02/22/17 – Brad Hoff on US plans for Syrian regime change in the 1980s – eerily similar to today – The Scott Horton Show

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Trying to get these wars ended.
All right y'all, welcome back to the show from, you know, last time.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show. scotthorton.org is the website and libertarianinstitute.org as well.
And I'm very proud to say that Brad Hoff has been writing for us.
Brad Hoff is an army veteran, although he was stationed stateside during the last wars.
Then he went and lived in Syria for a little while and knows a hell of a lot about it.
And he's been writing for the last couple of years at levantreport.com and including, he really broke the story of the Judicial Watch documents and the DIA report of August 2012 about the rise of the Islamic State as a consequence of American intervention and allied intervention in the Syrian civil war.
And now he's got another document for us here.
New declassified CIA memo presents blueprint for Syrian regime collapse.
Welcome back to the show.
Brad, how are you doing?
Thanks a lot, Scott.
Good to be here.
All right.
Very happy to have you here.
And again, everybody can find this at libertarianinstitute.org.
And so you got this document about regime change in Syria that was part of, I guess, this huge release of CIA documents, historical documents.
And the date on this is July 1986.
So tell us, Brad, what's the importance of this new, old, newly released CIA document here?
Well, sure.
It is 30 years old.
But when I started reading through it and even saw the title of the document itself, it's called Syria Scenarios of Dramatic Political Change, authored by a subgroup within the CIA called the Foreign Subversion and Instability Center, I started reading this thing.
And right away, it looked just like events as they played out in 2011.
So even though this is about three decades old now, what you had in 1986 was the CIA sitting around speculating if there were regime change in Syria, if there were civil war, if there were eventual government collapse, what would that look like?
And so what's remarkable about the document is that you read this thing, and there's talk of small protests against the government being hijacked by a Muslim Brotherhood insurgency.
From there, things spiral out of control into a sectarian civil war, pitting Sunnis against the Alawite-dominated government, and so on.
But when you read this, it looks just like things as they played out in 2011.
So obviously, none of this happened in the 1980s, or even the 1990s.
But in the 1980s, we're dealing with Hafez al-Assad, the father to Bashar al-Assad.
And you have a lot of the same dynamics at play, a sort of totalitarian Baptist police state.
You have a Sunni opposition, which at that time was represented in a kind of underground Muslim Brotherhood.
So the CIA is theorizing, look, if this Muslim Brotherhood thing could be revived, if it would go to war against the Syrian state, how would that play out?
And so already, there's been some Middle East experts, analysts online, who when they read this thing, their first comment tends to be, am I reading about the 1980s?
Or am I reading about Syria in 2011?
It's really uncanny.
Yeah, well, it seems like even the most minimalist interpretation here would have it that this is one hell of a crystal ball for how something like this would play out once the crisis started, who's going to be taking whose side and this kind of thing.
I mean, I guess it doesn't get so much into the foreign governments in the region and the degree to which they could be counted on to intervene for their own purposes.
But as far as the fault lines and all of that, you could at least say, you know, they can't claim that they weren't warned of how bad that this could be.
Although it doesn't sound like this was written as a warning.
It certainly could be read as one if what you cared about, you know, was things like humanitarian interests of civilian populations and quaint, you know, things like that.
No, exactly right.
In fact, in the mid to late 2000s, there's some documents that were released by WikiLeaks, some State Department cables and so on.
And they deal with Syria in a similar way.
Where are the fault lines?
Where are the sectarian fault lines that could potentially be exploited if the U.S. wanted to topple the Syrian government?
And the 1986 document, I noticed, looks remarkably similar to the thinking that's echoed in the mid to late 2000s.
And we could really look at the whole Syria story and what's happening now in Syria as the culmination of a long war.
What people don't realize is that there was a low grade civil war that was already fought between 1979 and 1982.
When people hear about the Hama massacre, right, that was the kind of final standoff in 1982, where the Syrian army leveled the Muslim Brotherhood stronghold of Hama.
Before that, there had been a kind of low grade civil war where you had a Muslim Brotherhood insurgency bombing civilian areas.
You had the Syrian government trying to round up radicals and throw them in prisons and so on.
In fact, in the midst of that, Hafez al-Assad barely survived an assassination attempt against the Muslim Brotherhood attack on the outskirts of Damascus.
