07/15/13 – John Glaser – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, next guest on the show today is John Glazer.
He's the, I don't know what he is.
Hey, John, how are you doing?
I'm very good.
Very good.
What's your job nowadays?
Well, I'm no longer editor at Antiwar, but I continue to be a blogger there and I'm a columnist at the Washington Times.
And we're going to see.
I'm trying to get a new gig.
Right on.
Times are tough.
Yeah, they are.
It's a one year anniversary.
My ass is getting canned from there too, so don't worry about it.
I should blog there too, you know.
I still participate.
I'm an editorial assistant still, just for a sixth of the price, that's all.
Hey, so anyway, it is good, very good to see you on the blog there and to see you in the Washington Times.
And of course, Antiwar.com is running all your stuff that you're writing for the Huffington Post as well and all that.
But this one at the Washington Times, really, man, that's something else, isn't it?
It ain't just the way you wrote it, although you did a good job writing it.
But the subject matter here is just, it's horrible enough to be ridiculous, I think.
In Syria, U.S. arms go to pro-Assad militias and jihadists.
But I guess before we get to that, we ought to start with the biggest Syria story, which is Israel's bombing Syria, or they have been bombing Syria.
Who'd they bomb?
Who'd they bomb?
And how come?
Well, yeah, analyzing Syria's repeated, I mean, sorry, Israel's repeated attacks on Syria, I think it's been four or five times now, is difficult, because Syria's so complicated, it's such a mess, and there are really no clear sides.
There's all these overlapping interests and strange bedfellows and so forth.
I mean, Israel clearly should and probably does prefer Assad to the Sunni jihadists that are trying to topple him, so these bombings can really get kind of confusing.
What has been put forth as a justification is that the bombs targeted Russian-made anti-ship cruise missiles, arguably to eliminate Assad's ability to, say, block or disrupt Western ships that are trying to transport supplies to Syrian rebels, or that's conceivably the strategic justification.
Another, of course, is that it's somehow to weaken Hezbollah, but, you know, however you understand the strategic justifications, or the so-called strategic justifications, what you have to really understand is that these strikes have been preventative.
That is to say, they were not disrupting an immediate threat of attack, which makes them illegal.
It makes them a violation of international law, it's a war crime.
And, you know, Americans typically find this difficult to understand until they are willing to engage in a thought experiment of reversing the roles.
You know, what if Syria bombed Israel for, I don't know, having weapons pointed at Syria, or occupying Golan Heights, for example?
Or what if Iran bombed Israel in retaliation for, you know, hiring MEK terrorists to assassinate Iranian civilian scientists in an attempt to sabotage their legal and non-weaponized nuclear program?
I mean, these are unthinkable, and they wouldn't happen if they did.
Of course, everyone would rally behind Israel to retaliate and condemn against their attackers as, you know, anti-Semites attempting another Holocaust.
So, you know, these Israeli strikes are just not justified.
They're clearly not helping the situation, but Assad's in a situation where, you know, he's on the brink of disaster, he's facing a rebellion, and he can't respond in any way he wouldn't because of Israel's military hegemony in the region, which really far outpaces everyone else.
Yeah.
Well, now, it really is an interesting thing, well, I guess more interesting because I can't come to any real conclusions about it.
I guess sometimes when the Israelis have been, some of the times when the Israelis have bombed Syria, I thought, well, you know, they said they're worried about these missiles, for example, falling into the hands of Hezbollah, but it seemed to me more like they were worried that they would fall into the hands of the rebels.
They want to keep the rebels at shoulder-fired anti-tank missiles, but nothing better than that, basically.
And so once they were getting too close to stores of better weapons, better missiles, that was when the Israelis struck.
But as far as attacking these positions on the coast, I mean, I don't know, this would be a first if the Americans are having the Israelis soften up targets before we get there for us and stuff like that.
I've never heard of them being a useful ally to America before.
I mean, the American empire, not like I approve of the policy, but that would kind of be unprecedented if they were actually doing legwork on an American military mission, right?
Yeah, and it actually wouldn't be surprising to me, however, because Israel can, because of its sort of special, it's a special case, Israel can get away with that, in a sense, and the U.S. couldn't.
If the U.S. launched airstrikes against the Assad regime, it would open up a whole can of worms.
It would be, you know, we'd be pressured to commit and do something like a no-fly zone.
But Israel has been, you know, so quote-unquote mowing the lawn throughout the Middle East for a long time, bombing any country it sees fit and keeping the actual operations secret, so not commenting on it.
Most of the Israeli public doesn't pressure their government to do anything to account for this.
