01/25/16 – David Mizner – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, kiddos, welcome back.
I've got to fix this thing.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm him.
And our first guest today is David Misner.
And he's got this piece at Brad Hoff's site, LevantReport.com, on the effort to exonerate Team USA for the rise of ISIS.
Guest analysis here by David Misner.
Welcome back to the show.
David, how are you?
I'm good, thank you.
Good to be here.
Good to have you back.
Hey, so I wasn't sure how to introduce you, because I was going to say you write for Jacobin, but after reading this article, I'm not sure if you still do anymore.
Well, I did.
I did.
I have written quite a bit of pieces for Jacobin.
I wasn't pleased with this piece, so I'm not sure I'll be writing for them in the future.
But in any case, I've written for them and a few other places.
I'm mostly, I write fiction, but I also write freelance journalism, usually about U.S. foreign policy with a special focus on the Middle East.
And then, of course, your own blog is RogueNationBlog.com, RogueNationBlog.com, everybody can find.
Is that your art on there, too?
No, that is an artwork that I found by an artist.
It's actually, it's been up there a while, depicts the war in Iraq, so I thought it was appropriate.
Yeah.
That's good.
Hey, listen, so, okay, very important story here, and this is, well, it's important your take on it, too.
You're not just challenging the narrative itself, but you're, and it's not, you know, personal, I don't mean to say it that way, but you're attacking anti-imperialist, anti-interventionist leftists for basically picking up this narrative that Assad, Bashar al-Assad, and the Ba'athist regime in Damascus is responsible for the rise of ISIS, and not just for being so jerky that they've provoked opposition, but that's, you know, supposedly Assad's plan, I guess, has been to create the Islamic State, as they say, to discredit the rest of the perfectly moderate suicide bomber jihadists who are fighting against Assad's regime right now.
But so, I guess, go ahead and take us through this.
Is it really the prison break, or the letting guys out of prison back in 2011, is that really the crux of the argument here?
That's the crux of their argument, and you're absolutely right, and this argument you hear often from the State Department and from State Department-friendly reporters, Vox, BuzzFeed, sort of establishment reporters, that Assad and Saddam before him are primarily responsible for creating and empowering ISIS.
You hear it all the time, but what prompted this piece was that I noticed that leftist anti-imperialist outfits like Jacobin and Salvage, which is Richard Seymour's outfit, sort of picking up this line of argument, really exonerating and ignoring the role of the U.S. and its allies, in particular Saudi Arabia, Turkey, for their role in the rise of ISIS.
And, yeah, as you say, sort of one of the principal components of their argument is that Assad empowered ISIS by releasing jihadists from prison in 2011.
You hear this a lot.
In fact, Salvage went so far as to say that the prisoners released by Assad represent one-third of ISIS, the other two-thirds being foreign fighters and former Baathists.
So it's a pretty significant charge.
So I went looking at that a little bit.
I mean, first of all, the most striking reason why that's absurd is that ISIS wasn't around in 2011.
But I went looking and trying to find, I mean, look at everything, but I read a lot of stuff trying to find proof that some of those prisoners released by Assad ended up in ISIS.
I found nothing.
Now, there were some reactionary jihadists that he released from prison in 2011.
And by the way, this is important, too, it was received at the time as an act of sort of generosity or trying to work and please the opposition, because it wasn't just jihadists released.
It was another, it was part of a general amnesty, and the opposition received it as such.
And that's what the regime characterized it as at the time as well?
Exactly.
So in other words, it's pretty, you're saying it's virtually inarguable that all this is just trying to twist it with hindsight, that at the time, there was no question that he was trying to appease his opposition, rather than sneakily letting out the worst jihadists to taint it.
I mean, let me say this.
I think there's an argument to be made, a somewhat more serious argument to be made, that he did have in mind, further inflaming and making the opposition more reactionary.
Now, that's not what the argument they're making.
They're saying that this created ISIS.
But some of those fighters did end up in Al Qaeda and some of Al Qaeda's allies, which by the way, are supported by American allies in the war against Assad.
Is there any actual evidence that he did that in order I mean, because don't get me wrong, I agree with you that it's obviously possible that he was trying to discredit the opposition by letting out, you know, very dangerous jihadists to taint their side.