Amazingly, the Assad line could have been snuffed out back in the early 1980s.
And so what this is in 1986 is the CIA sitting around thinking, well, we know the Muslim Brotherhood has been driven underground.
If this whole thing, this whole movement were to be revived and militarized, what would that look like?
And you're exactly right.
When you fast forward to 2011 and 2012, when the US and UK are thinking about arming this insurgency that had arisen rather quickly, well, they should have looked at the past literature and been able to easily see how this thing would play out.
It's a lie that the White House sort of perpetuated, especially in 2014.
Oh, we didn't see ISIS coming.
We didn't see this bloody sectarian nightmare unfolding.
We couldn't have imagined that, and that was a claim.
But the literature was very clear.
They were warned time and time again, if you start pouring weapons into an armed insurgency, and one of the most important geostrategically located places in the Middle East, you're going to have an absolute nightmare.
Yeah.
Well, now, listen, I'm sorry, I say this not to be like, Oh, patting myself on the back, but in fact, really just the opposite that if this was this easy for me, it would have could should have been for anyone in power.
And that is that when I first heard of the clean break strategy of the neoconservatives, David Wormser and Richard Perle and their friends that they came up with in 1996 about, yeah, you know, the what we need to do is focus on getting rid of Saddam Hussein in order to get to our real target Assad in Syria, who we really hate, which is kind of a, it's funny, if you read it, it doesn't make all that much sense.
But anyway, when I first heard of that, and the companion article is called coping with crumbling states, where Wormser says that what we want to do is expedite the chaotic collapse in Syria, so that then we'll have a better chance of, you know, reforming the society there, the way we want it to be, or, you know, whatever, however, exactly finishes a sentence, something like that.
But of course, it raised the obvious question, who do they think would come after a secular fascist dictatorship that they have here, a minority run secular fascist dictatorship?
I mean, who's even in the running the Muslim Brotherhood, if they're lucky, right?
That was my sort of just thinking out loud about it back in 2003.
And for I guess, when I first started, you know, read about the clean break and all that.
So the point being that that's the obvious question, right?
Who else could possibly replace the fascist government there?
What other organization could possibly command the loyalty of enough people that they could put anything like a new state together there to replace the current state?
And that's the answer.
And of course, the if you're lucky part was the real answer, because the Muslim Brotherhood is they're just a Rar al-Sham, right?
It's Jabhat al-Nusra that dominates the insurgency against the Assad regime there, those loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Well, it's interesting you bring up that question, because you're right that the establishment's approach to Syria has been much the same throughout the decades, except for that very brief time when Hafez decides to join the allied coalition in the first Gulf War, right?
That was a sort of exceptional moment.
And then things kind of go back to a kind of standoff between Syria, you know, Israel and the West and so on.
But the 1986 document, the few moments that actually gets into policy recommendations actually addresses that question.
And I just want to read one little sentence from the document.
In our view, U.S. interests would best be served by a Sunni regime controlled by business oriented moderates.
And business moderates would welcome Western aid and investment to build up Syria's private economy.
So there it is, the age old sort of economic puppet influenced by the West question.
The document actually ends with another question or another scenario.
Well, yes, we recognize Syria is secular, but there is a danger if Syria is destabilized for, quote, religious zealots to establish an Islamic republic, and that would deepen hostilities with Israel and provide a sanctuary to terrorist groups.
So there's the CIA saying that 30 years ago, and here we are today.
The whole thing is blown up into a nightmare where ISIS controls a vast amount of territory.
You got al-Nusra Front and other jihadi radicals, you know, essentially on their way to creating a failed state.
You know, I gotta say that, you know, from the point of view of George Bush, if I, you know, pretend to try to see it his way as best I can, I can see how, yeah, they keep saying that if I knock off Saddam and do the Iraq war, that that'll make the whole terrorism al-Qaeda thing worse.
But we all know they're just a few hundred guys.
And yeah, they got lucky that one time and everything.
But what are they really going to do about it's not that much of concern compared to real American power in the region and that kind of thing.
We got the U.S. Army, the U.S. Marine Corps.
So, okay.
But in 2006, when they decided on this redirection, when they basically said, and everyone can read, that's the Seymour Hersh article about it, that, well, oops, we didn't mean to empower Iran by empowering Iran's allies in Iraq.