So Israel would be a nice little scapegoat to the United States in a strategic sense to bomb these, you know, anti-ship cruise missiles and then make it easier for the delivery of weapons to these so-called vetted rebels.
But you know, this is part of what I mean by this being such a strange bedfellows in such a complicated situation, because you know, despite what the U.S. says, its weapons that it's delivering both directly and indirectly are getting to jihadist Sunni rebels, the very type that Israel doesn't want to see come to power or gain any influence in the areas bordering Israel or anything like this.
They say they don't want them to, and I believe them, because that would be insane.
I believe them at least to some extent.
But you know, and they're also getting into the hands of, according to the USA Today, you know, pro-Assad Iranian Shiite militias and things.
Well, you know what, at this point, John, I'm sorry to interrupt you, because believe me, I want you to talk all about that.
I think it would be beneficial if you could draw, and again, I know it's very complicated like you were just saying, but if you could draw the lines a little bit about who's on whose side here.
Because I think for people who aren't very familiar with this situation, they'd be quite surprised to find out that America is backing al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Pakistani Taliban and Chechen jihadists, as well as the Syrian members of what we used to call the Sunni-based insurgency in Iraq, the al-Qaeda and Iraqis in Syria.
And then on the other side would be the Shiites that we fought the war for in the last war in Iraq.
And then, of course, Hezbollah being the Shiites from southern Lebanon being on the side of the Baathists, whatever.
You can explain it better than me, but I just figure we've got to try to lay a little bit of groundwork.
As confusing as it all is, that's kind of what's newsworthy here is just how back ass worse this policy is.
That's right.
Okay.
So, I mean, it is complicated.
I'll try to put it in as simple terms as possible.
The Syrian civil war in the U.S. context is largely described as, you know, a terrible humanitarian situation where the government is cracking down hard on what started as a peaceful protest movement and developed into an armed rebellion.
Now, a lot of the hawks in the U.S. choose not to focus on the fact that it's a civil war.
They view it as a one-sided thing, the terrible Assad regime, you know, slaughtering his own people.
One of the problems is that as this armed rebellion has developed, we have domestic Syrian rebels that are, you know, taking up arms against the Assad regime, which is an Alawite regime.
It's a sect of Shiite Muslims, and of course, most of the rebels are Sunni.
And as things progressed, you got rebels or militias, foreign fighters, coming from Iraq, coming from many of the Gulf states.
And so you have this giant mess where there's no centralized opposition, there's no one sort of commanding everything, there's all these disparate factional rebel groups, maybe a thousand, according to some estimates.
And so when hawks like McCain and even John Kerry, who's now Secretary of State, argue for arming the rebels, you know, this is a redux of our sort of freedom fighter policy that we had in Afghanistan.
I was the Soviet, the Mujahideen, and we've done it all throughout Latin America for many decades as well.
They run into issues, because I can't just say, arm the opposition and overthrow the Assad regime and, you know, liberal democracy, yay, yay, yay, because the opposition includes people aligned with Al-Qaeda.
Jabhat al-Nusra is the offshoot of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, who's widely recognized as the most efficient fighting force in Syria's opposition.
And so, you know, Barack Obama had them put on the State Department's list of official terrorist organizations.
So you get into real trouble when you say, arm the opposition.
So the tact that the Obama administration has chosen to take is that they're going to arm vetted rebels, rebels that they have gone through a process of analyzing and saying, no, they are with us, they're secular-minded, they aren't going to commit war crimes, they're not going to not be our friends if they do end up winning and overthrowing Assad.
But, you know, this strategy is a complete mess.
First of all, the so-called vetted rebels are a tiny, tiny minority, and they can't overcome the power of groups like Jabhat al-Nusra.
It's become so sectarian that they really are caught up in a big mess.
And what's more is that, you know, once you start flowing weapons into a chaotic civil war, you have no control of who gets them.
So now we are in a situation where we can't control where the weapons are going.
They could be going on the black market, they could be coming from abroad or countries that we previously sent weapons to years ago.
And so everybody is getting U.S. weapons, and unfortunately this makes us culpable in some respect for the crimes that are committed with those weapons and these nefarious, sort of unscrupulous groups.
I have one suspicion.
I will admit that I'm speculating, but on the whole I do suspect that a strategy makes sense here for the Obama administration.
And it was...it's that they...you know, because the Obama administration has specified that the rebels will only be receiving small arms, so this stops short of anti-tank and anti-aircraft weaponry needed to level the playing field with the Assad regime.
So Obama knows he won't be tipping the balance in favor of the rebels, even if they are these small, tiny, vetted parts of the rebels.
