04/02/16 – Daniel Lazare – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, April 3rd, 2016.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
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Our guest this morning is Daniel Lazar.
He's a writer who's written for Consortium News, Jacobin, and The Nation Magazine, among others.
And lately, he's written a bunch of really, really great stuff for Bob Perry's site there at consortiumnews.com.
The latest is called How U.S.-Backed War on Syria Helped ISIS.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Daniel?
Just fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Really appreciate you joining us this morning here.
And I have to say, before we...
And maybe we can get into this a little bit later on or something if it comes up, but I wanted to mention that your article about Zacharias Moussaoui and the Saudi royal family and the Saudi government's ties to the 9-11 attacks and all that is the best one I've ever read.
And...
Thank you.
I'm very critical on that subject of all sides.
There's very little that I like put out by anyone on that subject.
But that was definitely something I've recommended to many people since then.
Really good stuff.
Great.
Also at Consortium News.
And in fact, let me ask you this, have you been writing about the Middle East throughout the whole terror war?
Because I've only started reading you at Bob Perry's site here recently, but if you wrote all about Iraq, I missed it.
No, no, no.
I was not writing about it then.
I just finished a major book up that was a huge slog now making the rounds with the publishers.
So I was kind of out of touch for several years.
But I got back into it around 2012, 2013.
I was just watching what was happening in Syria, you know, and I, you know, I think of myself as an experienced guy.
I've been around, you know, been around the block a few times.
But I was just shocked, shocked at what I was seeing.
US and Gulf money was going to arm, I mean, what do you want to call them, fascist bigots, sectarian holy warriors who were slicing throats and committing atrocities right and left.
And the story that the press was putting forth was the most distorted, the most, you know, upside down version of those events.
I was amazed.
Yeah, it really has been amazing to watch this entire time, really, since the dawn of the Arab Spring.
But, you know, especially by, I don't know, I guess, early summer, late spring, early summer 2011, the reports were already coming out.
Prince Bandar is sending Mujahideen and millions to Syria, CIA is helping.
Eric Margulies reported in, I guess, July or August 2011, that the French special forces and French spies were on the ground in Syria working on regime change.
And yet, here and there, like McClatchy newspapers would report, for example, that even the State Department, Hillary Clinton's State Department was putting out things saying, oh, Al-Qaeda in Iraq has come across the border.
They're now inside Syria and they're leading the fight.
And they were saying that they were admitting that by, you know, I guess the end of 2011 even, I think.
Yes.
But if you kind of bear in mind that the US relationship with Al-Qaeda and similar groups and by the way, we shouldn't get too hung up on names like Al-Qaeda because Al-Qaeda is simply a type of organization, an extreme Salafist militant organization.
But the US has been working on and off with these kinds of elements for years, for decades.
Before 9-11, after 9-11, I mean, they sort of went dry for a few years after 9-11.
But no, they quickly, you know, got back on the bottle.
And of course, the ultimate element of this sort are the Gulf states and most especially Saudi Arabia, with which the US has a special relationship, which in some ways is more intimate, more tightly bound than even the US relationship with Israel.
And by the way, this has also escaped the attention of large portions of the left.
Anyway, I'm sorry, Scott, go on.
Well, anyway, yeah, I mean, that really is it.
Is that America decided, because of our allies' interests, as you just said, that they would go ahead and side with the 9-11 attackers.
I mean, it's true when you say that, well, Al-Qaeda kind of just means this or just means that.
In this case, it means friends of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who helped to kill 4,000 something Americans in the days of Iraq War II and, you know, gladly accepts the legacy, claims the legacy of Osama bin Laden.
So in other words, if the American people have any enemies at all in the world, these are them.
And they're the ones that our government has been backing.
And not the Republicans, but the Democrats, who you would think, you know, I can understand people make comparisons between Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan, and there are a lot of comparisons to make there.
But Ronald Reagan didn't back the Mujahideen after they had slaughtered 3,000 American civilians.
No, but he did back the Mujahideen after they had slaughtered several thousand Afghan civilians.
Well, that's certainly true.
But that makes it wrong, but not treason like this.
By the way, this policy goes back to Eisenhower.
I mean, in the depths of the Cold War, the U.S. was trying to stir up extreme Muslim elements for use against both Soviet Central Asia and against left-wing elements in the Middle East.
And they actually weren't successful because the Muslim elements at the time were very torpid.