We sort of thought the influence would roll the other way, because that's what Iran's spies told us to believe in, us meaning Richard Perle, the idiot.
So they fell for it.
They screwed up.
And they said, oops, okay, well, at least we can sort of take a consolation prize by working on taking out Assad and limiting, you know, trying to fight Hezbollah.
So they started backing Islamist groups, basically al-Qaeda type groups in Lebanon, in Syria, and including in Iran, Jandala in Iran, and supposedly PJAK as well.
But anyway, and the thing of it is, though, that at that point, al-Qaeda in Iraq had already been a thing for a year and a half, and was already known.
They were the guys that blew up the Samarra mosque and, you know, were perfectly happy to play tit for tat with the Bata Brigade in this horrible sectarian civil war that got nearly a million people killed.
And that, you know, America, of course, had touched off and was fighting on the Shiite side the whole time.
But so that's the part of it that I still have trouble with.
Honestly, it's not that I don't understand that they would do immoral things.
But never mind the morality of it.
It seems really stupid to go ahead and side with Zarqawi's guys, basically, at the same time, they're kind of bribing them to stop fighting in Iraq.
They really think that they can just use these guys against Assad, against Qaddafi, around the region, against our former sock puppets in the Iraqi government to try to force them to sidle back up to us more than Iran.
They think that they can do that without serious consequences, that they can revive Al Qaeda in Iraq, and blow it up to this, you know, as you were kind of alluding to there, it ended up becoming the Islamic State that ruled more people than Great Britain, for a time at least.
So a couple years there.
So anyway, that's the part that I kind of still don't get that like, you know, business moderates, what business moderates, these guys are all bin Laden nights.
I mean, ultimately, if you're dealing with a grinding civil war, the group that is going to prevail is necessarily going to be the most violent radical group willing to use any means possible.
So it's delusional that people would think that the outcome to all of this would be quote, unquote, pro Western moderates, and Damascus hanging on suits and ties and so on.
No, from any horrible bloody revolution in history, we know that it's the most brutal that survived, right?
And when you're dealing in a Syria or even Iraqi context, the Middle East context, sadly, it's that Wahhabi energizing influence that produces the best killers as the CIA, you know, knew well from the Afghan Soviet war when they supported the Mujahideen.
But I suppose to your your quandary, your question about Iraq, Iran, and why the stupidity, I mean, I ultimately can't answer it, I think, I think maybe we could start with, if the long game consistency consistently has been to topple Tehran.
If that's the long game, then I suppose everything else is just details.
And you can sort of manipulate your way into destabilizing these societies, even if it's contradictory in the short term, so long as that leads to the doorsteps of Tehran.
And you know, with the current crisis in Syria, I think we're seeing that a little bit because Iran is increasingly getting more and more bogged down in Syria.
I heard a Syria analyst the other day, actually, it was a personal conversation on the phone.
And he's somewhat sympathetic to the Syrian regime.
He said, Look, right now, there's a lot of fear in Damascus, that Iran is going to sink Syria.
And that's kind of interesting, because, you know, on the surface of it, it's probably Iranian militias that are doing a lot to help the Syrian army survive.
Right.
But there's another kind of strain of thinking right now coming out of the regime, worried that Iran having such a clear heavy presence in Syria is going to sink Syria, because of this long game, which has sought to topple Tehran.
In other words, by making them an even worse target of the West.
Exactly.
So thanks a lot for the help, guys.
But you're actually in the short term, but in the long term, you're just digging us a deeper pit.
Yeah, no, exactly.
And of course, of course, Syrian government officials are well aware of the bigger, you know, geopolitical issues at play here very well aware.
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Well, and, you know, certainly, ultimately, you know, achieving regime change in Iran, you know, is on the agenda of the neoconservatives, but it seems like the rest of the CFR establishment types, the rest of the Pentagon, even and maybe even the CIA, they, they bought into the nuclear deal.
And which was really the only issue fake as it was the only one big enough that it could have really led to war with Iran.
I mean, unless Israel just attacked anyway, or something, but that doesn't seem too likely with the deal working and all the entire Security Council in on it, you know?
Well, you know, and there's always the scenario that in the future, anyone can use the deal, right in order to show Iran, a constant rule breaker, breaker, or deal breaker, right?
