., etc., again, pretty much everything that Israel had supposedly wanted, and they negotiated, and it came very, very close, literally within a few hundred yards close, because there was dispute going back to an old colonial border about whether it was on the shores of Lake Tiberias, also known as the Sea of Galilee, or if it was a couple hundred yards inland, which would sort of give Israel all sides of the lake.
And so things broke off, but it seemed that they were damn close.
So people figured, oh, the next round, they'll probably find out some kind of compromise around this or whatever.
Well, Assad died, and the sun took over, and that took a while to sort of stabilize things, and then Sharon came to power, a more right-wing government, and they weren't interested in doing this.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but just stop for a second.
The negotiations that you're speaking about now, was that in the first Netanyahu term, or that was after him?
No, this is under Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who was a more centrist politician.
Right, Netanyahu was in from 96 to what, 98?
And then came to the very beginning of 2001.
Okay, and then came, no, no, no, because there was Sharon.
And Sharon took over.
I'm sorry, I missed one, but I'm just confusing the issue.
Go ahead.
But anyway, there was another attempt back in 2007, when Israel had a coalition government between some center-right parties, and the younger Assad made a peace overture, very similar terms.
Hey, we want to negotiate, we're ready for peace, et cetera.
And this is an incredible thing.
This has been underreported.
I wrote about it several years ago, soon after it happened, and Obama actually made a veiled reference to it during his 2008 presidential campaign and his speech before AIPAC.
But basically, the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, talked to the Israeli leadership and said, don't even think about it.
Don't make peace with Assad.
And Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, acknowledged that it was U.S. opposition that led the divided cabinet to vote against resuming negotiations with Assad, saying that the United States is virtually our only friend nowadays, and we don't want to upset them by doing something they don't want, like negotiating with the Syrians.
Why did the United States not want them to negotiate with the Syrians?
Because if Assad had gotten the Golan back, which is a big issue that Syrians across the ideological and sectarian and whatever spectrum feel strongly about, it would strengthen Assad's rule.
And we did not want that.
We wanted to undermine Assad's rule.
We wanted regime change.
In fact, if you go back just a couple of years earlier, the United States passed what became known as the Syrian Accountability Act, which was ostensibly to try to force Syria to withdraw its troops from Lebanon.
A lot of people refer to it as an occupation.
Technically speaking, it wasn't.
It was more like the relationship with the Soviet Union and their Eastern European satellites during the Cold War, in that these were nominally independent governments, but the Soviets could basically tell them more or less what to do on foreign policy and make sure they didn't go too far away from Soviet interests.
But it was something, whatever you want to call it, most Lebanese didn't like it, and it was quite reasonable to want Syria to leave.
What was interesting about this, however, it was the United States that initially encouraged Syria to invade back in 1976 to try to prevent the leftist Lebanese national movement from taking over, and then supported them again in a December 1990 coup against a prime minister, General Aoun, who had himself staged a coup a few months later, and we were concerned he was very closely allied to Saddam Hussein, whom we were about to go to war with over the occupation of Kuwait.
But anyway, the United States changed sides and decided they really wanted Syria out of there.
And then came the Hariri assassination in 2005, I guess, right?
But now, I'm sorry, because the drum's kicking, which means we've got to take this break.
I'll continue the story.
It's an interesting one.
Yeah, yeah.
So it's very complicated, very interesting stuff.
Stephen Zunis on Syria, Israel, Lebanon, Hezbollah, and the USA, of course.
Right back.
So you're a libertarian, and you don't believe the propaganda about government awesomeness you were subjected to in fourth grade.
You want real history and economics.
Well, learn in your car from professors you can trust with Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom.
And if you join through the Liberty Classroom link at scotthorton.org, we'll make a donation to support the Scott Horton Show.
Liberty Classroom, the history and economics they didn't teach you.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here for Liberty.me, the great libertarian social network.
They've got all the social media bells and whistles.
Plus, you get your own publishing site, and there are classes, shows, books, and resources of all kinds.
