01/27/17 – Gareth Porter on the think tanks pushing Trump to escalate the Syrian war – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, January 29th, 2017.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
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I'm your host, Scott Horton, here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
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4,000 something interviews going back to 2003.
About three-quarters of them with our next guest, Gareth Porter.
No, that's not true, but it's got to be at least...
It's somewhere near 300 now because it was 200 the last I checked and that was a couple of years ago.
So anyway, there's a reason I interview Gareth about virtually everything that he writes and that's because it's all really interesting stuff.
All right, so Gareth's latest piece at Middle East Eye, which we reprinted at antiwar.com at original.antiwar.com slash Porter.
It's US intervention against Syria, not under Trump, which, yeah, it's a Middle East Eye headline, but anyway, it's an important article.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing?
I'm doing fine.
Thanks, Scott.
I'm doing good.
Happy to have you here.
As always, before we talk about your article today, I wonder if you got your morning email from Philip Weiss and the crew at Mondoweiss.net, Gareth?
Well, as it happens, I just happened to have seen that, yes.
Oh, you did, huh?
And then, so, I wondered, did you notice the article about Michelle Flournoy, the former Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy in the Barack Obama administration and co-founder of the Center for a New American Security, and her recent trip to Israel and what she had to say over there.
I did, actually, yes.
You did?
And so, what did you think of her unique comments?
Well, of course, I mean, this falls under the category of toadying to Israel, for sure.
And I mean, I think it is revealing of the degree to which CNAS, under her tutelage, is part of that political universe that is particularly sensitive to the importance of Israel's relationship to the United States, the alliance with Israel, the de facto alliance with Israel.
And this reflects the reality that the U.S. military has a huge stake, you know, the usual bureaucratic self-interest in the continued cultivation of this alliance with Israel because of the fact that all those hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid that go to Israel, every billions of dollars that go to Israel every year, are translated into dollars that go to the U.S. Defense Department, you know, because they, a large part of it has to be, or part of it has to be used to purchase goods that are, you know, from the United States.
And that all translates into self-interest for the brass in the military in the Pentagon.
So, that's my initial, that's the first thing I think of when I see that.
Yeah, so, well, yeah, that's the whole thing.
I mean, your article here is, again, at antiwar.com, U.S. intervention against Syria, not under Trump.
This is the whole think tank community, I guess they were ready for Hillary, just like Flournoy was.
She was in line to be the Secretary of Defense, of course.
And so, they're trying to sort of tailor their same Syria policy for Trump and still put forward the same plan for him.
Is that right?
Yeah, this, of course, is Flournoy's link to Syria at this moment, in terms of my article.
That is that CNAS, the think tank that she started as co-founder and has been the CEO of ever since when she left the Defense Department, she has been obviously involved in the decision by CNAS to organize a group of think tanks in Washington, which include two other militarist, clearly, you know, militarist think tanks, the Institute for the Study of War and the Atlantic.
Which is the Kagan's, right?
That's the Kagan's, right, and Atlantic Council.
All three of those think tanks, of course, CNAS and the other two, I didn't talk about this in my article, but it should be pointed out.
And I thought about adding it, but I ran out of space, that all three of these think tanks are heavily subsidized, supported by military contractors, major military contractors.
And it's not only that, it's not only those three, obviously, sort of militarist think tanks, but the Middle East Institute as well, which has, of course, now Charles Lister, is heavily supported by a military contractor, one of the major military contractors.
As well as foreign despots too, you know, the Saudis and Qataris.
It's, as I recall, UAE, but I could be wrong about that.
No, I defer to you.
Well, I thought Qatar, well, I'm thinking of Brookings, I guess, for Qatar, right?
Brookings is Qatar.
But anyway, the point I'm making is that it's very clear to me that a major reason for these think tanks to continue to push this line about, you know, a more aggressive U.S. military policy in Syria, meaning threatening at the very least to a bomb in retaliation for any Russian or Syrian attack on a U.S.-supported armed opposition group.
The reason for going ahead with that, despite the fact that their great white hope Hillary Clinton lost, is that they expected of them by their funders.
I mean, their funders, in other words, the major aerospace industries and other military contractors, want the CNAS to show that it's pushing for a bigger military role.
And I think that that has to be part of the background to understand why CNAS was doing this.
So my article really is about this interesting push by CNAS and other sort of militarist think tanks with a few smaller organizations that are not particularly oriented towards the military, but who are, you know, they're supporters of the opposition to Assad, the armed opposition to Assad, and that's why they're part of the coalition.
They are now trying to sell this bill of goods to the Trump administration.
And what I suggest in my article is that the chances of their success are very much less, and I would say minimal at this point, for both domestic political reasons and, you know, because of the change in the situation in Syria itself, because of the clear loss by the armed opposition, including, of course, the al-Qaeda franchise in Syria, now Jabhat al-Sham, in Aleppo.
