12/03/16 – Brad Hoff – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, December 4th, 2016.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all, welcome to the show.
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Alright, introducing Brad Hoth.
He keeps the great blog Levant Report.
He also writes for the Canary out of the UK.
And, well, as implied there, is somewhat of an expert on the Middle East.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Brad?
Thanks for having me on, Scott.
Yeah, somewhat is the key emphasis.
Alright, well, that's fair enough.
You certainly have some valuable things to say if you ask me.
And I just did ask me, and so that's my answer.
Very happy to have you here.
First of all, can we talk about just the news out of Syria over the last week real quick?
And then we'll get back into some of this back story here.
But I think it's reported that the Syrian army with Russian air cover have made major progress in pushing the quote-unquote rebels, however you want to characterize them, out of eastern Aleppo.
Is that right?
Exactly right.
And right now we're seeing a lot of resident civilians fleeing east Aleppo.
And they're either pouring into Kurdish zones or more of them are actually going back into government areas, especially west Aleppo.
And the Syrian government has actually set up some quote-unquote humanitarian corridors to facilitate that.
And sadly there are civilians being gunned down in these very corridors, either that or caught in some kind of crossfire.
And, of course, both sides are accusing the other of committing these atrocities.
But the Syrian government has really emphasized and pushed this program, these corridors to allow civilians to flee.
Personally, I don't see what it would accomplish for the government to attempt to gun down civilians that were trying to get to west Aleppo or some kind of government corridor in the first place.
So it's contentious and controversial.
But, yes, that's where things stand.
And it does look like the Syrian government, with Russian air support as well as Iranian support on the ground, it looks like they are going to take back all of Aleppo.
It's only a matter of time at this point.
All right.
And then, well, what does that mean for the larger efforts of these rebel groups?
And, you know, what other territory do they control?
We're not talking about the Islamic State now.
We're talking about Huwal, exactly.
Well, right.
I mean, from there, as other commentators have said, from there we're looking at the race to Raqqa as well as Deir ez-Zor.
From there, it's only a matter of time.
The Syrian government is just taking back areas between Aleppo and the border with Turkey, which actually there is a Turkish military presence in some of these areas now.
It's just a matter of time, these areas being rolled back piecemeal.
But it appears that the Syrian government is mostly interested in controlling, you know, the sort of Syria that counts in their mind, the urban centers, the places of industry and former industry, and the places where you have the greater population concentrations.
There's been a lot written about in terms of the geographic territory that's controlled.
But in Syrian government's eyes, it's more about the former industrial centers.
It's about the cosmopolitan areas.
It's about where you have the bulk of the population.
So initially it appears the Syrian government is going to be content with taking back those urban centers, and then from there it will be a kind of domino effect, taking back suburban areas.
And then, as I said, the race to Raqqa is on.
Then perhaps some kind of final showdown with the Islamic State.
But, of course, the real concern for both Russia as well as Syria and their allies is al-Nusra.
Al-Nusra is proving to be, in government's eyes, the long-term enemy.
They don't seem as concerned with ISIS because it's Nusra that's more embedded in these very urban centers I spoke about.
All right.
And, well, I mean, I guess there's a chance at some point that once the Islamic State— I mean, they're in the process of being rousted out of Mosul in northwestern Iraq, and then, as you say, Raqqa obviously is next there in eastern Syria.
Once they turn back into a militia, I guess it'll be a new question then whether they really merge back in with their old buddies in the al-Nusra front and just become plain old al-Qaeda in Iraq again like they used to be.
Or maybe they'll come up with a brand-new name.
But it doesn't seem like, you know, even if the Syrian government and all of their allies— the Russians, the Iranians, Hezbollah, and whoever— they can't really get rid of these guys entirely any more than the U.S. Army could during Iraq War II, can they?
No, I spoke to an advisor to the Syrian government who actually described this as the endless insurgency.
So government people, you know, are looking at this in terms of a long-term deal.
I don't think they're under any illusions that just because they take back Aleppo and it'll probably be mostly wrapped up by Christmas or New Year or just after in terms of the heart of East Aleppo, the heart of the city.
But that's how it was described to me, that the Syrian government basically thinks it's facing and is going to face an endless insurgency, you know, similar to Iraq in the mid-2000s and beyond at the height of its insurgency.
You know, it looks like the Syrian government and the Syrian people are sort of taking stock of that right now.
But yeah, it's interesting, you know, you talk about Islamic State becoming just another militia, right?