You can always use this for leverage in the future, should in the administration want to sort of train change tracks, change policies, and something similar, as we know, happened with Iraq in the 90s.
Well, you know, it's funny, because nobody ever talks about how we're fighting for Iran's interest in Afghanistan the whole time, too, right?
They back the Hazaras that are part of the coalition that we support in the north against the Pashtuns, ultimately.
Right.
I mean, Afghanistan, what is that, right?
The media is sort of forgotten about Afghanistan.
Now, what exactly is the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria now?
Because I know the Muslim Brotherhood is a lot of different things, depending on where you go in the region.
And that, you know, there are some major differences between Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, for example.
But did I have that right earlier when I claimed that, basically, Arar al-Sham, which is sort of junior Al Qaeda in this so-called civil war in Syria, is basically the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood?
Is that right?
Yeah, that's mostly right.
I mean, you should look at the Muslim Brotherhood more as genus to species, right?
The sort of fertile soil out of which all the subgroups, all the jihadi subgroups came.
And so, yeah, you could speak of these different groups as sort of different species of the bigger category that is the Muslim Brotherhood.
But of course, there's not some single, you know, militia or entity that would call itself, you know, we're the Muslim Brotherhood.
I mean, the Brotherhood early on, you know, basically nearly completely staffed the Syrian National Council, right?
So they quickly set up the sort of government and exile.
And you still had veterans of, like I said, that first sort of low-level Muslim Brotherhood insurgency from the early 1980s.
You still had veterans of that war, both languishing in Syrian prisons and basically living an underground existence in Syria or outside of Syria.
But it's also true that based on historical circumstances and geography, the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria has always been more quickly militarized, and I would say radical, than its counterpart in Egypt.
So do you think that this particular document actually was a blueprint that they, you know, must have referred to this thing in the way that they pushed this so-called revolution beginning in 2011?
I mean, it's hard to say.
It was certainly on the shelves, and we can imagine there are a lot of similar documents related to— I mean, you could just say it's a realistic take is what it is, right?
Right.
No, first and foremost— That's why it played out this way is because it was smart guy wrote it.
No, exactly right.
Exactly right.
Yeah.
First and foremost, it's a very insightful, realistic take.
You know, you can see the assumptions coming through, though, right?
You know, no matter how much of a sort of war games theoretical scenario it lays out of Syrian regime collapse and so on, you see the assumptions.
The assumptions are present throughout, and there are moments, like I said, where it comes close to policy, right?
They sort of play their hand a little bit.
There's a section that talks about the possibility of getting, at that time, U.S. ally Iraq to ship weapons to this Muslim Brotherhood insurgency.
And as I said, there's also sections where it says, look, the U.S. position is that we would rather have—instead of a Ba'athist, nationalist, and Alawite-dominated regime in Damascus, we would rather have, quote-unquote, Sunni moderates.
I mean, we can assume a kind of like the client Gulf monarchies that are, you know, basically tied at the hip with Western economic interests and so on.
So there are places like that, right, where they tip their cards.
You know, there's assumptions throughout.
And what's remarkable is that whether you pick up this document or—there's a few other documents that talk about the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood in the early 80s.
There's some documents in the late 90s that you could look at.
There is a remarkable consistency which reveals the establishment thinking on Syria, and that is the approach is not to take the kind of Arab nationalism, the secular nationalism, which is typically religiously pluralistic, not to take that very seriously, right, but to actively try to exploit sectarian fault lines and bring them to the surface in the hope of basically manipulating the situation toward whatever end you want it to be.
And the document does spell out that end, as we desire a Sunni moderate regime.
And oh yeah, it's possible that a bunch of Islamic radicals could take over, but we'll hope for the best.
And it's all for the sake of Western economic interests and to the benefit of Israeli security.
Man.
Well, and they say here, too, setting the stage for civil war.
This is, you know, what we could do is try to foment civil war, which I think necessarily means hundreds of thousands of innocent people killed, right?
I mean, you're right.
This is the value in all of this.
And this is the value of journalists pouring through, you know, the new big CIA document dump online.
You get to see the real story, the real history, right?
What we're constantly fed is that the U.S. government takes actions based on humanitarian concerns, right?
That we care about the people, we care about common Libyans, we care about common Iraqis and Syrians and so on.