So this merely prolongs the stalemate.
Daniel Dresner, who's a professor of international politics and writes at Foreign Policy, said that the goal all along has been to ensnare Iran and Hezbollah into a protracted, resource-draining civil war with as minimal cost to us as possible.
And other people have said this, too.
Other analyses at various think tanks have said that the U.S. is kind of benefiting from the fact that our allies are...not our allies, our sort of competitors, like Iran and Russia and so forth, are losing credibility and resources in continuing to fund this civil war.
And they're involved just as much as we are.
So I mean, that's as simple as...
I know that's a complicated answer, but that's as simple as I can make it.
It is a giant, giant mess.
And the people that we supposedly don't intend to get these weapons are, in fact, getting them and it's making it an even bigger mess.
Right.
On both sides.
Right.
Yeah.
Now, so it is one kind of hopeful point in there.
Maybe if I can try to twist a silver lining out of all that is, is it possible that the Americans have figured out that this is how al-Qaeda works?
That they bait you into overreacting and bleeding yourself to bankruptcy financially and political capital-wise, too.
And that this is what they did to America, first the Russians, then the Americans, and now they're doing it to the Iranians, who they hate, despite what TV might have conflated.
And so they're bogging them down in a war and they're making...they're turning where Nasrallah just, what, three years ago or four years ago, after the Israeli war of 2006 in southern Lebanon, Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, was the most popular Arab leader, even though he's the head of a minority Shiite group, because, you know, he was the most admired just for earthly reasons, you know.
But now, no more.
Now he's an agent of the hated Iranian ayatollahs and they're propping up of the hated Shiite Baathist regime in Syria.
And so all of that...anyway, it sounds like, in other words, the silver lining is, somebody did something smart and on purpose here, even if it's horrible, right?
Maybe they learned a lesson and now they're too clever by half, trying to promote al-Qaeda again.
Well, what I'm saying is that that's possible.
I know some people who are of the establishment and, you know, think this, about draining the resources of our competitors in Syria, right, and making...prolonging the stalemate for that purpose.
It's a zero-sum game.
We win a little bit.
And then there are other people of the establishment that just say that there's no evidence for it.
And actually, there isn't direct evidence for it.
I'm coming to that conclusion by process of elimination, because every other conceivable rationale for getting involved in this mess, which the Obama administration has said could draw us into a protracted war in the Middle East, has said might blow back on us in unintended consequences and so forth.
So you know, I'm only saying I can't conceive of another justification for getting further involved in this Syrian civil war.
And this is the only one that's cohesive and coherent and makes any sense.
So I mean, I'm coming to that through sort of deduction, but it's certainly a possibility.
Otherwise, our leaders in the Obama administration are real morons, like certifiable idiots, to get into a situation where they know that they can be possibly arming our exact enemies in Al-Qaeda.
So I don't see any other strategic justification.
That's the only one that makes sense.
Yeah.
Well, and now, by the way, the rebels are losing, right?
And pretty badly?
Well, yeah.
The Assad regime still has a pretty serious advantage over the rebels.
The rebels do have small arms and small arms only, almost.
They don't have the anti-tank weapons or anti-missile weapons that would be able to at least a little bit level the playing field.
The Assad regime has gained control over territory in recent months that previously was controlled by the rebels.
And so you've been making gains there.
And I think, you know, a lot of the rebels are going through war fatigue.
They are losing men very quickly, far faster than the Assad regime side.
And so the stalemate is really becoming quite tiresome.
And so, you know, I think the Assad regime is winning out.
But I don't think it's that simple, because I don't think it's just going to end when people go, oh, man, we're sick of fighting.
I think this is going to go on for years.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, they really don't have the force to end it.
And then there's this thing in Foreign Affairs from July the 7th, how Syria's civil war became a holy crusade.
And it's about this guy, Qaradawi, 86-year-old Egyptian cleric living in Qatar.
And he has just, I'm trying to find the date on here.
I think it was very recently that he announced that all good believers in Allah who can, all good fighting age males go to Syria.
So this could be the start of a whole new thing.
Already, I think, 5,000-something foreign fighters are there fighting on the Sunni insurgency side.
And apparently a lot more are coming, which, of course, just means a lot more Hezbollah too and a lot more who knows what.
So it doesn't look like it's going to be calming down anytime soon at all.
No.
What was amazing about that Foreign Affairs piece was that this cleric, who's supposedly very influential, went the full step and said, it is a duty of all Muslims to go and fight on behalf of the Syrian rebels.
