06/21/16 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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Now, I'm certain it's well over 200 of those interviews now are with our good friend Gareth Porter more than anyone else.
My very favorite reporter.
Gareth writes for Truthout and Middle East Eye most often nowadays.
He's the author of the book Manufactured Crisis, the truth about Iran's, the truth behind the Iranian nuclear scare, which is the book on the Iranian nuclear program, debunking every lie you ever heard about it and then some.
And well, he's the best.
Welcome back.
How are you doing, Gareth?
I'm doing fine.
Thanks, Scott.
Good to talk to you again.
Very happy to have you here.
Very important piece you got here in truthout.org.
And, you know, for people who are new to the subject, even people who are kind of experienced in the subject, I'll ask you to bear with us.
We got to get down in the weeds a little bit here to understand this.
The Syrian so-called civil war is one hell of a complicated mess.
But Gareth is really breaking it down for us here.
The article is called Why the Obama administration is favoring al-Qaeda's main Syrian ally.
Well, Gareth, why?
Yeah, to reduce it to a sentence, I would say the reason is that the Obama administration is unwilling to essentially risk any of its regional alliances, that is with Turkey, Qatar, or Saudi Arabia, in order to support the Syrian ceasefire, the partial ceasefire that the U.S. agreed to with Russia.
That's a kind of complicated statement in itself.
And of course, it raises many questions as to why that is true.
But essentially, the United States is favoring, in the sense of coddling, I think that's another bit, perhaps a better word would be coddling, this group called Ahrar al-Sham, which is al-Qaeda in Syria, that is al-Nusra Front's main ally, its closest jihadist, not jihadist, but Islamist ally in the Syrian civil war, and the largest fighting force, in fact, in the field of trying to bring down the Assad regime.
So what objectively is happening is the United States is enabling the Ahrar al-Sham to continue to fight with the al-Qaeda Syrian franchise, al-Nusra Front, to try to bring down the Assad regime, instead of blowing the whistle on them and saying, well, you know, you violated the ceasefire with the al-Nusra Front, and you shouldn't be protected by being considered within the ceasefire now, you should be a legitimate target.
It's a political position, which may or may not directly affect what happens on the battlefield, but it's a very revealing piece of administration policy.
Yeah.
Man, it's killing me now, I'm trying to remember who to give credit for this, but I saw someone had linked to, well, I think Moon of Alabama had found it, but it was Jane's Defense Weekly, talked about all the weapons that America, that the CIA has been funneling to their partner groups during this so-called cessation of hostilities here, and that basically, they just cynically used it as an opportunity to rearm and never really treated it as a cessation of hostilities, as an opportunity to achieve peace at all.
Well, of course, that's absolutely right.
I mean, it's clear that even if there was a temporary pause in the supplying of the opposition forces in Syria, it was very quickly superseded by a new shipment of arms, which, of course, is a routine affair in Syria, that the arms are constantly shuttled across the border from Turkey to the opposition groups, including Ahrar al-Sham, and then this is why Ahrar al-Sham is one of the reasons Ahrar al-Sham is so crucial in this situation.
As I pointed out in the article, one of the ways in which Ahrar al-Sham has been most useful to al-Nusra Front, the al-Qaeda franchise there in Syria, is that they get arms from Turkey, as well as, I think, from some of the other outside players in this fight, and they turn some of them over to al-Nusra Front.
I mean, this is a pretty well-established fact, which I cite in the article.
So, Ahrar al-Sham is useful not just politically, but actually militarily and in terms of logistics to al-Nusra Front.
It's a crucial factor in its ability to continue the war.
Well, and people should know, too, that, Garrett, it's not just oppositionists like us who always have a bone to pick with whatever American policy, but people like Thomas Jocelyn and Bill Roggio and some of these guys, the Long War Journal and Blogs of War and other of these places, they've been very critical of this, too, saying, look, everybody, we're putting tow missiles in the hands of al-Nusra, or at least here's an Ahrar al-Sham guy and here's an al-Nusra guy standing right next to them while they're firing tow missiles at the Assad government, if that's how you want to try to differentiate them.