But when you read memos that come out of the national security state, it is all Machiavellian.
It's all real politic.
It's all, and justifies the means.
There is not a single consideration of how much bloodshed could result in all this.
There's not a single mention of democracy.
When you read the intelligence files, you know, whatever part of the world, whatever conflict, their chief concern is strategic objectives.
And it has nothing to do with saving Syrians, saving Libyans, saving Iraqis, and so on.
And if you think about it, right, you think about it.
Before we hear about these places in the news, before we intervene in Libya or Iraq, I mean, how many of us actually knew what Tripoli or Misrata looked like, right?
How many people could visualize Baghdad or even Tehran, right?
Tehran is a modern bustling city that looks like Los Angeles, right?
Same thing with Damascus.
This is what shocked me the first time I went there.
I mean, how many of us can actually picture these places and how many of us have relationships with actual Syrians, Libyans, or Iraqis, right?
This is not what drives, as you know better than most, this is not what drives the foreign policy of the US, UK, or of any of these states that are, that intervene at the drop of a hat.
John McCain doesn't actually care about anybody, right?
He has his own strategic sort of objectives at play.
Well, you know, I just love the title, the Foreign Subversion and Instability Center.
And that sure sounds like William Casey and Robert Gates to me, right, back in 1986.
And I could just picture the plaque on the door.
It's just a, looks like an office park, right?
A bunch of cubicles and a bunch of office people, just like anywhere else, only it's the Foreign Subversion and Instability Center.
Come on, guys, we're going to study how to get the, how to radicalize the Sunni population of Syria to overthrow the minority Alawite government.
And who cares how many Christians or anybody else or Druze or Shiites or anybody else dies in the thing.
We're just, you know, and then maybe business interests will benefit at the end.
Who cares, right?
Could be.
Roll the dice.
Let's go.
This is their job.
This is what people go to work and do in the morning.
It's crazy.
Yeah.
And you know, they're very good at selling it in those humanitarian terms, right?
The politicians are very good, you know, CNN, they're all very good at sort of selling all of these things in terms of the plight of the people, humanitarian concerns.
And that's a real concern.
And I'm not saying people should ignore that.
I'm saying people should understand this is not what motivates our leaders when they take us to war.
And yet, it is the lie they sell us.
When in the end, it's the interventions, it's the covert arming of all the different groups across the Middle East.
You know, it's the bombing of Baghdad.
That is what harms civilians more than all these other things.
That is our presence there.
It's shock and awe, right?
We're taking out actual people.
And yet, that's not, you know, that's not how it's all sold, right?
It's sold as we're going to fix their problems.
But certainly, there's a lot of hubris in that.
And yes, you're right.
It's hubristic, even this name, this title, Foreign Subversion and Instability Center, full of arrogance.
I was able to find out that there still is a department of what's called Global Issues at the CIA.
In my research, I wasn't able to establish whether or not that the particular sub office is still called Foreign Subversion and Instability Center.
A lot of these, a lot of these names change.
And there's sort of different titles over the decades.
Yeah, I'm sure they probably changed this since then.
But it is, it's just like Brazil, though.
Either way, whatever they changed it to is probably just as ridiculous.
And you know what, that kind of might be an inside joke on their part, too, that they're that blatant about it.
It seems like, you know, they must kind of laugh about that.
But I don't know.
Right.
Well, you know, I'm sure they changed the different posters and art on the wall from decade to decade.
Because one of the great things about reading Charlie Wilson's war, all about our getting involved in the Afghan-Soviet war and arming the mujahideen, there were actually, you know, in the office where the Afghan desk was, they actually had like, massive posters of jihadi, mujahideen fighters on the walls of the CIA.
No kidding.
And that's not a joke that's detailed in this.
What's ultimately, you know, it was a movie, right?
But the book is a serious piece of investigative journalism, Charlie Wilson's war.
So they talk about parts of the CIA being decorated with these posters and images of these Afghan-Mujahideen guys, these hardline jihadis, some of the very guys that will later give us 9-11.
Well, hey, they're people of the book.
They believe in the same God as us.
We're fighting against the communist atheists of the USSR.
So yeah, ironically...
If there's any problems, we'll deal with them later.
Okay, don't worry about it.