But is there any actual indication other than that this is sort of how it panned out?
I haven't seen any and the people who make this charge, they link to articles and you go and read these articles.
I cite a piece by Kyle Orton and the articles they cite, they link to articles about the general amnesty that he that Assad initiated.
And the opposition was saying at the time, no, this is too, this is too little too late.
It's not enough.
It's not enough of a gesture of goodwill.
So they didn't they at the time, there's no evidence that even they saw this as whoa, whoa, you can't let these guys out of prison.
We don't want them.
So to your point, I don't see any evidence that that's the case, whether they're whether he planned them to become part of the opposition or part of more ridiculously, this group ISIS, which didn't exist yet.
Right.
And then, of course, back to the point, that point, as you're saying, that's the argument they're making, not even that he was just trying to taint the the opposition, the mythical moderates and those loyal to Zawahiri and Arar al-Sham and God knows who.
But specifically, this is where the Islamic State came from.
Right.
And of course, it's you know, I don't want to talk about in terms of their side, but I will for the sake of the argument.
It's their side, the people who make these claims that see a vast, you know, gulf between ISIS and the rest of the of the opposition.
So it's not really people like me who I don't I don't see a whole lot of difference between al Qaeda and its allies and ISIS.
But for the purpose of their argument, because ISIS has such political import in playing the blame game, that's the argument they're making.
So I'm contesting on their own terms.
Sure.
Well, yeah.
And of course, and for that reason, that's why that's what they're focusing on, too.
So right.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it'd be one thing if they made this charge about Assad, which I don't I don't find holds up at all.
And some of the more well-informed, honest, popular Syria analysts will debunk this pretty, pretty readily.
They'll put the lie to it.
But even if you're going to make that claim, it's especially bad when you ignore all the evidence that of complicity from the United States and its allies.
So it's completely stacking the deck in terms of telling the narrative about the rise of ISIS in Syria.
Well, and I don't know, man, maybe it is just corrupt confirmation bias or maybe it's, you know, smart.
I'll leave that to the observers.
But it seems to me like even Josh Rogin has written in The Daily Beast that, yeah, all our allies are directly sending funds to the Islamic State, not just to the opposition, but they are backing the Islamic State, just as even The Washington Post and The New York Times have admitted from time to time over the last four or five years that the CIA is sending tons of guns and money, just as they've admitted over the weekend, again, tons of guns and money with the Saudis to whatever so-called mythical moderates that all end up in the hands of the jihadis anyway.
Well, I mean, that's one of the, I guess, amusing and sad things is that, you know, I'm no expert.
I don't have, you know, access to, you know, classified intel.
I base part of my, you know, I'm a well-informed layperson who reads a lot and talks to a lot of people.
I base part of what, you know, these, you know, to debunk what these people are saying, I rely on their own publications, which I'm happy to ignore later on.
Right.
Yeah, including, yeah, your own work in Jackman, for example.
All right.
Now, hold it right there.
I'm sorry.
We've got to take this break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with David Misner.
Okay.
His great piece at levantreport.com after this.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with David Misner.
He wrote this thing for Brad Hoff's site, levantreport.com, on the effort to exonerate Team USA for the rise of ISIS.
And in leftist publications, Richard Seymour, that's the guy that wrote the book The Liberal Defense of Murder about all the horrible humanitarian interventionists and all their apologists, I thought.
Right, David?
Yeah, he is.
And he's a good, you know, well, I tend to agree with a lot of what he says.
And he's written some very strong anti-imperial stuff.
And if I could return, because you asked about Jacobin.
Sure.
I'm not sure your viewers will care about this, but I was too, I wasn't prepared to talk about them.
I was a little too flip.
I do think, you know, I was grateful to be able to write for them for a while because they're a place that I allowed to write my stuff, which I think does have a strong anti-imperialist bent.
And I think I still respect their publication, and I'm glad I was able to write for them.
But I do think they've moved somewhat away from a strong anti-imperialist line, especially where Syria is concerned, for whatever reason.
So that sort of disenchanted me.
But we'll see what happens with the publication.
I still think it's a good one.
Yeah.
And by the way, I didn't mean, it came out as though I was trying to say, yeah, and you link to your own work in here to prove your point.
I didn't mean it like that.