But the U.S. was siding with the Muslim Brotherhood as far back as the mid-'50s.
Sure, Devil's Game by Robert Dreyfuss covers all that.
Yeah.
Yeah, Robert Dreyfuss and the Devil's Game is a very good book, and it covers all this kind of stuff.
All right.
Now, so I sent you this morning, I'm not sure if you saw in the email here, the brand new breaking news, it's all the talk on Twitter, Obama nixed CIA plan that could have stopped ISIS in NBC News, and it's about a plan to overthrow Assad, which they don't mention Baghdadi in here.
It was a plan to overthrow Assad back in 2012 that Obama refused to buy into.
I'm not certain where they got the headline.
Well, I'm not sure either.
It's the standard line.
The standard line is that Assad has caused ISIS.
Therefore, if you remove Assad, ISIS will go away.
But if you think about it for a second, that just makes no sense at all.
If they removed Assad in 2012, what would have happened?
It would have been the same thing you had in Libya.
You would have had heavily armed Islamist groups backed by the Gulf states benefiting from hundreds of millions, if not even billions of dollars in military aid rampaging across the country.
Now, Obama is not entirely stupid, and so he sort of realizes what that would have meant.
So therefore, assuming this report is true, that's probably why he responded the way he did.
Well, you know, at the time when, well, as you said, this has kind of been sort of pretty much unbelievable all along.
But then in June of 2014, the Islamic State invaded western Iraq and they conquered.
I mean, they had already really taken over Fallujah, but they conquered Mosul and declared the caliphate.
So at that point, I'm so naive, even after decades of doing this.
At that point, I thought, well, you know, the empire is a pretty big ship, but they're going to have to start to turn it around now.
And of course, that is somewhat true, right?
They started the drone war almost immediately and started, you know, sending more aid to the Iraqi Kurds and Iraqi Shiastan army in order to fight the Islamic State.
So that is kind of true.
But at the same time, on the western front of the very same war, they continue even now, even after the peace deal, they continue to push for regime change against Assad in Damascus.
Now, I know that they can't say, boy, were we wrong.
So we better stop what we were doing.
But they could at least sort of say, well, now things have changed.
So we better stop what we're doing or something.
Right.
And yet they continue to fight Baghdadi's war on the western front of the Islamic State.
Why?
How?
Well, this is the this is this is the question.
First of all, yes, in June 2014, ISIS broke out of their, you know, when it went into Iraq from Syria and the U.S., there were two sort of basic assumptions behind U.S. policy.
Number one is that is that ISIS was really bad in Iraq when it went into Iraq.
But in Syria, ISIS was a useful asset that could be deployed against Assad.
OK, now, officially, they would say, well, the mythical moderates are are great for use against Assad and al-Nusra and ISIS, while they're problematic, but maybe we'll save them till later or something.
But you're saying that their attitude was outright.
Let's use ISIS.
Well, no, it wasn't outright.
It was essentially that I mean, they first of all had a policy of not bombing ISIS when ISIS was in combat with with Assad.
So therefore, that meant turning that around.
That meant that encouraged ISIS to engage in combat with Assad.
So when so when the attack on Palmyra occurred in May 2015, ISIS troops were going across miles and miles of open desert.
They were perfect targets for the U.S. held back because they wanted to see them, you know, engage in combat with Assad's troops.
And this is almost a year after the launch of the air war.
This is after America's already bombing ISIS.
They refrain from bombing them when they're attacking Assad's government.
And then and then cried crocodile tears when the when ISIS took the throat of that 80 something year old antiquities expert Khalid al-Assad.
If you remember that incident was, you know, it was a horrible incident.
And but the Americans were shocked, shocked, shocked.
But no one had the the presence to ask, well, why didn't they use their, you know, use their forces to prevent this takeover to begin with?
Why do they, in effect, encourage it?
But the other but the other assumption operating assumption was that that ISIS entered Syria in June 2014, as you said, in August 2014, Western Iraq, I mean, Western Iraq, I'm sorry.
And then in August 2014, two months later, White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes wrote that ISIS was the lesser threat, because whereas al-Qaeda was focused on attacking Western targets, ISIS was more concerned with establishing its caliphate in the Middle East.
So therefore, ISIS posed no threat to Europe, the United States, et cetera, et cetera.
So the U.S. could continue safely playing with fire.
Well, now, I'm sorry, I just want to analyze that that argument for a moment and get back to the facts in a second.