Ironically, the chief architects to this whole funding jihad in the early 80s in Afghanistan were religious right type people, hanging out at cocktail parties in Houston, combined with their friends, the, you know, the oil sheikhs.
Yep.
All right.
Well, so good history lessons on the show today from John Schwartz, and now from Brad Hoff as well.
Let me ask you one more thing, too.
Actually, while I have you here, I meant to...
Sure.
Shadow Wars, an Explosive New History Documents the Rise of ISIS.
That also was published at libertarianinstitute.org by you, Brad.
And so I'm wondering why you're so excited about this book.
You seem really impressed by this thing.
Yeah, it's a new scholarly work from a British academic named Christopher Davidson.
And what he's done is taken a lot of the new documents, like you mentioned, that 2012 DIA report, he's basically, you know, analyzed a lot of recent, very recent funds and intelligence, you know, releases and leaked stuff.
And he's composed a pretty brand new history that goes back to the mid-20th century on up to the start of the Syrian Civil War.
And he just does a great job.
I mean, if you could take the entire position of, you know, antiwar.com or Libertarian Institute, and then turn it into a like 600, 700 page serious academic work, that would be Shadow Wars and more people need to learn about it.
And like I said, it was produced by a British press.
And it's only just now, you know, accessible to an American audience as well.
Cool.
Yeah, man.
That's really good.
I saw, you know, in, I guess, as part of your, your review here is you've really read all of the popular books about the rise of the Islamic State, you really condemn all the rest is, you know, oh, it's ISIS is all Assad's fault in this kind.
Are they really that uniformly bad?
Yeah.
So basically, you know, you go look on the shelves of Barnes and Noble, it's amazing how many books about ISIS have been written.
And there's more coming out like every month.
And I'd say they fall into two categories, right?
The first category is the sort of standard clash of civilizations.
Oh, it's the Muslim Middle East versus the Christian West.
And that's pretty absurd, right?
And that's, that's the kind of, you know, popular category you can find on the shelves at Barnes and Noble.
But then there's the other side, the sort of Charles Lister, Hassan Hassan emphasis on, oh, it was actually Assad, who let the al Qaeda guys out of his political prisons, who, you know, is behind the rise of ISIS.
And that, you know, the Ba'athists in Syria are such puppet masters, that they've basically created this whole phenomenon, you know, which, by the way, has almost toppled their own government.
And so those are kind of the two categories.
It's, it's, it's an absurd argument, because if you go back to 2012, at the time, Amnesty International, the Syrian opposition, everyone was screaming for Assad to let those political prisoners go.
And they weren't making distinctions, they weren't saying, hey, you need to keep this jihadi radical and this criminal inside your prison.
They were saying, no, amnesty right now.
And he did just that.
And so years later, now there's been this sort of, you know, Charles Lister, Roy Gutman, concocted narrative that Assad is actually behind the rise of ISIS.
And there's a few books out there that actually takes a look at the role of the West and Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the Gulf allies, and fueling the insurgency, which gave birth to ISIS.
Well, there's no question about it, too, because, well, for especially longtime listeners to this show, we cover this all in real time from 2011 on.
Patrick Coburn said, American support for the Sunni side, the so called Sunni side, the jihadi side of the war in Syria is quote, and then I think he's quoting Iraqi Shiite politicians, is re-energizing the Sunni insurgency in Iraq.
And we covered how Patrick Coburn, above and beyond anybody else, especially covered how Iraqi troops were abandoning Mosul a year before the fall, that they felt like they were way out on Fort Apache with no support out in enemy territory in a foreign country, former Iraqi Sunni stand out there in Mosul.
And they were going AWOL and going safe back behind Shiite lines and leaving the place ungoverned at the same time that everybody knew, as we're covering daily on the show, that CIA was backing this jihad.
And it's even McClatchy Newspapers reports that even the State Department admits that yes, in fact, what they call al-Nusra in Syria is nothing but al-Qaeda in Iraq.
It's the Syrian dominated faction that ISIS ended up splitting off from, ISIS just being the Iraqi dominated faction of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
They're all Zarqawi's guys.
And in fact, ISIS still claims bin Laden, they just don't like listening to Ayman al-Zawahiri like Jabhat al-Nusra still likes to do.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, all of this is spelled out even in, you know, Hillary Clinton's emails.