I meant that they were ignoring work that's been published on their own site, not that you link to it, which I had read before.
That's all I meant by that.
So sorry about that, too.
All right.
Now everybody's clear on everything.
We're talking about the Syrian civil war, and it's a complicated mess, kind of.
But basically the argument here is that, well, there wouldn't be a rebellion in the South if it wasn't for Abraham Lincoln being their enemy, which, OK, kind of makes a little bit of sense as far as it goes.
Now, when it comes to Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, I don't know about these leftist publications you're talking about here, but when it comes to the establishment, their line is, so, you know, we have to, you know, assume we're doing the American Civil War analogy.
If they're the Brits and they're going to intervene in the American Civil War, we've got to overthrow Abraham Lincoln and the government in the North before we can get rid of the evil slaveholding Confederacy in the South, because the North is really what's agitating them and making them so angry in the first place.
And this is the insane position that are, in fact, Jeb Bush just put out a thing, actually have it here somewhere, defeating ISIS.
How to defeat ISIS.
We got to get rid of Assad, huh?
That's their argument.
And but so I wonder about these guys.
Are they promoting regime change?
Is that what they're saying to here?
Is that as long as Assad keeps creating his enemies, then this is going to keep happening?
So we got to do something to him?
I think I think it's varied.
I think they would all like to see the you know, I think they get sort of vague when it comes to the question of regime change.
I think they they they basically want to see the Syrian government fall without giving too much thought to it with with the vague, unexamined hope that whatever progressive elements remain in the in the revolution, if I can call it that, will somehow prevail.
I see I see al Qaeda, you know, storming Damascus and killing religious minorities.
But I don't think, you know, they will say that they're opposed to to U.S. intervention in Syria, but they seem to ignore or accept the U.S. intervention intervention that's that's already occurred.
And in their view, you know, I'm generalizing, but I think there is a split on the left and I'm generalizing about about their point of view and my point of view.
I think in their point of view, the U.S. government has actually worked to preserve the Syrian government rather than to undermine it.
And that's a whole other argument.
I don't know how well versed you are in terms of intra left arguments, but that's one that that goes on pretty, pretty much nonstop.
Yeah.
Well, no, go ahead and elaborate about it if you'd like to.
It's interesting.
Well, the the there the argument goes that the U.S. government has sought to undermine the opposition by not giving it forget, for example, anti-aircraft weapons.
You know, and they even said that they told they've instructed the rebels in Saudi Arabia to pull back and they had a chance to early on to overthrow Syria.
And so it sometimes verges onto conspiracy theories about the United States actually being in bed with Assad.
I do think there is something to be said.
I think it's clear that the United States at some point pulled back from being hell bent on regime change.
If they hadn't, then there would have been regime change.
The United States would have gone in and bombed and bombed Syria and taken them out.
That doesn't mean, however, that the United States hasn't sought to weaken and destabilize Syria from before 2011 to the to the current current moment.
And you could also make the case that the United States government has decided that the best case scenario is to sort of perpetuate this war, which with letting either side win.
But in any case, it's still a war on Syria.
That's still imperialism.
It's still causing suffering.
And regime change isn't has never been an end in itself.
That's part of an effort to dominate and control other countries.
And there are different ways to to tame and disobedient, noncompliant state regime change is one of them.
You can also flood the country with weapons as the United States and its allies have done.
Flood them with Saudis as the U.S. and their allies have done, as you write in here, 12 of the judges, all 12 of the judges who preside over the Islamic State's court system in Raqqa are Saudis.
You don't say.
Right, exactly.
And that's another thing that you find.
And this is another you know, I'm a student of Syrian civil war coverage.
It's kind of a blockbuster finding.
You find that buried in this kind of short economist piece.
Now, assuming it's true and well reported, you could easily see that as a cover story in The New York Times.
But it's not.
It's just buried here, left for someone like me to pluck out.
Now, that's kind of interesting information, especially when you tie it to the well-known facts that Saudi Arabia has allowed reactionaries, ISIS bound fighters to fly out of Saudi Arabia, unfettered, and also reports that Saudi Arabia has allowed death row prisoners to go fight in Syria in exchange for commutation of their sentence.
And that just goes to show what I'm saying is that the argument that I'm taking on those making it will exaggerate and distort what Assad has done to empower ISIS while ignoring the material, very concrete material support the U.S. allies have given ISIS.