But they fight together, and we're basically treating, at least in a de facto kind of sense, we are treating Ahrar al-Sham the same way al-Nusra is, as sort of go-betweens, the fencing operation for funneling weapons to the most effective jihadists on the battlefield, the Nusra Front.
Well, I mean, that has to be viewed as the underlying reality here.
And I have to assume, as you do, that the Obama administration knows perfectly well this is going on.
It's no secret that, as I said, Ahrar al-Sham has been turning over some portion of the weapons that have been going to Ahrar al-Sham directly from the Turks.
And as I point out in the article, Ahrar al-Sham has become what one expert in Washington, D.C., Faisal Laitani, calls a Turkish project.
In other words, Ahrar al-Sham is the chosen vehicle for Turkey to intervene in the Syrian civil war.
And a portion of the weapons that go into Ahrar al-Sham from Turkey across the border are being given routinely to al-Nusra Front.
And that has to be well known in Washington, D.C.
So you have to assume that the Obama administration knows this and is perfectly prepared to have that continue.
All right.
Well, now, so what exactly makes this group not al-Qaeda if they were founded by friends of Osama in the first place, as you point out in the article here?
They fight side by side with the al-Nusra Front for the last five years in a way where it's really hard to tell them apart a lot of the time.
I don't know.
I guess their exact chain of command has not sworn loyalty to Ayman al-Zawahiri as Ghulani or Jilani, the the Nusra Front leader has, I guess.
But what differentiates them really beyond that?
I mean, it sounds like wasn't that in the Osama bin Laden documents that, you know, we really need to change the name from al-Qaeda because Zarqawi made us look so bad.
So let's come up with some new names for the same project.
Isn't that what this is?
First of all, you're correct that the evidence available and open sources is that Arar al-Sham is not loyal to al-Qaeda.
It is very independent of al-Qaeda itself, although some of the founding members of Arar al-Sham did in fact have ties with personal ties with Osama bin Laden that would be going back to the Afghanistan conflict.
But I think the crucial differences between them, I don't want to say crucial in the sense of being dispositive on the issue that we're discussing now, but the main difference, I should say, between them is that Arar al-Sham is not favorable toward the idea of global jihadism.
It is not interested in or supportive of sending jihadist fighters abroad to Europe or the United States to try to blow things up or cause massive civilian casualties.
Well, that's still consistent with Ayman al-Zawahiri's instructions as of the last few years, right?
Focus on Syria, we're ahead there.
And don't piss off the Americans, they're helping us.
Well, I mean, you know, you could argue that there has been a shift in al-Qaeda strategy.
That's true.
But at the same time, it's not clear that they've given up a long-term strategy of attacking the United States and Europe either.
I think that, on the contrary, there are still indications that that is part of their strategy, that they haven't abandoned that.
So when you say they're Islamists, but they're not jihadists, that's, and this is basically Western lingo, but the point being, that's the difference is they have much more parochial concerns.
That is the fundamental difference.
They murder civilians for being of the wrong religion and that kind of thing, just like al-Nusra, though.
I mean, they're brutal.
I mean, they share al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda's hatred of the Alawites in Syria, as well as other religious groups, particularly the Alawites, considering them to be less than human, in a sense, and therefore perfect targets for terrorist operations.
And from that point of view, they are in fundamental agreement with al-Nusra Front in regard to the way in which they operate.
Now, there are differences in the sense that Arar al-Sham has criticized some of the ways in which al-Nusra Front has operated in the territory or in the areas where they have taken control.
I mean, they've carried out extreme policies of applying Sharia law in those areas.
And apparently, and this is based on some of the expert analysis of Arar al-Sham's policies, they have been critical of al-Nusra Front in that regard, and they have, at least in some ways, tried to restrain them.