As it first emerged on the Syrian battlefield in about 2013, as they started really first making a name for themselves in northern Aleppo.
You know, who knows?
It really could be that the media sort of inflated them into the big boogeyman, you know, beyond the strength that they really were, because now we see them crumbling.
And it could be just this classic case of the West always needs a big, bad boogeyman, right?
And ISIS was the convenient big, bad boogeyman for a while.
And, you know, now that they're being rolled back, ironically, not primarily through Western coalition airstrikes, but through, you know, Russia's intervention, through Iranian buildup, you know, as well as the Syrian government, the Syrian army.
But, you know, who knows if there was a bit of threat inflation going on, right?
Because ISIS is what drove headlines for a couple years there.
But I'm not hearing much about ISIS these days.
Well, yeah, I mean, the thing of it was really that American and Iranian policy had, you know, and that goes for Bush and Obama, too, they basically left all of Western Iraq open.
The Shiite ruled, you know, backed, controlled government in Baghdad.
Never really ruled Fallujah.
I guess they did.
They did kind of have control in Ramadi, but that's still kind of way out there.
They didn't really.
They had already abandoned Mosul a year before it fell to the Islamic State.
So there was basically just wide open space with no one claiming a monopoly on power.
And here, you know, this group Al-Qaeda in Iraq, they had started calling themselves the Islamic State in Iraq back in 2006.
And this was always what they wanted to do.
In fact, you can find an article I wrote in the spring of 2013, when the Islamic State first broke off from the Al-Nusra Front, when they weren't really a state yet at all.
They were still just a group.
But I was saying, look, they're calling themselves a state again.
And now all of Western Iraq is just wide open for the taking.
So we could actually see that big fake Islamo-fascist caliphate that never existed except in George Bush and Osama bin Laden's imagination come true.
And then a year later, it did.
Yeah, exactly right.
It's interesting.
I just interviewed a family living in Houston that fled Mosul in 2013.
And, of course, they were very critical of, you know, the decision to invade their country in the first place back in 2003.
But their big complaint, you know, in terms of life in the mid-2000s and especially, as you say, 2006 and a couple years after, their big complaint as a family living in Mosul, and actually the head of this family is actually an important religious leader.
I can't mention his name on the line here.
But essentially they were very upset because they essentially thought the U.S. occupation abandoned Mosul in particular to just lawlessness.
Their perception was there was a sort of skeletal crew in terms of the Western occupation providing security.
I mean, ironically, of course, this family was against the occupation in the first place.
But they thought, look, once all of this chaos has been unleashed, you have ownership of it.
And they were seeing literally graffiti, propaganda, and signs going up all around the city.
As you said, Islamic State in Iraq, I mean, there was no one, no one was quiet about it.
And they, from their perception, yeah, this is anecdotal.
This is based on interviews I did with one family, right?
But from their perception, the U.S. occupation essentially looked the other way and, you know, either didn't want to deal with it or were playing politics.
Let me ask you this now.
Well, OK, so Washington, D.C. politics as far as what's to happen with Syria next.
Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's former secretary of state, and Stephen Hadley, who was Bush's national security adviser, first deputy national security adviser, then his second national security adviser after Condoleezza Rice.
They just put out this new paper saying – and it's very bipartisan, you see, one a Democrat, one a Republican.
And they say we got to bomb Damascus because otherwise how are we ever going to have a peaceful settlement if we don't bomb the government in the capital city?
And I don't think they really explain themselves very well, but this is the same kind of argument that we've heard for a long time.
And they seem to be in a real hurry because they're afraid that Donald Trump is going to come in and outright ally with the Russians and the Iranians and the Syrians against the al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State.
But I wonder – does anybody really know?
But what do you think is really going to happen with that?
Right.
Of course, Trump has verbalized as much.
And interestingly, so as you know, I was in Syria during the first part of November.
And as I went around just walking around talking to people, and I had some formal interviews lined up, but I also did a lot of sort of man-on-the-street interviews and just talking to people in coffee shops and cafes.
And I did a sort of straw poll kind of, you know, who do you want to win the election?
Because, of course, this was weeks before the election.
You know, in terms of government areas, of course, they were all very pro-Trump, not because they liked the guy, but because they saw him as the less hawkish candidate.
And even advisors to the Syrian government and government types I spoke to basically interpreted a Hillary victory as escalation equal to bombing Damascus.