But if he's saying he could say the same thing about al-Qaeda, right?
Ghulani, Ghulani, the leader of the al-Nusra Front, he still is loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the butcher of New York City.
But Zawahiri has ordered him to focus on Syria and more parochial interests and to call off the attacks against the far enemy for now.
He's not stupid.
He can see we're fighting on his side.
As the email to Hillary Clinton says, look, Zawahiri is on our side in this one, AQ is on our side in this one, boss.
And so really that argument, that Ben Rhodes argument would be even would apply even more easily to the al-Nusra Front.
And since Baghdadi ignores Zawahiri, but still claims Osama bin Laden, it's basically it's the same enemy.
Only the ones who are still loyal to Zawahiri, who was in on the actual 9-11 attack.
They're the ones who are least focused on attacking European targets compared to the Islamic State.
Am I wrong?
Yes.
No, you're totally right.
I mean, the thing is, these are first of all, as I said before, you know, don't get hung up on on labels, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, moderates, etc.
This is all one militant phallicist milieu.
Highly dangerous.
Highly dangerous.
We play with fire.
You get burnt.
OK.
For a while, ISIS was focused on its caliphate in Syria and Iraq.
But now its focus has shifted.
They can certainly shift.
Sometimes ISIS made war against al-Nusra.
Sometimes they collaborated.
Sometimes al-Nusra fought other rebel units.
Sometimes they collaborated.
It's an extremely fluid, shifting milieu, not so much organizational as a milieu.
And these groups, they fight among themselves, but they're also perfectly capable of wreaking havoc in the far abroad, in Western Europe or the U.S.
So the U.S. is playing with fire.
But in general, what it's been doing consistently since 2011 is strengthening, pouring weapons into this Islamist milieu.
And as a consequence, this movement has grown.
It's grown in numbers.
It's grown in militancy.
It's grown in ambition.
This is the madness of what the Obama administration is engaged in.
So they shoot up Paris.
They explode a bomb in Brussels.
Everyone gets very, very, very upset.
But then they go back to business as usual.
And the same thing will happen, I guarantee, in the near future.
This is so crazy.
And this is all just because this is the redirection, right, that Seymour Hersh wrote about in 2007.
Oops.
George W. Bush listened to Richard Perle and Ariel Sharon and got rid of Saddam Hussein for the Ayatollah and strengthened Iran.
So now the consolation prize is to attack all of Iran's other allies in the region since we gave them Baghdad.
Yes.
Ultimately, this goes back to oil.
Ultimately, it goes back to the special relationship with Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states.
I mean, bear in mind, Saudi Arabia is largely a U.S. creation.
It was the U.S. which built up the Saudi oil industry from scratch.
It was the U.S. which made the Saudi royal family what it is.
And it's the U.S., it's its oil money, which has pumped up this Wahhabist religious structure from a local, a purely local phenomenon into a global force, a global ideological force.
So yes, I mean, the Saudis in the U.S. are very, very closely intertwined.
And so therefore, Obama, you know, in this case, it's very hard to tell, you know, in these cases, who's the boss and who's not.
But Obama, after, you know, after officially reaching his nuclear accord with Iran, has spared nothing to appease Saudi anger and concern.
The U.S. is backing Saudi's air war in Yemen.
I mean, no one can figure out why.
Thousands of civilians have been killed, children are maimed and blown apart.
It's horrible.
But the U.S. is backing this war.
And no one, of course, no one's talking about it on the campaign trail.
I mean, even Bernie Sanders is not talking about this.
But, you know, it's just business as usual.
Yeah.
Well, and they even told The New York Times that this is their excuse, I guess.
They don't want to talk about naval bases and strategy and this and that kind of thing.
So they said, well, you know, and they even admit that we knew all along it wouldn't work either as far as putting Hadi back on the so-called, you know, in the presidency there on the throne there.
But you know what?
After the Iran nuclear deal, we had to make the Saudis feel better.
So we agreed to it.
It's easier to kill a few thousand civilians.
It's actually easier than real than than getting down and talking turkey with the Saudis.
And of course, the real joke is we're securing their interests by securing the Iranian civilian nuclear program and double extra verifying it that it's staying civilian.
It's we're protecting them by doing it.
Why we should have to do anything for them except accept their thanks at this point is completely ridiculous.
Well, but bear in mind, first of all, there's some there's some very important things that are going on.