And now we're seeing enormous signs, signals, that there are big troubles within the coalition between al-Qaeda in Syria, on one hand, and the non-jihadist opposition to Assad on the other.
So that's part of the reason why I suggest that this is a failing effort, for sure.
All right.
Now, so on that last point, is that really so?
I mean, I guess I was reading as well that Jabhat Fatah al-Sham and Arar al-Sham, both of which were founded by original friends of Osama from back when, anyway, and have fought together all this time, that is it really right then that Arar al-Sham is, they're going for the mythical moderate title now that al-Zinki, the child headcutter guys, are out?
And so they're splitting, the CIA's been successful at splitting them away from Jabhat al-Nusra, really al-Qaeda's group, Fatah al-Sham now, as it's called?
Well, first of all, I would say, you know, that it's not, not CIA success at all.
And I don't think the CIA had anything to do with the developments that have, that we've seen in recent months.
Russian foreign ministry success then?
Negotiations, is that it?
Absolutely.
The Russians have been working on this very, very hard since their military intervention in Syria.
And I think this in part reflects their efforts to draw some of the moderates away from the coalition with al-Qaeda.
But it is very complex at this point, because Arar al-Sham is divided sharply between a group that is clearly committed to al-Qaeda in the leadership.
And I would add, probably from everything that I've read, and I've written about this, as you probably know, a majority of the fighters in Arar al-Sham are with the pro-al-Qaeda group of the leadership.
But there is another group in the leadership that has been less committed.
In fact, I would say, you know, more independent-minded in terms of al-Qaeda, who have never been comfortable with what was Jabhat al-Nusra's connection, loyalty really, to al-Qaeda, and who've been trying to work some kind of arrangement that would separate the opposition to Assad from al-Qaeda, from the parent organization.
And so what we're seeing now is the beginning of a split in Arar al-Sham.
It's very difficult to know how far that's gone at this point, how it's playing out on the ground in terms of the fighters within Arar al-Sham, and whether they're clearly choosing sides at this point, or whether that's still a process that is ongoing or is about to begin.
All that remains to be seen.
But, I mean, the bigger picture, of course, is that the civil war in Syria between the Assad regime and the opposition has really taken a very sharp turn against the opposition.
And, you know, efforts to try to change that by intervention by the United States, military intervention by the United States, now look certainly much less rational than they did before, and they didn't look very rational before.
I think that's the bigger picture.
But beyond that, I mean, there is this problem that I allude to in my article, which is the subject of a recent column by David Ignatius, the famous sort of court scrivener of the national security state in Washington, who always reflects the views of senior people in the CIA and the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs.
And his column in mid-December said that he recalled a meeting that he had in 2014, it would have been late 2014, with leaders of the opposition group Harakat al-Khazm, which was one of the, I would say, the top pick of the CIA in terms of armed opposition groups that they had hopes for some years ago.
And, of course, was favored with tow missiles and training and cash and so forth.
So it was the one that they had the highest hopes for.
And when he met with them, it followed a U.S. strike, an airstrike against al-Qaeda operatives who were in Syria supposedly planning for some kind of attack against the West.
That was what was put out by the Pentagon.
And so Harakat al-Khazm leaders were described by Ignatius as being, quote, despondent, unquote.
And the reason was that when he asked them, why were they so upset?
They said, well, this means that al-Qaeda won't have any confidence in us.
They will not tolerate us any longer.
We won't be able to fight with them.
And I think, you know, the subtext of that was they really expected al-Qaeda to just take them over.
And, of course, within a matter of weeks, that's exactly what happened.
The Harakat al-Khazm basically disappeared and its tow missiles and all the rest of the loot that they had gotten in their military operations and from the United States were taken over by al-Qaeda.
That was the one where they just sacked the warehouses and just took all of it, right?
That's right.
And the State Department actually asked them to return it, please.
Right.
So the point of that story, it seemed to me, and I say this in my article, is that it's clear that this was being related by Ignatius, who is in touch with people in the CIA.
And the reason that he was writing at that point, it seems clear, is that he's getting signals from the CIA that they no longer feel that this idea that they can use the non-communist, non-jihadist fighters to try to influence the overall state of play in the civil war, whether it's against Assad or al-Qaeda or whatever, is not really viable.
In fact, the telling point that I mentioned in my piece is that Ignatius actually talks about the CIA program of aiding the armed opposition in the past tense.
Now, I assume that that was deliberate, but in any case, it was obviously signaling that something had changed.
I wonder about that.
Yeah, that's quite possible.
Now, so let me ask you this.
Oh, I wanted to add one thing to your whole case here that you're making, which is it's a, you know, circumstantial case for the calling off of the CIA program here.
