05/30/13 – Daniel Larison – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
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And next up is Daniel Larrison.
He writes at the American Conservative Magazine, mostly in blog format.
Welcome back to the show, Daniel.
How are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
I'm doing well.
How are you?
I'm doing real well.
Oh, and I should say, that's TheAmericanConservative.com/Larrison.
Simple enough.
Very good.
So, man, you write a lot of great stuff about Syria and particularly analyzing the Republican Party.
Well, I mean, the whole politics of the situation and the situation in Syria, for that matter.
But the various splits in conservatism and republicanism on the question are of great interest to me as well as you.
And so that's why I like reading your blog so much.
You've got great stuff up here.
And so, first of all, along those lines, I was thinking maybe I could start by saying something nice about Rand Paul.
The best thing anybody ever ghost wrote for him was in CNN.com today.
Did you see that?
I did, yes.
Yeah, and thanks for your comments about the blog.
Yeah, I saw Rand Paul's article.
He had written up an argument against arming Syrian opposition, essentially laying out what I guess you could call the anti-McCain position, refuting almost sort of step-by-step everything that Senator McCain has been saying about why we need to get more deeply involved in Syria.
Senator Paul did, I thought, a very good job in pointing out all of the flaws and the pitfalls with each one of the options that were spelled out, especially in this recent Menendez-Corker legislation that he voted against.
He was the only Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee to vote against it.
All of his other fellow Republicans voted with John McCain on the committee to authorize or to approve funding for arming the Syrian opposition and possibly committing us to more than that down the line.
So yes, Senator Paul has been very good in terms of articulating why sending weapons into an insurgency that's heavily influenced by Islamists and which contains, of course, other jihadist groups that are nominally affiliated with al-Qaeda, whatever that means operationally.
But sending weapons to these groups is a very foolish and short-sighted way to approach the conflict in Syria.
Well, you know, I was just talking with Josh Rogin from the Daily Beast, formerly from Foreign Policy.
I'm sure you're very familiar.
And of course, he's broken all these stories lately on this subject.
So he's doing a lot of reporting to us, basically.
You know, I was trying not to ask him his opinion too much.
But he was, you know, in a way he was representing the conventional wisdom in D.C., I think, because he kept saying things along the lines of, and I'm very roughly paraphrasing so nobody get mad at him or anything, but something along the lines of the question, and he is just a reporter.
He wasn't taking a position, but just the question is coming down to really how long can we go on like this before we do something?
That kind of thing, right?
Like, that's what everyone in D.C. is saying to each other.
Jeez, it just keeps going on.
And nobody seems to have a solution, as he said.
Nobody has a solution that's going to lead to an end of the violence, necessarily.
But just, can you really have this much butchery and murder going on in the world and not get in there?
You know, like, that's just kind of what we do, you know?
Right.
No, I think his read on what the mood in Washington is quite accurate, and unfortunately so, because you do get the feeling that there is this impatience or frustration growing, even among people that are skeptical of the merits of military action, with the way that the administration has been handling it.
Because, and this is, part of this is the administration's fault for being sort of half in and half out of the conflict all along, and making demands of the Syrian government, but not really having any idea of how to realize those goals.
And so that creates, on the one hand, these false expectations of U.S. military action among the Syrian opposition and among those in the U.S. that want that, and it also possibly creates false hope among those of us that want to stay out of Syria, that they aren't going to eventually be dragged in, because it seems, it doesn't seem to derive from any sort of coherent reading of the situation, but very much a sort of reactive policy that is slowly being pulled toward Syria by events that the U.S. isn't in control of.
I think the big problem with this conventional thinking about it is that it assumes that the U.S. must eventually become ensnared in this conflict, when, I mean, there are many conflicts, or there have been many conflicts in the last decade, that were, in fact, far more destructive, far more destabilizing to their local regions, and yet, not only did we not feel compelled to get involved in them, I mean, in some cases, our clients were the ones responsible for the instability.
So I don't, in a sense, I don't buy the idea that it's inevitable, it becomes inevitable because people buy into the idea that we have a responsibility to take control of the situation, and that responsibility simply doesn't exist, in fact, as far as international law is concerned, we have an obligation to remain out of the conflict, unless there is a clear threat to international security and peace, and at this point, the greater threat to international peace is the urge to broaden the war and draw more people into it.
Right, well, okay, first of all, the thing about the mixed signals that Obama's been sending, they are mixed, to the people in D.C., the people on TV are very confused, but of course, the Mujahideen, he keeps giving them reason to hold out for American intervention, that if they keep it up, that eventually we will give them heavy enough weapons to win, because from the very beginning, or I think from the very beginning, or almost the very beginning, Obama has said that American policy is that Bashar al-Assad must step aside.