And I host two shows on Liberty.me, Eye on the Empire with Liberty.me's Chief Liberty Officer Jeffrey Tucker every other Tuesday, and The Future of Freedom with FFF founder and president Jacob Hornberger every Thursday night, both at 8 Eastern.
When you sign up, add me as a friend on there, scotthorton.liberty.me.
Be free.
Liberty.me.
All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
We're talking in a little bit about the history of Israel's interest in peace and war with Syria.
Of course, they've been providing medical treatment to al-Qaeda fighters there for years now and still at this stage.
I'm a bit confused about this whole thing, although maybe the answer is pretty simple.
Oh, did I say we're talking with Stephen Zunis about all of this?
Stephen, at the point where the Israelis say, okay, we want to go ahead and maybe negotiate over the Golan, and the Americans say, hell no.
Well, what the hell is the Americans' interest in this, other than doing whatever the hell the Israelis say?
The American interest in...
That's interesting.
It's been the clean break of the neocons all along.
Is it just because the neocons are even further to the right than the Israeli government?
In many respects, that's true.
It depends on the Israeli government.
But certainly the Israeli government at that time, we were talking about before the break, which was in around 2007, it's in the right government there, was willing to negotiate, but pressure from the United States led them to do otherwise.
Because again, our priority was to undermine the Syrian regime.
And just going back to 2004...
But wait, I mean, but that's what I'm getting at, is our policy of undermining the Syrian regime is because that's what Israel wants in the first place all along, right?
No, no, I would say, I mean, obviously there's a conjunction of interest there.
But the United States first and foremost is opposed to any government that challenges U.S. hegemony.
And Israel can be an ally in that struggle.
I don't think this particular example is one of tail wagging the dog.
In fact, we get an interesting idea, another idea that's happened under the Clinton administration.
In the late 1990s, public opinion polls showed that something like 75% or more of Israelis wanted to withdraw Israeli occupation troops from southern Lebanon.
Despite all the complaints in the United States about the so-called Syrian occupation, the Israelis had been occupying southern Syria for over 20 years by that point, defying no less than 10 U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding they withdraw.
And this is what gave rise to Hezbollah.
There was no Hezbollah before the Israeli occupation.
They were organized in large part to resist the Israeli occupation.
And Israelis were getting tired of their young men getting killed there.
In fact, over 300 Israelis had been killed in the occupation.
And parents and others were saying, bring our kids home.
But Clinton had his ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, go on national Israeli television and say that, no, Israel should not unilaterally withdraw from Syria.
You know, so here we had our ambassador to a foreign country saying that country should continue to defy U.N. Security Council resolutions and continue this occupation that the vast majority of the people in that country did not want, not to mention, of course, the Lebanese, who had been suffering like crazy with thousands of people killed as a result of it.
But eventually, the Israelis had enough.
They withdrew in kind of a hectic fashion in 2000.
But the reason we wanted Israel to stay there was we wanted to pressure the Lebanese government to distance themselves from Syria.
Again, we did not want Syrian political domination there.
And again, we didn't want the Syrian government to exist at all.
It was one of the last bastions of secular Arab nationalism, one that opposed both Islamist extremism but also opposed Western imperialism.
You know, we had a number of victories in the eyes of the United States.
You know, when Sadat switched sides after the death of Nasser and moved Israel from an anti-imperialist to a pro-Western position.
And in more recent years, of course, we've seen how Saddam and Gaddafi were overthrown.
Assad was sort of the last bastion of this kind of tradition.
And we want to get rid of him.
And again, we've had a hard time with these nationalist, anti-Western governments, whether it be in Latin America or Southeast Asia or Africa or whatever.
Well, Netanyahu's government is certainly interested in regime change in Syria.
Very much so.
In fact, it's kind of interesting, though.
Let's go up to a 2000...
So anyway, the Syria Accountability Act of 2004, it mentioned, you know, threatened serious sanctions against Syria if they didn't withdraw from Lebanon.
OK, that's reasonable.
I think they should have withdrawn before as well.