But that is that Trump is the president.
And as early as 2013, he tweeted that, what do we do in arming these guys?
We don't know who they are, which is a very polite way of saying we know who they are.
They're Bin Laden's guys.
He might be dead, but his guys are still fighting, and why are we backing them?
And he said that all along.
On the other hand, though, there's this great piece in the, well, I don't know how great it is, well-reported piece in the Wall Street Journal today, I believe, this morning, or maybe it came out last night, military brass filled Donald Trump's National Security Council.
More and more and more generals and colonels and lieutenant colonels joining the National Security Council staff, including some of David Petraeus's men.
And I saw actually where Michael Weiss and Max Boot were high-fiving each other on Twitter this morning about the pick of a couple of these guys from the Petraeus era, and how they have their mandate.
They're to write up a new policy, and the policy is we're going to fight Islamic extremism, which means ISIS, no mention of Al-Qaeda, I don't guess, but it mentions ISIS and Iran.
And so this is my setup to let you run loose here, is we have this very schizophrenic policy under Obama and under Trump now, obviously, too, which is that America is on the Sunni side in the American, Israel, Turkey, and Sunni Arab axis against the Russia, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Hezbollah in Lebanon axis, which includes Iraq, where America is on Iran and Russia's side, fighting for the Shiites still against the Islamic State there, which they had helped to build up, as John Kerry has admitted, and as Joe Biden has admitted, that they went ahead and allowed the Sunni insurgency, aka Al-Qaeda in Syria, grow up to check Iran.
And it blew back huge into Iraq in the form of the Islamic State that we've now been fighting for two years.
And so when they say radical Islam, what they mean is stop differentiating between who's fighting on which side of the sectarian war over there so that we can continue fighting for both sides, Gareth.
So what the hell?
Is that changing?
Doesn't look like it.
That's going to change.
I mean, you're absolutely right.
The national security state, what I call the permanent war state, is sort of permanently tied up in knots because its interests require it to basically conduct contradictory policies in the Middle East.
And that's been the case for quite some time now.
And so there's not going to be a stop to that, no question about it.
I mean, they have heavy, heavy vested interests in sort of maintaining a presence in Iraq.
And that presence obviously is now justified by fighting the Islamic State.
And so they can't afford to not cooperate with Iran, with the Shia's militias in Iraq, all the people that are supposed to be so dangerous to the Middle East.
At the same time, of course, as you've just said, I mean, they're going to have this trumpeting, this policy of how dangerous Iran is as part of this Islamic extremism.
And of course, this is all opposed because, you know, Iran is part of the meal ticket for the U.S. military and CIA, always has been, always will be, from the beginning of the Islamic Republic in Iran.
As you demonstrate in your book, Manufactured Crisis, at the end of the Cold War, they came to be one of the pieces to fill in the shoes of the enemy that the Soviet Union had filled before.
Took the words right out of my mouth.
That's what I was going to allude to.
Yes.
The chapter in my book that talks about the political origins of the idea of the existential threat from Iran or Iran as a threat.
The nuclear program is a threat, I should say.
So, yeah, that is going to continue for as long as the permanent war state has its legitimacy and its power given to it by the Congress with the acquiescence, whether willing or otherwise, of the American people.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so on the question of one side of that fight, we have a pretty tough fight going on right now in Mosul, still months into this thing.
There's a huge question of whether the Islamic State was going to stay and fight or they were going to turn and run the way they had done from Fallujah and from Ramadi, at least eventually they gave up on Ramadi.
They still had Mosul to run to.
And I guess there were reports that some of the ISIS guys had fled from Mosul to Raqqa in Eastern Syria.
But anyway, apparently most of them decided to stay and fight.
And just two days ago, it was announced the Iraqi government conceded that they got ahead of themselves when they had previously announced that they had taken at least Eastern Mosul and it belonged to them now.
So, you know, Danny Davis, the lieutenant colonel with a very keen eye for this stuff, has written that the Iraqi army, really the Shiite army, the Shiite militias and the Kurdish Peshmerga, along with the U.S. Special Forces and Air Force, that this coalition fighting in Mosul right now may not hold together to finish the battle.
And so far ISIS, I mean, I guess what do they have?
Just a couple of 10,000 guys there, something like that, 20,000 men or something.
But they're really holding out.
But anyway, then I guess the longer, I guess I figure as long as the Special Forces and the Air Force are there, eventually they're going to get it done.
At which point, then the whole policy of backing the jihadists in order to check the Iranians has just backfired and call it backdraft.
One more time, it's only empowered Iran even more, right?
And helped expand possibly the borders, certainly the influence of Iraqi Shiistan, even further to the West than before.
An Iranian-powered influence, in other words.
I know this is one of your favorite themes, Scott, and you're absolutely right that that is worth a really a headline.