So I guess now they're kind of taking that back a little bit, but jeez, if you were the Mujahideen and the President of the United States had announced that that was his policy, you might just try to hang on, see what happens, you know?
Sure, yeah, it does create a lot of confusion, and I think because in previous episodes, since the 2011 uprisings started in different Arab countries, I think Obama was to some extent following the script that he had taken in the different cases in North Africa, where he would give a speech and say, so-and-so no longer has legitimacy, he must step aside.
And in two of those three cases, the President was eased out or was forced out without too much upheaval, and in the Libyan case, of course, we did intervene militarily to make that happen.
And so on Obama's side, he was, I'm guessing, he thought that he could do something similar and Assad might be eased out by someone within the regime, and this would not descend into a civil war.
And on the side of the opposition, they were probably expecting a repeat of Libya, even though that was explicitly ruled out many times beforehand.
So there is a lot of confusion that's been created by this insistence on Assad going without trying to make him leave in any real concrete way.
But to my mind, the main error was in declaring that he needs to go, because in fact, real U.S. policy is not full-scale regime change with the entire Ba'athist system being overthrown.
In theory, the U.S. goal is to have some kind of transitional government that brings opposition and pro-regime groups together.
Now, that's not particularly realistic, I think, but that's supposedly what is trying to be achieved in getting rid of Assad.
The problem is that the opposition interprets our position as one of total regime change, of total victory for them, when in fact we don't want them to have a total victory.
And this is why there's a lot of miscommunication or mixed signals being sent back and forth about what kind of aid we're willing to give them, because they think if we're supposed to be helping them overthrow the government, we should be providing them with all possible means to do that.
We don't actually want them to have the ability to do that, in part because some of the members of the opposition are recognized by our government as terrorists and allies of al-Qaeda.
And so, understandably, we don't want them to take power.
So there's a bit of a muddle, which gives me a strong argument for reducing our involvement in the conflict rather than finding new ways to increase it.
Yeah.
Well now, so the people who are for more intervention, like John McCain, have they ever really explained what they expect to happen?
I mean, I guess there's the basic narrative that, well, we'll just have the CIA vet the rebels and decide which ones get our weapons, which is just silly.
We'll do a no-fly zone, which really means, of course, a full-scale bombing zone and carve out a piece of somebody else's country and declare that safe territory, which of course implies that only we can provide their security or else Tripoli, I mean, Damascus has to fall.
Same thing, right?
But do they even have a picture like, yeah, here's what Mujahedin-run Syria is going to look like.
It's going to be great.
Or what?
Do they even have an argument?
I mean, they laugh at Rand Paul when he says, you're voting to fund and to arm al-Qaeda's allies.
You can't escape that fact.
And they say, ha, but they don't explain why they're laughing or what's flawed in his argument.
You know?
I mean, this sounds like the same thing that's, well, not the same thing.
It's keeping Obama from doing much worse, but it's not keeping McCain from complaining all day that he's not doing worse.
So I'm trying to understand why is what I'm getting at here, Daniel.
Sorry.
Well, but, yeah.
In terms of what they expect to be the result of the situation in Syria, let's say five years from now or 10 years from now, I don't think they're thinking anywhere near that far ahead.
Their main concern right now is to get the U.S. to start committing itself to one side in the conflict.
And then once they get that commitment, they will keep pushing and pushing to get more and more escalation until the U.S. is directly involved in the conflict.
And then, presumably, we'll take on some kind of post-war occupation role or probably will be called a peacekeeping role.
But in practice, it's going to mean Americans and allied soldiers being stationed in Syria presumably to try to keep the different communities from killing each other, because that's the underlying problem in Syria, that the communities no longer, or if they ever did, they no longer trust one another.
The war has devolved to such a point in terms of being a sectarian war that even once the current regime is gone, these communities are going to keep fighting each other for quite a while, I would think.
And so we would be in the position of trying to police that or try to keep them apart from one another.
And it would be a very dangerous and, I think, a thankless task where all sides would end up blaming us for whatever happened.
So again, I don't think that they're thinking in terms of what Syria will look like in five or ten years.
Their main concern is to get the U.S. into the conflict, because I believe the overriding concern of most people who are pushing for intervention in Syria is one of delivering a blow to Iranian influence in the region.
And that's all that really matters to them.
As long as Iran and Hezbollah are hurt in the process, Syria can be turned into a wasteland, even more so than is already happening.
And while there is sometimes rhetoric about humanitarian concerns being brought forward in these debates, I think a lot of that is, if not insincere, it's certainly intended to mask what it is that the Syria hawks are mainly concerned with.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm sorry to be all hyperbolic and whatever, but this wouldn't be the first time anybody ever accused John McCain of treason.