Yeah, I even read a thing where a guy was a Saudi was crying and saying, this is horrible.
We have Saudis fighting for Al-Nusra against Saudis fighting for the Islamic state.
Brothers come together.
We're all on the same side here kind of thing.
And by the way, I want to point out, too, because I think you're very careful with your language and the way you write and the way you speak about this and and the way you sum it up in the article, I think is really great that, you know, there are various degrees of culpability and there are various ways of, you know, overstating others positions and accusations on this.
But I just it's a short enough and we got the time.
I want to play this clip real quick.
It's really short.
It's just Hillary Clinton basically explaining your same position here.
This is from February of 2012.
She's being asked by CBS, why aren't we doing enough to overthrow Assad?
And she says, we know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
Hamas is now supporting the opposition.
Are we supporting Hamas in Syria?
All right.
Now, there is no Hamas in Syria.
There sure as hell is Al-Qaeda in Syria.
And that and we know she got an email just a couple of days before that from an aide saying, look, AQ is on our side in this one, boss.
Yeah, America's on Al-Qaeda side in this one.
So she turns and uses that as her excuse for not doing more in 2012.
But she's basically her frame is not are we directly doing following Zawahiri's orders?
She's saying, is our policy creating space for these guys to get what they want at our expense?
We don't want that.
Right.
That's what she's saying.
And then that is exactly the policy that she continued to push and complain that Obama didn't come with her far enough on the policy when she was still in power throughout 2012.
That's interesting, I've actually never heard that clip, and it might correspond with that DIA report that you've covered that in which military intelligence concluded that Al-Qaeda and other reactionary elements dominate the opposition.
And that was in 2012.
Yeah, so this was known.
And that's and that's that's another thing that that becomes sensitive when you talk about the makeup of the opposition.
And when I'm a member of the left, I talk about the left and this stuff gets very, very sensitive when you're talking about exactly what was what happened in 2011, 2012, who rose up, what were the groups and so forth.
But I don't think I don't think a serious argument can be made that that reactionary jihadist type elements didn't dominate the the opposition from fairly early on.
And the thing is, too, as we've seen, and of course, it's a big empire.
So you got a lot of different opinions in different places sometimes.
So I think Panetta and Petraeus may have come at this from kind of a little bit different angles.
And then, of course, Seymour Hersh says that the military just decided we're not having this and started passing secrets to Assad by way of the Germans to prevent the fall of Damascus because they just were insubordinate on the issue.
They just couldn't take it.
Yeah, well, sometimes you find, you know, for all the talk about the, you know, the military, military industrial complex, I think sometimes generals take national security seriously, occasionally.
Yeah, they have a little bit different set of incentives than than the civilians.
Basically, they can afford sometimes, I think, to say, well, let's bomb these guys instead of those guys.
Come on.
But then again, you know, you look at Yemen, they click their heels and obey.
Anyway, they're right now they're bombing Al-Qaeda and fighting for Al-Qaeda at the same time in that war.
So, yeah, I just made a pro general comment.
So could you edit that out, please?
But no, no, no.
It's an important point.
It's a terrible irony.
That's how that's how I'll save you here.
It's a terrible irony that we have to rely on our standing army to cool the passions of our hothead egghead civilian warmongers.
Well, I think, yeah, I mean, you know, they're happy to bomb and to dominate.
But I do think I think you saw that in Libya, that the civilian leadership was was more eager and out in front of the military leadership in in their zeal to to bomb and remove the Libyan government.
Yeah, of course, they go along anyway.
We didn't see mass resignations, but but yeah, it is certainly instructive regardless.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I really appreciate you coming back on the show and talking about this with us.
And I do hope everyone will read this article and we'll certainly link to it on antiwar.com.
Is it OK if we run this as an original on antiwar.com?
Yeah, sure.
OK.
All right.
Cool.
Well, then that's what we'll do.
All right.
Well, thanks very much, Dave.
Appreciate it.
All right.
It's a pleasure.
Thank you.
All right.
So that's David Misner.
He's here at Levant Report dot com.
Brad Hoff's blog, Levant Report dot com on the effort to exonerate Team USA for the rise of ISIS.
And we'll be right back.
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