So there's that additional difference between them.
But fundamentally, they agree on the objective in Syria, which is to overthrow, not just to force Bashar al-Assad to resign, but to overthrow all of the institutions of this regime and replace it with a hardline Islamist Sharia law regime, and a harsh regime.
That no matter how you look at it, it's going to force non-Sunni Islamist populations in Syria to toe the line in the case of Christians and others.
But in the case of the Druze, for example, and the Alawites, they are toast.
They are subject to policies which can be fairly characterized as genocidal.
Well, and of course, you know, that's the thing, Gareth, is, you know, the State Department report, for example, calling for war there, as the New York Times points out, they don't even contemplate, they don't even bring up in order to dismiss the possibility that if America bombs the Assad regime, that it might fall and then what might happen.
And, you know, they always would try to, I guess, in media, they try to spin this as, you know, any opposition to war against Assad amounts to support for Assad.
But if that's the game they want to play, then therefore the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda killing every last Alawite man, woman, and child, which is what we all know will happen if the regime falls, right?
This isn't a war of secession where the Sunnis of the East are trying to declare independence from Damascus.
They're trying to take Damascus and the whole country.
And that includes how many millions of Christians and Alawites, Druze and Shia, as well as Sunnis who so far have stayed more loyal to the regime.
Well, this, of course, you're pointing directly to the fundamental dysfunctionality of U.S. policy.
And this is a point that I've made, I think, a number of times on your show, that the Obama administration has never really been committed to a complete overthrow of the regime in Damascus.
I mean, they have in various ways made it clear, although this is not a part of their everyday statements on the Syrian conflict, that they want to maintain the regime structure in place because they understand precisely the point that you're making, that it would be a horror if, in fact, that regime were to be overthrown by the opposition forces, meaning primarily al-Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham, who constitute the vast majority of the effective military power that is being brought to bear against the regime.
But nevertheless, the Obama administration has pursued policies which certainly risk that outcome.
And that's why I'm saying that this is the most outstanding example of a totally dysfunctional policy that I can think of in my memory, in a government that is carrying out policies which are in danger of doing precisely what it says it wants to avoid.
Yeah.
Well, so what do you make of these stories about, as Nancy Yousef reported in The Daily Beast, where the DOD has just had it with the CIA right now and their support for the so-called moderates in this war, when they're saying, man, we should be not fighting Assad.
We should be focusing on fighting the Islamic State.
And the CIA is accusing them of regurgitating Russian propaganda, Gareth.
Right, right.
You've pointed to a very, very important and very interesting phenomenon, which is the degree to which two major agencies involved in the national security state in Syria are at odds with one another.
And that mirrors their fundamental bureaucratic interests.
The CIA has a bureaucratic interest in upping the ante in Syria in support of the non-jihadist armed opposition groups, because it's their program.
I mean, they want to have their program grow like every good bureaucracy in history.
They want it to grow.
The Department of Defense, on the other hand, is not involved in the war against Assad.
They don't have any dog in that fight.
Their fight is against ISIS.
And against ISIS, I mean, you know, the Assad regime is an ally, not an enemy.
So, of course, they think it's crazy for the United States to risk weakening and potentially the collapse of the Assad regime.
So they are definitely fundamentally at odds with one another.
I'm not saying this is the first time it's ever happened, but it may be, you know, it's possible that this is the sharpest conflict in bureaucratic interests in a foreign conflict that I can think of between two major U.S. national security outfits.
OK, but then here's even the third spoke on that.
Out of the CIA and the DOD, who's closer to the Bata Brigade?
I guess the DOD is closer to the Bata Brigade in Iraq, which is also fighting in Syria with Hezbollah and Assad and Russia against the CIA's bin Laden nights.
That would be I think that would be true.
Absolutely.
Unreal, man.
You know, I don't know.