That basically the standard State Department establishment line, pro-intervention, or all these old names and retirees and think tanks and things which really dominate the narrative in D.C., they ultimately thought that Hillary would basically do what the establishment wanted, an outright full intervention, Iraq-style bombing of Damascus.
But, no, I see Trump as genuinely uninterested in escalating things in Syria.
I think he's content to just, you know, allow Syria and the Russians to take it.
But, of course, as you know better than I do, he's now filling his cabinet, and there's also just, in terms of just chatter and gossip in terms of who's being considered or who has been, who has already been put in place, right?
A bunch of hawks, right?
And even a bunch of some Bush throwback people, and even people that haven't been named in terms of foreign policy advisors to Trump's team that have been talking to him for the past many months.
These people are old Bush appointees and Bush-era throwbacks, and there's some neocons in there, of course, so that's worrisome.
So, no matter what Trump says at this point, in fact, he just gave a speech in Cincinnati, right, where he said we have to stop this insane push for regime change.
I mean, that's all good, but as you know, things can change radically.
We know George W. Bush was initially elected claiming a humble foreign policy, but we're talking about the most hawkish man in the history of the world, right?
So, no, I think ultimately the Syrian government is pretty confident, as well as Russia, that it's going to take back at least that part of Syria, as I said, that counts, the important industrial and population centers, as well as the roads that link them.
And I think there's probably even been a kind of quiet nod from the Obama administration, and certainly there will be a big nod from President-elect Trump.
And, of course, there was even a phone call, supposedly, I believe two days after Trump was elected, between Trump and Putin.
And, of course, Russian media tried to play that up a lot, as if decisions were made based on that phone call.
No, decisions were not made based on that phone call.
Basically, Russia and the Syrian government, they're trying to take back as much of Aleppo as possible, while Obama is a lame duck president.
So it was going to happen either way.
Either there was a race to get it back before Hillary was in office to make any kind of Hillary-sponsored intervention harder, or there was basically a race to establish military dominance on the ground.
I mean, before anyone gets in office, before anyone can be convinced, you know, by the Albright types that you just mentioned, to do something, some kind of bombing of Damascus, and so on.
Yeah.
And I guess, you know, that report had already been written up, and presumably they anticipated, like the rest of the establishment, that Hillary would be coordinated.
And we should, you know, mention now that the Trump preferred policy is virtually as murderous as Hillary Clinton's.
It's just geographically more restricted.
He wants to bomb the Islamic State, and presumably the al-Nusra Front, and anyone who happens to be nearby them, instead of bombing Damascus, too.
Which, you know, Hillary wanted to bomb, I guess, protect al-Nusra, but bomb Islamic State and the Syrian state.
So, you know, Trump's policy is presumably to be just as violent, only instead of being absolutely insane, and ultimately treasonous, fighting on the side of al-Nusra, as Obama has done, and as Hillary clearly meant to do, it'll be simply murderous, but not insanely so.
No, you're right.
People need to realize that the whole Obama playbook of, you know, we're going to go in and bomb ISIS, both in Iraq and Syria, supposedly, and, you know, we're going to get more and more involved, and supposedly promising no troops on the ground, and yet the first American, you know, special forces guy was killed only, what, a week ago?
Was this within the last week?
The first one in Syria, there had already been previous casualties on the Iraq side, but yeah.
Right, exactly.
But look, this playbook was set in place after August-September of 2013, when the administration's push to just do an outright bombing and occupation.
If people remember, after the big August 2013 East Ghouta chemical weapons incident, there was a big push for war.
Well, that was shot down, I mean, literally, when we were all going to the streets to try to prevent yet another endless war in the Middle East.
Well, that was shot down, so what was plan B?
Plan B was to basically, you know, get further and further involved over the skies of northern Syria and eastern Syria, as well as now on the ground, get further and further involved, ostensibly, you know, under the name of fighting ISIS.
We've got to fight ISIS, and of course that's when ISIS was in the headlines non-stop for a couple of years.
But what happened?
We told Syria, it cannot fight ISIS.
We told Russia, what are you doing there?
You can't fight ISIS.
And, you know, over time, our forces are sort of backing in, backing into Syrian government forces, in places like Deir ez-Zor, where we saw, you know, a U.S. coalition airstrike on Syrian army movements, you know, which the Pentagon's report came out and said, oh, sorry, it was all a big mistake, big accident.
You know, but it's like, what were we doing there in the first place?
You know, in 2013, the people clearly said no to war.