But Daniel, isn't it treason?
I mean, the Sunni, Salafist, Takfiri, Bin Ladenite, Mujahideen types, they're the only actual enemies of the American people in the world.
Iran is not our enemy.
They're our government's strategic rival in the region.
They might be Israel's enemy, maybe, but for our government to prioritize checking the so-called Shiite crescent and Hezbollah in Lebanon and whatever, by backing Jandala in Iran, Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon, Jabhat al-Nusra and Friends in Syria, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and Ansar al-Sharia in Libya, it's treason, isn't it?
It's crazy.
I mean, I can't believe that this is the policy right in front of everyone's face and they do it.
These are the guys that knocked down our towers, man.
Well, I think it's extremely foolish, I mean, crazy would not be a bad word to describe it.
I think it's irrational to be doing what, or to be proposing to do what they're proposing.
I don't think that they're, for the most part, with most Syria hawks, I think that they're simply misguided.
They're thinking that by delivering some sort of strategic blow to Iran, that that is somehow making the region better off, or it's somehow making the U.S. more secure.
But the issue for me is that U.S. security is not in danger, or not in significant danger from either faction.
As you say, there are al-Qaeda affiliated groups in the opposition, and if anyone represents a threat to us and our allies, it would be groups like that.
I think it's a matter of extremely short-term thinking and stupidity, really, that's how I would describe it.
Well, it's that hubris, right, and you know what, I can identify a little bit, because if you put me in the emperor's chair, I might feel like I could get away with anything, too.
Scahill, in his book, talks about the wow-wee factor in the White House, when JSOC shot those Somali pirates.
Three shots, three kills, and saved the captain's life back in 2009 or 2010, whichever it was there.
And Obama just felt that lightning at his fingertips, that power, of course he can do anything.
He's the most powerful guy ever.
The same thing that George Bush thought.
Of course I can remake Iraq how I want.
Who could tell me no?
Well, I imagine that having as much power as the president does have at his disposal would cause a vastly inflated sense of what the U.S. can do, and what the president can do, that would actually be effective.
So, yeah, I think Cuba does account for a lot of these ideas that it is up to us to shape or direct the politics of other nations.
We assume that we know how to do this, when clearly, over the last 10 years, we've proven that we don't have a clue, and then we think that simply through the application of power that we can bend other nations or form other nations according to our wishes.
And to the extent that that was ever true in the past, and I don't know that it ever was really true in the past, it required a much more sort of brutal and oppressive sort of regime in dealing with other nations than ones that we're going to be willing to do.
And it's a good thing that we're not willing to do them.
We shouldn't aspire to that kind of control over other nations.
And these sort of half-baked attempts at trying to run the affairs of other nations are equally unwise because they can't possibly succeed, and yet they're going to generate enormous resentment and resistance and reaction against them.
So, I think these attempts to dictate to other countries how their politics should be ordered will keep blowing up in our faces for decades to come, and until we recognize the connection between the threats to us and what we're trying to do in the world, I'm afraid we're just going to keep blundering around and making the same mistakes.
Yeah.
Well, it is really an interesting political dynamic, isn't it, where the polls show, even the Fox polls show, that the American people just don't want a war in Syria, couldn't care less if Syria exploded all at once, really.
And then, but they've got no organized opposition.
They don't really care one way or the other.
That's why they're against intervening there, because they don't really care one way or the other.
And then you've got John McCain on the other side screaming his head off.
And so, I wonder how much pressure does that really amount to on Obama, where the only organized force on this issue is the Bill Kristol camp?
As small as it might be.
I think over time, it gradually is having a pernicious effect on U.S. policy.
It is gradually pressuring the U.S. in a direction that it seems the administration isn't interested in going, or at least it isn't eager to go that way.
And as you say, a lot of the organization and the energy is on the side of the people advocating for that action.
And we know, not just in foreign policy debates, but we know in all sorts of debates that the side that has the most energy and organization and activism will tend to prevail over the more inchoate, disparate opposition to whatever they're proposing.
And so, it does worry me that even though opposition to involvement in Syria runs something like two or three to one in the general public, there is an even greater general indifference to the entire debate out there, so that no one's feeling compelled to lobby their representatives or write to their representatives to urge them to oppose intervention in Syria, because at the moment, it doesn't seem to be in the cards.
And so, no one wants to get out in front and start denouncing a policy that hasn't even been proposed yet, except by a handful of senators.
But it is worrisome, because I see this same sort of gradual creep towards military action that we saw in the Balkans, we saw in Iraq.