I guess I was going to say no one could have predicted this, but then I thought of Patrick Coburn.
Yeah, OK.
Yeah, it is something that you could see coming if you were if you were following the way things were shaping up over the last couple of years.
And of course, some of the stories that I've written and others have written about DOD's opposition to the Obama administration's tendency toward not just tendency toward, but but open support for those forces that are trying to overthrow the Assad regime.
All right, Gary.
So at this point in the conflict, when to get back to the cessation of hostilities and all that, it was, I guess, if I understand it right, the Americans really were supposed to somehow lean on Arar al-Sham and get them to separate themselves away from the Al-Nusra Front.
But they didn't do that.
And that's why they're always complaining that the Russians are bombing our guys is because our guys are still hanging out with the Al-Nusra Front, which is, again, al-Qaeda in Syria, still loyal to Zawahiri, the butcher in New York City.
And the Russians are saying, hey, listen, Nusra was never part of the deal.
We get to bomb Nusra.
And if you can't get your guys away from Nusra, tough.
Is that basically what's going on now?
Well, there's a big distinction here which needs to be made, and that is that Arar al-Sham has a somewhat different status or has had a different status under the ceasefire than the U.S.-supported armed opposition groups.
The latter, the U.S.-armed opposition groups, have, in fact, been considered in theory to be within the ceasefire, assuming that in each case they formally associated themselves with the ceasefire.
And I haven't found any documentary evidence about precisely how this was done or which groups, in fact, did that.
But that's the theory underlying U.S. policy, that these groups that the U.S. has been supporting did, in fact, associate themselves with the ceasefire, and they achieved a certain status by doing so.
Arar al-Sham, on the other hand, has been sort of in and out.
They had a very vague, unclear status in the sense that they showed up at the first meeting of the armed opposition groups or the opposition groups and seemed to be willing to participate in it, but then denounced the whole shebang and walked away.
Now I'm told that they have been showing up unofficially, just hanging around, and they're involved, but they still have not associated themselves with the political talks.
And they have sought to be part of the ceasefire.
But again, as you've indicated, they have openly violated the ceasefire with al-Nusra Front.
The difference between them is that the Russians specifically approached the United States in April and said, Arar al-Sham has openly violated the ceasefire.
Let's make it clear that they now stand outside the ceasefire like al-Nusra Front.
And the Russians have not been willing to say the same thing about the other armed opposition groups, for reasons which we can get into, but it's more complicated.
But on Arar al-Sham, the Russians definitely wanted the United States, they approached the United States in April and wanted them to name Arar al-Sham as being outside the ceasefire and therefore a legitimate target.
The US publicly rejected that, said that that would not be a good idea for the purpose of trying to get a political settlement.
That was the main reason it was given for refusing to do that.
So in other words, this is a special case, apart from the rest of the armed opposition groups, in which there was a formal transaction here with the Russians and the United States.
And the result was that the US essentially publicly coddled the Arar al-Sham and said, oh, no, we don't want them to be outside the ceasefire.
We want them to be protected by the ceasefire.
All right.
Now, so just to, I guess, back up to the bigger picture for a second here.
I still sort of can't get over the fact that we're now having this conversation two years after the fall of Mosul and the declaration of the caliphate by, you know, basically Osama himself up there on the balcony declaring himself the dictator.
And we're still talking about support for.
And, you know, look, it's a big empire.
It takes a while to turn the aircraft carrier of state around.
I understand that, Gareth, but but dang, man, we're such a realist, Scott.
Yeah, you know, but the Pentagon, as we talked about, is saying, hey, can we please stop backing jihadists against Assad now?
And that argument still hasn't carried the day after two years of this.
And I sort of feel like I'm in a Twilight Zone episode where and we all know we talked about this five years ago, Gareth, that all Obama had to do was say, now, listen, we don't like Assad, but we hate Al-Qaeda.