British Parliament said no, even.
The Brits shot it down, then we shot it down.
And so, this was sort of plan B, right?
Well, how do we get in there while claiming not to be in there?
And that's what's been pathetic about Obama's policy, claiming he's a Nobel Peace, you know, President, I'm going to be, I'm not like Bush, right?
We're not going and guns a-blazin'.
And yet, he's still doing the covert thing, right?
He's still selling this idea of, well, we're bombing ISIS, and yet, well, as we saw a couple weeks ago, we bombed the Syrian army.
And, right, there's just more and more heightened possibility for some kind of greater World War III as Russian and U.S. planes cross each other in the air.
So, of course, it's, this was really plan B after plans for all-out war got shot down.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, it's worth remarking that even though, as you said, George Bush obviously was this raging hawk, and Obama has been a somewhat reluctant warrior at times, and whatever, that, hey, when George Bush did the best thing anyone ever did for al-Qaeda by giving them all of western and northwestern Iraq, you know, Anbar and up to Mosul, to be their, you know, new jihadistan for the last three years, the last 13 years now and counting, that was a big stupid accident.
It wasn't supposed to work out like that at all.
And it was, you know, the result of a policy that had been dreamt up by idiots like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle who had no idea what they were doing.
Obama, on the other hand, outright took the side of the jihadists, of the veterans, really, of al-Qaeda in Iraq from Iraq War II, the guys that, you know, the Libyan guys who had traveled to Iraq to fight with Zarqawi.
They were the worst of the worst of the worst of America's enemies.
Then Obama turned around and took their side in their war against Qaddafi in 2011, and then there's Hillary Clinton's famous bank shot, as they put it in the New York Times even, the bank shot to send all these jihadis and guns and money off to Syria to continue the same policy.
And, yeah, even if that means supporting the bad guys from Iraq War II, the veterans of Zarqawi's al-Qaeda in Iraq from Iraq War II, that they would rather get rid of Assad.
And that's the thing that, you know, Mr. Peace Prize, the reluctant warrior, has committed an act of pure high treason here.
And just because John McCain was the one who made him do it doesn't mean that that makes it okay.
Exactly.
I mean, let me take this to a personal level.
As you know, I'm a Marine veteran.
I served during the Iraq War.
I was at a headquarters unit in Quantico, right?
But, you know, I was a gung-ho post-911 warrior.
I actually helped recruit some guys.
A close friend of mine, I'm going to go ahead and name him, his name is Ben Lee, right out of high school, went into the infantry.
Within a short two and a half years, did three tours, three tours.
Two of those tours were in Iraq.
He was killed by an IED in Anbar.
And the kid was 20, 20 years old, my friend Ben Lee.
And it absolutely enrages me.
It absolutely enrages, I can tell you, all the veterans I know, and all the veterans I interact with, are absolutely enraged at this nonsense.
That the whole post-911 narrative, we're going to go fight Al-Qaeda, we're going to, you know, global war on terror.
And now, in northern Syria, right, the military, through its train and equip program, as well as guided by the CIA, is being asked to arm the veterans of the Iraq War who were killing, killing my friends, my young 20-year-old friend who lost his life, who's buried at Arlington Cemetery right now.
We are now arming these veteran guys that were previously killing us in Anbar and Iraq, and it's just nonsense.
It's absolutely insane.
So when you say treason, absolutely it's true.
And you know what, I have a bunch of veteran friends who say the same thing.
And that's something that's not been reported.
No one talks about that.
These huge swaths of the military and veteran community that are enraged at what we're doing in Syria, that are enraged in terms of the sham global war on terror, because sadly, to an extent, we were used as pawns.
We were used as pawns.
Of course, when you're in, right, you're in that foxhole, and it's all about your brother.
It's all about the brotherhood.
It's all about completing the mission.
But when you step back and see the bigger picture, it's absolute insanity.
And this whole thing has to stop, because right now, as you and I speak, the CIA covert program is still on in terms of arming the jihadists, in terms of keeping the flames lit.
But if people...
Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.
Go ahead, no, please.
Well, yeah, I want to ask you about that, because there's this brand new Washington Post story out, a couple of them, actually, that say Obama's now decided the mission in Syria is a counterterrorism mission.
And now he's going to go ahead and order the Joint Special Operations Command to target the leaders of al-Nusra.
And they're trying to separate and say, well, rank and file al-Nusra actually don't mean no harm, but they're leaders.