It's a headline story.
It should be a headline story.
You're the newsman.
Yeah, that everything that the United States has done in Iraq since the beginning has merely been a de facto assistance to Iran in supporting its fundamental interest there.
And of course, there is this period during which the United States was realizing how much the situation there was, in fact, in the interest of Iran.
And they were overtly pushing the line during the Bush administration that we are taking on Iran in Iraq.
And there was a huge bow wave of stories about that in 2007, 2008.
But in the end, the Iranians were the ones who really controlled the government of al-Maliki.
The US was saying, and I have to think that they actually believed that the Bush administration actually believed their own propaganda that, in fact, al-Maliki was leaning more towards the United States.
But the reality was always that Iran was the primary backer, the primary ally of the al-Maliki government.
And it was with the al-Maliki government that Iran cooked up the agreement that got the United States troops out of Iraq, which, of course, the US news media absolutely ignored.
I was the only one who was really writing about that.
Hey, I was going to say that just now.
That actually, you know, we really should go back and make a book out of your article archive here, because your documentation of how exactly that took place there, the compromises, and in fact, where even Soleimani ducked in from Iran and worked out the deal between Muqtada al-Sadr's guys and the Dawah Party guys and the, I don't know, and I guess the Bata Brigade, too, the scary faction, too, among the Shiites to secure the coalition on the condition that you promise to kick America out.
Once they're done winning the war for you, you got to tell them to go.
Exactly.
So, look, Scott, I mean, to me, the overall message of all this, the take-home message is the United States has always been everywhere in the Middle East, you know, pick your country, and it's still the case, over its head, far over its head.
I mean, just having no understanding whatsoever of the political, social, cultural context in which it intervenes in these countries, and the results are, you know, dependably, predictably, invariably disastrous from any point of view.
So, you know, that to me, that has to be just repeated over and over again.
Right.
From any point of view except one, which is, eh.
Okay.
So, you know what?
If it doesn't work, we'll have another war, too.
That's all right, because that's our job.
As long as they can get away with that politically, then you're absolutely right.
They are in perfect position because of what I call the perverse policy cycle.
The more, you know, disastrous their policy is, the more destabilizing it is, the more cause for war there is, and the more they're in business.
Yeah.
You know, I have a couple of quotes here.
One's from Defense News and the other in the New York Times.
I won't read them to you word for word or anything, but they're both quotes that say, well, one of them even refers specifically to the Dagger Brigade.
It's the U.S.
Army.
Now that, I guess, Special Forces.
Well, you know, now that we're pulling out of Iraq, and, you know, the Dagger Brigade is looking for ways to stay globally engaged.
So we're looking to Africa as a place where, you know, we can find things to do.
It's just as simple as that.
They're not even embarrassed.
Out of the mouths of babes kind of a thing, you know?
That's true.
But on the other hand, I think there's a bigger picture, a bigger reality here, which is that Special Forces are so much committed in so many places that the real problem is they're overcommitted.
They're overstretched.
And I just saw a piece yesterday by, I think, Sean Naylor that talks about that reality, that the real worry on the part of the managers of the Special Operations Command is that that they're being overused.
They're burning out their troops.
And, you know, of course, they're going to try to capitalize on this situation and get more resources, more manpower, and so forth, and they probably will get it.
But at this point, at least, their problem is not that they're not committed in enough places.
They're committed in too many places.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Nick Terz has written that, you know, a lot of this is basically the Army's payoff, because I guess it's not just SOCOM and JSOC.
It's regular, you know, Army, too, in various places building bases there, and how this is sort of their payoff compromise since the Air Force and the Navy get to have their buildup in Asia, and the Air-Sea Battle Plan for containing China or threatening China, and all this and that.
And the Army's saying, oh, yeah, well, so who do we get to occupy then?
What's our excuse for doing something?
And, you know, of course, there's hardly a nation in Africa that can put up a fight.
Most of them, of course, are willing to just sign on the dotted line and invite the Special Forces on in to help train up their military, help them find something to do before it's too late, you know, before somebody finds that they're the one that's something to do.
And that is indeed the deal, fundamentally.
I mean, that's the overarching deal that constantly is reiterated in the politics of the permanent war state, which is, as you said, you know, the Navy and the Air Force get more in East Asia from the U.S. policy in terms of budget and missions and so forth.
And as compensation, then the Army gets more bases in Africa with the promise of more and more things to do in future years.
Yeah, well, yeah, it's a promise all around.
All right.
Hey, listen, thank you very much for coming back on the show, Gareth.
Always great to talk with you.
Thanks, Scott.
My pleasure as always.
All right, John, that's it for anti-war radio for this morning.
Thanks very much for listening.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
Check out my full interview archive at scotthorton.org and follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
See you next week.