And so, you know, Saudi, Qatar, Turkey, we're not doing this, dude.
This as long as this guy shaves his chin in the morning, we are not doing a damn thing to undermine his authority here and breathe new life into Al-Qaeda in Iraq, et cetera, et cetera.
He didn't do that.
He's gone along with it.
He called it pure fantasy that his plan could work.
And then he kept doing it anyway this whole time.
And as you said, he's not really trying to overthrow Assad, but just keep the war going and going.
But how come they can't just say, look, let's back off Assad, CIA, back off the Syrian state until at least the Islamic State is defeated and then see what happens or something.
It all just seems crazy to me.
Well, in a sense, I mean, you have two major contenders here that are jihadists, the ISIS on one hand and Al-Nusra Front on the other.
Which one is the biggest threat is an open question.
I mean, in some ways, Al-Nusra Front, because it has achieved a status within the opposition to Assad, has a greater potential for seizing power than ISIS does.
And this is not a point that has been widely discussed, but it is relevant to understanding the implications of U.S. policy, for sure.
I mean, we are at war with ISIS and there has been some degree of weakening it or certainly pushing it back from its maximum degree of territorial control.
But Al-Nusra Front is not at this point at all being pushed by U.S. policy toward becoming weaker.
I mean, it's exactly the opposite.
U.S. policy is enabling Al-Nusra Front.
So this is an extraordinary situation.
And you are, I think, correct that it's like an episode out of a fantasy series, because it's so unreal.
It's such a strange and irrational situation.
And it all has to do, as you correctly indicated, with our regional alliances.
The fundamental problem with U.S. policy in the Middle East starts with regional alliances with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.
All three countries are crucial to the United States because they dispose of military bases, first of all, most important of all, military bases that the United States wants to keep.
Bahrain, of course, is controlled by the Saudis more or less completely.
The Qatar is the home for the key logistical ground base in the Middle East, as well as an important air base.
And, of course, Turkey has Incirlik Air Base, which is now being used against ISIS.
So these are all crucial bureaucratic interests of the U.S. military and very strong interests of the entire globalist contingent in U.S. society, the contingent that is bent on global power.
And I think that is what this is all about.
The bottom line is that the Obama administration, Obama himself, is not ready to cross that line and jeopardize any regional alliance, despite the fact that he may be critical of them and understands that they are costly to U.S. interests.
Yeah.
I wonder sometimes, Gareth, whether I don't do a good enough job of playing devil's advocate and trying to force you to grapple with the other narrative.
I mean, I know you do your best anyway, but I should do better at trying to make you.
So, for example, as best I understand it, the Michelle Flournoy line here, the Hillary Clinton line is the root of all evil, of course, is Assad.
And if he wasn't such a butcher killing people all the time, then there wouldn't be a war against him to try to overthrow him.
It's his fault for being you know, totalitarian, fascist dictator.
And, you know, unfortunately, since America has refused to lead, al-Zawahiri's men and then the break off group from there have come to the fore and have dominated the rebellion.
But this could have been a very moderate rebellion all along if only Obama had listened to Hillary and Panetta and Petraeus and gone in there and built up this moderate force.
And then, you know, even on the new State Department report, they're saying, look, Assad isn't just bombing Arar al-Shaman on Nusra.
He's bombing human beings to death with these dumb bombs, these barrel bombs he drops on the neighborhoods where the bad guys have support.
So he is just making the crisis worse and worse.
And if only America would just bomb him and give him a taste of his own medicine for a minute, then maybe he would chill out and start abiding by the deal.
And then maybe we could get somewhere with the peace process.
And and so, I mean, I know you disagree with that, but I'd just like for you to get to some of the specifics there about why that doesn't sound right to you.
Sure.
And I thank you for taking on the role of, you know, really asking me to explain why I differ and in what ways I differ with that.
You know, in fact, you know, I'm no fan of the Assad regime.
It's certainly not my favorite regime in the Middle East.