But it was so hypocritical because they cited the very United Nations Security Council resolutions that called on Israel to withdraw as saying, well, the UN says no foreign forces should remain in Lebanon.
And Israel is the only country mentioned by name in that resolution.
Yes, it applied to Syria, too.
But the hypocrisy was just incredible.
It was not once that Congress complained about Israel violating it during their 22-year occupation.
But all of a sudden, the UN Security Council resolutions became sacrosanct because it involved Syria.
And they added all these riders to this thing, saying that even if Syria did withdraw from Lebanon, we have to impose these heavy-duty sanctions less than until they dismantle their medium-range missiles, even though Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria had very similar missiles or even better missiles.
But we said Syria had to get rid of them unilaterally.
Same with their chemical weapons.
Israel didn't have to get rid of theirs.
Israel didn't have to get rid of theirs.
But Syria did.
They cited these, oh, I forget that joker's name, one of the guys who really grossly, grossly exaggerated the weapons of mass destruction around Iraq.
They cited him, even though he'd been totally discredited by what had happened the year before.
I mean, it was still all sorts of things, including threat, blaming Syria for the deaths of American servicemen, even though most of the Americans are being killed by these hardcore Sunni groups, the very ones that are fighting the Assad regime now.
That we're backing against them now.
Yeah.
And regime change.
OK, let's move it forward to a couple years later, to 2006, when the United States, working with Israel.
Well, wait, what about 05, when Hariri was assassinated?
I'm with Porter that it must have been al-Qaeda that did it, but they blamed it on Hezbollah and therefore Syria, which backs Hezbollah, demanded that the Syrian army had to get out of Lebanon, which, of course, just empowered Hezbollah, filled the power vacuum that the Syrian army had been filling at that point.
It was a popular, it was a genuine popular uprising that got rid of the Syrians.
But, of course, the U.S. used this to try to blame Syria for it.
But in 2006, we actually, the Bush administration pushed Israel to attack Lebanon to try to wipe out Hezbollah and attack Syria as well.
Well, the Israelis said, no, that's too much.
We can't take on both of them.
So in a summit in Washington in May 23rd between Olmert and Bush, Bush said, Olmert agreed that they would attack Lebanon that August.
Well, in July, Hezbollah did this provocative border incident where they kidnapped two Israeli soldiers and whatever, and that was the excuse for Israel's invasion.
But that had been planned for many, many months, with the U.S. pushing it.
In fact, there were a lot of Israelis in the top military leadership who said, this isn't a very good idea.
And in fact, the fact that the United States had pushed it became an issue within Israel.
You had 30,000 Israelis protesting in Tel Aviv, chanting, we will not fight and die for Bush.
We will not fight and die for Bush.
Again, they saw this correctly as something that the United States had really pushed on Israel, because since Israel had withdrawn from Lebanon in 2000, not a single Hezbollah rocket had landed in Israel.
Not a single Israeli civilian had been killed.
But thanks to this Israeli attack, scores of Israeli civilians got killed, along with about 700 Lebanese civilians from the Israeli bombing.
But again, this is something that the Bush administration pushed on Israel to do.
Why do we want to destroy Hezbollah at that point?
Because Hezbollah, again, had not been attacking Israel.
They had largely demobilized.
They were working more as a Lebanese political party.
Admittedly, a pretty reactionary one, but they were working within the system.
But the concern was, they were getting all these new missiles from Iran.
Why were they getting missiles from Iran when they weren't actually fighting anybody at that point?
Because they knew that at that point, the Bush administration was planning a large-scale attack on Iran, in conjunction with Israel, and that they wanted a retaliatory capability.
They wanted this to be a kind of deterrent.
So the Bush administration figured, hey, and their allies within the Israeli government said, hey, if we take out these missiles preemptively, destroy Hezbollah, then we can go into Iran.
Well, as you know, the 2006 invasion was a disaster.
The Israelis, in their own investigative committee, they won a grand commission that was actually chosen by Omer, was very, very critical of the government and of going ahead with this.
And again, a lot of Israelis blame the United States to this day.