Number one, the Saudi regime is hanging by a thread, a thread.
I mean, oil is now down to thirty six dollars a barrel.
They are busted, busted, B-U-S-T-E-D.
They are they are politically exhausted, religiously exhausted, completely isolated in terms of world opinion.
And they are bankrupt.
And and Iran actually has great economic strength.
It's got a very well-educated, talented population.
So Iran really is the North Korea, of course, is that I get what, three times the population of Saudi Arabia.
So Iran clearly is the coming power on the in the Persian Gulf.
And that scares the hell out of the out of the the the Sunni Arab Gulf states.
Sure.
And of course, there never was a nuclear weapons threat.
So nothing's really changed there.
So that makes sense.
Yeah.
I mean, the ironic thing is that Iran in some ways benefited economically from the years of sanctions because they were unable to sell their oil and therefore were forced to diversify their economy.
So so the Iranian economy in some ways is actually in better shape as a consequence of the of the of the of the sanctions, which kind of imposed a kind of a protectionist policy.
But they've got very strong agriculture, they've got very strong industrial facilities, they've got their their the university system is expanding dramatically.
Women are are very heavily enrolled in higher education.
I mean, I mean, I don't want to put too nice a face on the Iranian regime, which is still a despicable regime.
But nonetheless, though, they look better and better in comparison to their neighbors in the Gulf.
All right.
Now, so to get back to Syria here for a minute, I kind of messed up your train of thought when you're talking about Palmyra.
And you did explain, you quote here in the article again, well, hey, you know, ISIS is focused on parochial interests.
So who's really worried about them?
As Obama said, and this is after this is August 2014.
After the declaration of the caliphate, they went from junior varsity.
No big deal.to, well, sure, they're a caliphate now, but they would never attack Europe.
So or the West.
So we're not too worried about that rough paraphrase here.
And then you explain how then even in in May of 2015, when the Islamic State is marching on Palmyra, and Obama's ordered the Air Force to not attack them as they're engaging against the Syrian regime.
You also write in the article here at the very same time.
And I guess in the in the weeks leading up to this, America was doubling down on support for the so called mythical moderates and their friends in the Al-Nusra Front and giving them tow anti tank missiles, just like Ronald Reagan sold the Ayatollah back in the day for use against Saddam, who he was also backing, but anyway, and that these tow anti tank missiles had the Syrian regime really on the ropes back almost one year ago, May 2015.
And that was why Assad had to basically withdraw his forces from Palmyra, he put up a bit of a fight, but not enough of a fight, that then the media spun it like, oh, there he goes again, giving a city to ISIS because he's secret allies with ISIS, when in fact, it was American support for Al Qaeda that had him too tied down to fight for Palmyra at the time.
Yes, the New York Times coverage of the liberation of Palmyra was just amazing.
They included a paragraph in which they accused, as they said, in May 2015, Syrian army troops that had collapsed ignominiously and fled the city without a fight.
Now, I think that's exaggerated, but they were defeated and they were driven out.
So the point is, the sequence of events is this, on June 30th, 2015, King Abdullah dies, King Salman takes place, Salman is a much more of a hardliner, much more conservative, much less of a conciliator with regard to the West, short of taking the throne, Salman sits down with Erdogan and Turkey and decides to push a rebel offensive in northern Syria, just over the Turkish border.
On March 24th, that is less than two months after the death of Abdullah, large numbers of fighters, al-Nusra, FSA, Free Syrian Army, the pro-US rebel forces, and other assorted groups launch an offensive in which they are armed with large quantities of optically guided TOW missiles, these are high-tech weapons, provided to them, manufactured in the US, sold to the Saudis probably around 2012, as far as we can figure out, and then transferred by the Saudis to these various rebel units, which are operating under the leadership of al-Nusra, as al-Qaeda is known in Syria.
Now that offensive was highly effective, because those weapons are very good, they destroyed a lot of Syrian tanks and other vehicles, they drove the Syrian army out of town, the rebels continued to advance to the point where they began to threaten the government stronghold in Latakia, which is on the Mediterranean coast, and there's a large Alawite population.
So, the Syrian army was stretched thin, they've been in four years of civil war by this point, their forces are depleted, they've taken huge losses, they're hanging by a thread, and yes, then at that moment, ISIS says, hey, great, we'll launch an offensive in the central part of the country.