Actually, I can't even think of what my favorite regime is in the Middle East.
In fact, I can't even think of any regime that I could possibly consider a favorite and under any circumstances.
But look, I mean, I think that Assad is nearly as bad as the United States.
And if he were more powerful, he could be as bad as the United States.
The only difference between them is that he does not dispose of the degree of military power that the United States has.
And, you know, look, I'm a child of the Vietnam War.
And I remember, you know, the use of air power in ways that make the Assad regime look like child's play.
So, I mean, that that is perhaps the perspective that I bring to this conflict, given my age and experience.
That's part of it.
And the other thing on which I would, you know, I would push back to the Michel Flournoy line, if you will, is that the responsibility for civilian deaths in Syria, which is certainly a serious issue by any reckoning, is not one that is held by Assad alone.
The opposition to Assad, you know, intervened very early in the conflict from abroad.
You know, thousands and then tens of thousands of foreign jihadists entered the country in 2011, 2012, and began to carry out terrorist actions, blowing up targets in Damascus and elsewhere.
And they did provoke a great deal of this violence without any question.
This is not a situation such as we had in Vietnam, where the opposition, the armed opposition in Vietnam, was very wary about getting involved in a war and tried to keep it from getting to that point.
I'm talking about the North Vietnamese regime and its minions in South Vietnam.
So again, I mean, I can't help but think about the differences between Vietnam, which was the worst war in terms of civilian casualties in my memory, and Syria.
And if you look at the civilian casualty figures in Syria, they pale in comparison to civilian casualties, not just in terms of total numbers, but the percentages are much higher in Vietnam, from the best analysis that I've been able to find of this issue.
And again, large numbers, I mean, huge percentage of the total casualties are the troops of the regime.
And they have suffered the greatest number of casualties, if you break it down, in Syria, of all.
So these are all things that I think it's more complicated than Michelle Flournoy would lead us to believe.
It does not add up to a case for adding U.S. military power to the mix.
Well, I'm with you there, although I'm not certain that the audience will buy that, hey, less bad than Nixon or Johnson means much.
I mean, compared to the Iraq War, for example, Assad is as bad as George W. Bush, which is as bad as Saddam Hussein, which is pretty damned bad.
That's pretty bad.
I agree.
That's terrible.
So they're saying, look, if this guy wasn't such a murderer, everybody wouldn't be trying to kill him back.
Yeah, I mean, if there was no dissent in Syrian society, if everyone was happy with the regime, we'd not have a war.
I agree with that.
And that means that it's not a regime that one would like to be associated with if you are independent and have the opportunity to have an independent view.
But that is very far from a support for the argument that is being made by people like Michelle Flournoy.
Well, it's almost like the clause in the Constitution that says that the national government must guarantee a Republican form of government to every state in the union applies to the whole wide world wherever.
I mean, not that they seek a Republican form of government, but just that it's their choice and that if any regime is in power, the default is regime change.
And if they were in, if America refuses to regime change, then that's, you know, withholding the typical state of things, you know, and refusing to do.
Why won't Obama do the regime change when the state of war is the permanent default and peace would be the exception?
That's right.
You, I think, hit the nail on the head that since the end of the Cold War, regime change has become such a convenient policy for the Pentagon and for the CIA and for the national security state that it is almost, it's close to being the new normal.
And that the centrist position in U.S. politics and in national security policy is that you support regime change unless there is absolutely no way that an argument could be made in favor of it.
Yeah.
Tough.
All right.
Thanks very much, Gareth.
I sure appreciate when you come on my show.
My pleasure.
Thanks again, Scott.
All right, y'all.
That's the great Gareth Porter.
He's writing here at Truthout, why the Obama administration is favoring al-Qaeda's main Syrian ally.
Read it and weep.
Truthout.org.
And check out his great book, Manufactured Crisis, The Truth Behind the Iran Nuclear Scare.
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