But again, the original additional target was Syria.
So I'm using this chronology, going up through Bill Clinton, through George W. Bush, there was a very explicit desire for regime change in Syria.
And the Israelis support it too, though there are some divisions, especially again in the Labor Party and some of the more moderate elements, believing that maybe Syria could be accommodated.
We're seeing these divisions even now, because what's happened is that, and divisions within Washington, in that the Obama administration, like the moderate Israelis, would obviously like to see Assad go, particularly given the large-scale war crimes he's committed.
At the same time, they see ISIS as a very serious threat, the instability a very serious threat.
And frankly, my impression is that you have divisions, both within Israel and the Obama administration, as to how much priority should we get rid of Assad, how much priority should get rid of ISIS, what kind of rebels we should support.
And both the Israelis and the Americans are kind of beside themselves about this monster they've helped create and how to handle the fallout.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I don't think I've ever heard anybody really stick up for Assad.
It's universally agreed.
Here is a fascist murderer dictator.
But it's sort of beside the point.
The question is, who supports him?
The answer is more than half the population of the country, including a huge plurality, at least, of the Sunni population of the country.
Because his state, not necessarily they support him, but the state that he is the chief of is what's standing between them and a good crucifixion.
And they know it.
And America and Israel and Turkey and Saudi have been backing Arar al-Sham, which is nothing but al-Qaeda, and in effect al-Nusra, which is nothing but al-Qaeda, and even according to their own documents, in effect, the Islamic State, even though they knew and predicted the danger that this could really lead to the creation of a place called the Islamic State out of the group by blowing back into western Iraq.
And they did it all on purpose.
And even the head of the DIA says so, too.
And I know you got to go, too.
So I'm sorry.
You can wrap this up.
We're overtime into the break at this point.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I agree with most of what you said.
I nitpick at a fair number of levels on some other points.
But I think overall, the problem is that, as we've seen when we supported hardline Islamists against the communists in Afghanistan, and we support hardline Islamists against these nationalist governments, that we end up creating these even bigger threats and then use that as an excuse for still further intervention.
And it's just so ironic to see so many people who were so passionately supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which was really what created ISIS more than anything, are now saying, oh, the problem is we haven't used enough.
We need to militarize the situation even more.
Right.
Yeah.
And of course, I don't want anybody to get me wrong.
I'm for backing dictators or renditioning torture victims to Assad or any of this opposite policy either.
I'm just talking about trying to highlight the insanity of taking bin Laden's side.
As soon as they dump him in the ocean, they take the side of all of his men in Libya and Syria.
It's unbelievable, but true.
I know I've got to let you go.
Thank you very much for your time again on the show, Stephen.
Great to talk to you.
Appreciate it.
All right.
That was Stephen Zunes, and we'll be right back after this.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
It's always safe to say that one should keep at least some of your savings in precious metals as a hedge against inflation.
If this economy ever does heat back up and the banks start expanding credit, rising prices could make metals a very profitable bet.
Since 1977, Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc.has been helping people buy and sell gold, silver, platinum and palladium, and they do it well.
They're fast, reliable and trusted for more than 35 years.
And they take Bitcoin.
Call Roberts and Roberts at 1-800-874-9760 or stop by rrbi.co.
You hate government?
One of them libertarian types?
Maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers or warmongers.
Me too.
That's why I invented LibertyStickers.com.
Well, Rick owns it now, and I didn't make up all of them.
But still, if you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go.
LibertyStickers.com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right, libertarian, empire, police, state, founders, quote, central banking.
Yes, bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And, well, everything that matters.
LibertyStickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Don't you get sick of the Israel lobby trying to get us into more wars in the Middle East?
Or always abusing Palestinians with your tax dollars?
It once seemed like the lobby would always have full-spectrum dominance on the foreign policy discussion in D.C.
But those days are over.
The Council for the National Interest is the America lobby, standing up and pushing back against the Israel lobby's undue influence on Capitol Hill.
Go show some support at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
That's councilforthenationalinterest.org.