In Libya, the timeframe was a bit shorter, but it happened the same way, where an administration that was initially very skeptical and indeed opposed to getting involved ended up leading the way.
And so, it's a very discouraging sense that there isn't more concentrated opposition.
I think Senator Paul is one of the very few members of Congress actively speaking out against any possible involvement.
And so, it's kudos to him, but I wish that there were more people joining him, because first of all, it's clearly a very popular position to be taking, so politicians should be pursuing that.
I would think, out of their own interest.
And it's also in the best interest of the country to stay out of another war.
And so, it wouldn't be simply for their own interests or their own political goals that they should be doing this, but for the good of the country.
Right.
Well, you know, John McCain is really setting you up perfectly, him and Lindsey Graham, over at the American Conservative Magazine, to say, hey, paleo, nothing.
Any plain old conservative knows better than this ridiculous, utopian interventionism.
Leave that to the Hillary Clintons and the Lindsey Grahams of the world, the John McCains of the world.
He always was a rhino, liberal, Republican.
All of us conservatives are unanimous that this is stupid.
Even Henry Kissinger says this is stupid.
So, you know, great time to attack the interventionists from the right and marginalize them as a bunch of liberal sociology professor wannabes that they really are.
Well, I think you're seeing that there is really no enthusiasm among conservatives, even among conservative pundits, who tend to be a bit more hawkish on these things than their readers.
You have a lot of people writing in print in major conservative outlets that they don't think sending weapons to the Syrian opposition is a good idea, because they're concerned about the presence of jihadists in the opposition's ranks, and because they don't see how U.S. security is being advanced by any of this.
And I think it's that focus on what is actually advancing and enhancing American security that is bringing a lot more people on the right together in opposition to any sort of meddling in Syria, because they realize that this is not something that touches on our security and we're gambling with very dangerous outcomes if we try to get involved and try to make things follow according to a certain plan that they have for reordering the Near East.
Yeah, I mean, hey, after all, it's Barack Obama and John Kerry in charge.
Who would trust them?
They're Democrats.
Might as well have Bill Clinton over there reordering Syria.
Well, and in fact, I've seen some foreign policy wonks on the Republican side saying something to that effect, that they don't really have much confidence in Obama's leadership to carry out a military intervention in Syria successfully, so they may as well not even try it.
And if they want to think about it that way, that's fine by me.
I think it is important if the U.S. were to be involved in a war, that there be broad, not just broad support for the mission, but that there be broad confidence in the administration carrying it out.
Otherwise, public support would collapse very quickly and any setback would be immediately politicized to the detriment of, I think, to the detriment of the whole country.
So it's.
It's foolish in these circumstances to even be considering steps that would lead us down that road, and I think.
The the absurdity of what McCain and Graham and others like them are proposing is helping to to defeat them, to defeat their their arguments, even before that they've really been heard.
And now, can I ask you to comment about the role of the Israeli government in the argument, as well as the actual conflict and the Israel lobby in the United States as well, because, you know, everybody knows there's been this clean break plan to go ahead and expedite the chaotic collapse in Syria for a long, long time now.
But then again, everybody also knows that that's stupid.
What are you crazy?
Don't do that.
So and then there have been all kinds of reports back and forth, Daniel, as you know, indicating that Netanyahu's position on this entire thing, what America should be doing, what's happening in Syria is ever changing and shifting and could be anything.
And I just wonder what you make of all that.
Well, from from what I've been able to make out about it, it seems that Israel's main concern is that neither side prevail outright.
They they do.
They don't want advanced weapons to be handed off to Hezbollah.
And they're going as as they demonstrated, they're going to take military action to prevent those transfers from happening.
And so it's been interesting that they lobbied the Russians not to send these anti aircraft missiles to Syria and the Russians actually ignored them, which they had not done in the past when it came to Iran.
And so that that suggests to me that the Israelis may try to to attack those anti aircraft weapons at some point in the future if they believe that those weapons might be used in a way that limits their their ability to strike at targets in Syria and Lebanon.
But beyond that, I don't I don't see a lot of eagerness or interest coming from Israel for the US or anyone else to get involved in the conflict.
I think they would like to see Hezbollah and Iran.
Have all of their attention and resources consumed by the Syrian conflict, which as far as they're concerned, makes both of them less of a problem for Israel.
And and to the extent that that makes conflicts with Iran less likely between Israel and Iran or or between us and Iran, I think that's probably to the good of the the wider region.
And it's certainly good for us.
So for the for the moment, it looks like Israel is content to.
For the most part, stay out of it, except where there's the possibility of weapons being shipped around that they don't want to have in the hands of Hezbollah.
All right.
And that's it.
We're all out of time.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Daniel.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
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