So, yes, so Syria's performance in that battle was not the best, but you know, that's what happens when you're depleted and bled dry for years and years and years, you're exhausted.
So, that's what happened in Palmyra, but the New York Times chortles and says, oh, their behavior was just disgraceful, how terrible a thought is, it's just turning the truth upside down.
All right, now, I want to ask if you saw this thing in Foreign Policy from the 29th, it's by Thanasis Kambanis, and he talks about in here that they're basically using the current ceasefire to simply rearm, that the Al-Nusra Front and their associates are being supplied by, guess who, the Friends of Syria, which is just the USA, right?
I didn't even know such a group existed anymore.
Is that what they're calling the fencing operation in Turkey now for the guns?
Perhaps, perhaps.
There are all kinds of rumors, but I would not be surprised if they aren't rearming.
I would not be surprised.
I mean, I can't imagine this lull will last very long.
I think it's the same guy, the same guy wrote a thing here, I'm reading it from the Moon of Alabama blog, but he had written another thing at TCF.org here, and they publish him in Foreign Policy, so that means he must be, you know, some kind of credential to say so.
I don't know exactly, but he says in here that the United States, this is a quote, the FSA commander said the United States had been forthcoming during the ceasefire period, replenishing arms stocks and leaving open the possibility that some anti-aircraft missiles might be released into northern Syria, and they're very happy.
One commander, very satisfied, says the U.S. military commanders are always with us.
We ask, and they're very cooperative.
Just great, great, great.
Here we go.
That's marvelous.
I mean, this guy Obama is just, he's just unbelievable.
And as I said, as I said in my article, this is not Donald Trump or Marine Le Pen carrying these policies out.
These are the nice guy centrists, like Obama.
Yeah, and the guy who has said all along that he knows better.
I mean, I've got a clip of him from the spring of 2012 saying, hey, some of these guys are really bad guys.
He told a journalist named Ben Swann, some of these guys are really bad guys and we don't want to give them weapons.
We're only giving non-lethal aid to some very moderate, nice guys, because you're right, Ben Swann, to give a bunch of guns to al Qaeda would be treason, wouldn't it?
The U.S. uses the Saudis to maintain deniability, and the Saudis use the U.S. for political support and backup, and for everywhere from Yemen to Afghanistan to Syria and Bahrain and beyond.
So, you know, so there's this weird partnership going on, but it is really the real dark side of the U.S. empire, where it is in league with this ferocious, benighted, neo-medieval monarchy, and it's going to end in disaster.
Yeah, well, and so the disaster for the Syrian people, but well, maybe for us, too.
I mean, that's the thing, as you mentioned in this article, this news story, and I only believe it because I've been predicting this for years now.
So it's just a matter of confirmation bias in the most extreme kind of fashion.
But maybe it's propaganda.
I don't know.
What do you think about this story that the government put in the Associated Press here, that there are hundreds of ISIS sleeper cell fighters who have been sent to Europe to cause havoc?
We have no idea.
We have no idea.
I mean, that's the very nature of an underground movement, is they're below ground, therefore they're out of sight.
You have no idea whether there are hundreds or there are thousands or there are scores.
We have no idea.
I am pretty confident we're going to see more of these these incidents.
I can't see how we won't.
And I know that every time a bomb goes off, the political center of gravity shifts to the right.
Correct.
And so, you know, it's great for Donald Trump.
It's great for Marine Le Pen.
It's great for the far right elements in Eastern Europe, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, et cetera.
You know, so yeah, so every time a bomb goes off or someone fires, you know, an automatic weapon into a rock concert in Paris, you know, this is that definitive shift, a rise in paranoia, xenophobia, racism, Islamophobia, et cetera, and a definitive shift to the right.
So this is this is being carried out by the center.
It's not being carried out that the center is delivering these countries into the hands of the of the far right.
All right.
So that is Daniel Azar.
He's writing regularly now for Bob Perry's site, Consortium News dot com.
It's really great stuff.
All of it is really great stuff.
This one is called How U.S.
Backed War on Syria Helped ISIS.
Thanks very much for your time, Dan.
Appreciate it.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
All right.
And that's anti-war radio for this morning.
Thanks very much, y'all, for listening.
I'm Scott Wharton here every Sunday morning from 830 to nine on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A.
Find my full interview archive, more than 4000 of them now going back to 2003 at Scott Wharton dot org.
And follow me on Twitter at Scott Wharton Show.
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