I mean, you can see her and people she's communicating with, acknowledging very clearly, yeah, we know Saudi Arabia, Qatar, you know, they're basically very sympathetic to ISIS and even funding them.
And, and now just at the start of this week, there's talk of a safe zone being set up in part by the Saudis.
I mean, that doesn't make sense, right?
How do you take a state that's basically ideologically aligned to, you know, the ISIS Wahhabi worldview?
They're gonna create an al-Nusra state.
That's what they're talking about.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah, but how do you, how do you take a party that's, it's backing one side of the conflict, right?
And pretend they're neutral.
But I guess that's been the whole name of the game with coverage of Syria.
The media has also failed to cover Turkey's role in the rise of ISIS.
Well, never even mind Trump.
If you took McMaster and Mattis and Dunford and smashed all their heads together and throw in Pompeo too.
Are they even going to be able to sort this out?
I mean, what a bunch of maroons.
And we're stuck in their hands.
Trump is stuck in their hands too.
He doesn't know what to do or think.
I mean, the fact that somebody came up with this, and this is what they're saying they're going to do.
I mean, who's giving them this stuff?
Where are they reading this?
That this is what they should do.
Which think tank is saying carve out?
Oh yeah, I guess we know.
Which all think tanks are saying carve out a safe zone for the al-Nusra front in Syria now that they've lost, right?
Now that they got their asses kicked out of Aleppo at the high cost for all kinds of people all around.
Now, no, we got to intervene again to save them.
We hate ISIS, but we still like al-Nusra in the Trump years.
He really is just Barack Obama, I guess, at the end of the day.
Look, the safe zone plan, look, and I want civilians to be safe.
I mean, I absolutely do.
But this thing sort of comes off the shelf essentially when the Syrian government, anytime the Syrian government threatens to take back larger sections of territory.
And so, yeah, it certainly doesn't seem like the motivation is actually humanitarian.
Again, it's just another strategic ploy.
And like I said, you're talking about a safe zone administered by like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United States.
These are the very groups that left the Turkish border wide open for ISIS to pour in.
And, you know, these are the very groups sponsoring terrorism inside Syria.
So it's clearly absurd.
You think it makes a difference whether it's Flynn or McMaster calling that shot?
Well, you know, Flynn, given his, we could say maybe realism toward Russia, and I don't, I mean, I don't really buy into these theories that, oh, he's just so compromised.
He's a Russian agent.
He happened to go to Moscow and hang out with Putin and so on.
Geraldi and Ray McGovern were there too.
Yeah, exactly.
Don't tell me Geraldi's a traitor.
He's just too smart to believe in this BS.
That's all.
Well, you know, you actually have to go to these places to know what you're talking about.
And sadly, a lot of the policy wonks, you know, have hardly stepped foot in the places of their supposed expertise.
Yeah, but at the end of the day, sadly, the establishment, you know, both sides of the establishment are so infected with this sort of, you know, anti-Iran thinking.
Now, maybe it doesn't make a difference at the end of the day.
But what I always go back to is, look, Iran and Iraq stood toe to toe for eight years during the bloodiest war in modern Middle Eastern history.
Neither side could gain an edge.
We walked into Baghdad and took the country over like it was nothing.
And we think Iran is a threat.
Iran is not suicidal.
They're a rational actor.
And it's a country that we can deal with.
And so, yeah, sadly, the fallback position among all these guys is typically, you know, be an Iran hawk.
It's probably hard to become a general in the military and not be an Iran hawk on some level.
And so there's a few options out there, really.
Yep.
That's true.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate your time again on the show and all your great journalism, Brad.
All right.
Thanks, Scott.
Thank you.
That's Brad Hoff, y'all.
I said Army.
I'm sorry, man.
He's a Marine, veteran in the Marine Corps, lived in Syria for a time.
And I think you'll agree he's a real expert when you read his great writing at LevantReport.com and at LibertarianInstitute.org.
He's got a great archive there, including Shadow Wars and Explosive New History Documents the Rise of ISIS.
And this exclusive new declassified CIA memo presents blueprint for Syrian regime collapse at LibertarianInstitute.org.
Thanks, y'all.
That's the Scott Horton Show.
ScottHorton.org for the full archive.
LibertarianInstitute.org for the rest.
See you.
Thanks.
All right, y'all.
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