These guys are OG friends of Osama, and so we got to kill them now.
Now, again, this is being recorded on Saturday, December the 3rd of 2016.
Now al-Nusra sworn loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the butcher in New York City.
Now they're the bad guys.
But what was missing from that Washington Post story, I think both of them, was any mention of, well, but what about the CIA and their longstanding program now to arm and equip, if not the al-Nusra front, the al-Nusra's best friends, their arms procurement branch, the mythical moderates of the Free Syrian Army.
So if Obama's ordered JSOC to target these guys, does that mean that the CIA has been called off of their mission to continue supporting them or not?
I mean, that's a great question.
Part of the advantage of doing things through the CIA is that no one will ever find out.
No one will ever be held accountable.
No one will ever be disciplined or so much as lose their jobs.
But yeah, it's very much a program that's still alive.
And it's always been a much, much, much bigger program than the DOD-Pentagon program.
The DOD-Pentagon program was sort of window dressing in a sense, sort of, here's the program you show the public.
And it didn't do much.
And it was a big joke.
And even the generals overseeing it, when they gave congressional testimony, were like, yeah, it's kind of a big joke.
Let's send 50 guys into northern Syria and then they hand their weapons straight over to Nusra or they get killed or kidnapped or defect or whatever.
It was sort of a joke, but it was the sort of public face of the covert program.
The face of it that no one knows about except through people doing diligent work in terms of obtaining declassified documents, following groups like Conflict Armament Research, which tracks weapons.
It's a UK organization.
This is documented if you go looking for it, but the public is not going to be exposed to it.
The CIA program is very much alive and well.
And as we saw with some recent news out of Jordan, it looks like the CIA is now actually directing the special forces guys.
So yeah, when the CIA is involved, they are in the driver's seat.
The CIA is in the driver's seat, right?
And the genius, from a kind of White House administration perspective, the genius of doing that is that the CIA are the guys that report literally directly to the men, directly to the president.
And so they can do what they want.
And so, yeah, it's still alive and well right now.
But that's a great question.
And if there were any CNN reporters or Fox or Washington Post reporters worth their salt, they would be asking this question right now or come Monday morning.
Yeah.
And so now then the question is, what's Donald Trump going to do?
Because he says he wants to back off Assad.
He wants to back off and maybe even cozy up to Russia.
But what about Assad and Russia's ally Iran?
He hates Iran and everybody surrounding him hates Iran.
He says he doesn't want to do regime change, but he surrounded himself with Iran hawks.
So which way is the redirection going to go now?
Is he going to go to Tehran and make a deal with the Ayatollah or is he going to bomb him off the face of the earth?
Your guess is as good as mine.
Right.
In terms of foreign policy, look, I understand that a lot of libertarians and a lot of others, a lot of liberals and things like this anti-war folk.
Right.
I understand that, you know, a lot of people would sort of welcome Trump's rhetoric on a lot of these foreign policy issues.
I get that.
Actually, he just met with Congresswoman Pulsey Gabbard, which is a really good sign because she's been amazing in terms of.
But she's bad on Iran too.
Yeah, except for.
Yeah.
And so, yeah, that's that's the problem people need to understand.
It's not it's not what he says.
It's not even what he personally believes.
It's what it's the people he surrounds himself with, especially a guy like Trump, who, you know, lacks experience and lacks any real knowledge of the world.
And that's what's scary is that people, you know, anti-war people can't really be celebrating too much.
And these people I interviewed in Syria who welcome a Trump presidency because they think he's not going to intervene.
Well, no one can be celebrating too much in terms of, you know, his rhetoric of let's stay out of the world.
Let's not do regime change because it's who he surrounds himself with.
As you said, and of course, Trump has, you know, verbalized a willingness to trash the Iran deal while also saying well, so I think acknowledging that easier said than done.
Right.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We're out of time.
Got to go.
But thank you very much, Brad, for coming on the show.
I really appreciate it.
Always enjoy it.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, so that is Brad Hoff.
He's a vet.
I didn't say at the beginning I should have.
He spent a lot of time traveling in Syria in previous years and has been there recently as well and knows a lot about it.
And he writes at LevantReport.com at TheCanary.co.
And also at SOFREP.
That's the Special Forces site, S-O-F-R-E-P, SOFREP.com.
And that's Antiwar Radio for this morning.
Thanks very much, everybody, 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 at ScottHorton.org and you can follow me on Twitter at ScottHortonShow.
See you next week.