And that's a step, sort of a theological step, that not even many clerics took with regard to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s, which, of course, prior to this was the grand experiment in exporting jihadist holy warriors in order to oust some occupier on behalf of all Muslims, right?
Yeah, that and Iraq.
Yeah, yeah.
But this guy went even further.
And so it's quite possible that more and more fighters will continue to flow into Syria.
And the interesting part of that on the geopolitical side of things is that we're allied with the Gulf states, right?
The Saudis and the Qataris, who are very skilled in, as we know from history, in exporting this extremely conservative Wahhabist version of Islam, and won't support for some foreign holy war.
I mean, they did it in Afghanistan, they've done it in the Balkans, they've done it in Africa.
And, you know, this is just incredibly dangerous, and it speaks to the fact that our entangling alliances in the Middle East are getting in a sense of far more trouble than they're worth.
I mean, we're allies of places like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, because they have massive oil underneath their feet.
And so we bribe them with money and weapons in order to submit to U.S. demands on a number of key issues, namely the flow of oil and preventing their populations from having any say over policy, because then it would conflict with U.S. interests.
And you know, U.S. leaders have been fine with that, despite how despicable and horrible it is to support dictatorship.
And now, but now, I mean, these places are just getting us into all this trouble.
They're allied with arguably al-Qaeda-type people who are foreign fighters in Syria, and of course they probably inflate America's feeling of need to bomb Iran for a nuclear weapons program that doesn't exist, because of course the Sunnis in Saudi Arabia hate the Shiites in Iran.
So you know, we have all these entangling alliances throughout the region, and it's making an already complicated situation in Syria far more complicated.
Yeah.
And already, I don't know exactly what the numbers are and how overinflated or underinflated they are, but they're at least in the high tens of thousands at this point, and maybe, I don't know how many refugees.
Do you know a good count on the refugees?
I think it's four million total, including the internally displaced and the externally.
I wonder if that includes all the two million something Iraqis who went home, because now Syria's even worse than Iraq.
Right, yeah.
I don't know specifically the statistics on whether or not that includes them, but you know, Iraq's a whole other discussion.
That place is still a giant mess.
Of course.
And you know what, we don't have time for that, but I bet we could probably work in a little bit here about your recent piece on Bahrain, the tiny little island nation in the Persian Gulf, where America and Saudi Arabia back the minority monarchy there.
You wrote a great piece about that.
I think it was on the anti-war blog recently, right?
Yeah, it was in Viewpoints, and I wrote it at the Huffington Post, yeah.
You know, that's the usual story.
It was really a review of what everyone knows.
The Obama administration continues, as it's condemning the Assad regime, although not it seems trying to oust it, it continues to support the Bahraini regime, which is brutalizing its own people, because they won't just sit back and accept totalitarianism.
You know, people aren't in Bahrain, the Shiite majority, tiny little island in the Persian Gulf, which again is really important for U.S. grand strategy, because we based our Navy's fifth fleet there, and we bribed the regime in order to allow us to patrol the Persian Gulf in the flow of oil with warships and so forth.
So it's really important to the United States that this brutal totalitarian regime, which is cracking down on press freedoms and torturing people and beating them in the streets and shooting tear gas canisters into people's homes and so forth, it's really important that they stay in power, according to Washington.
And you know, the point of the article was just to say, you know, if Obama were even the least bit honest broker that his supporters make him out to be, he would admit what he's doing in Bahrain to the American people, but he's not.
And by using the usual type of propaganda, you know, that's really no more sophisticated than the crap that came out of Bush's mouth.
You know, we support human rights and democracy, and we're the greatest force for good in the world, but you know, that evidence is belied by virtually every country that we have a relationship with, including Syria, including Iraq, all the Gulf states, and Bahrain in particular.
I forget if it was George Stephanopoulos or David Gregory.
He was honestly confused.
He was not being provocative.
He was honestly just, huh, I don't know anything.
And so he said, well, I don't get the difference of how come we're fighting a war against Qaddafi, but we're backing the king in Bahrain to, I believe it was Admiral Dennis Blair who said, who was the head of national intelligence director at the time, and he said, oh, well, that's because Bahrain is our ally.
So that was it.
Yeah.
It's interesting when, like, you have a 12-year-old understanding of the world, and suddenly things are as clear as they should be.
Like, David Gregory doesn't know anything about geopolitics, and so he was struck by this apparent contradiction, but he hit it right on the nail, hit the nail right on the head.
If he knew a little more, as in if he was a little more indoctrinated by state doctrine and propaganda, he would have been, he would have known the answer.
Of course, Bahrain, it's our ally.
We have to support dictatorship there.
It's not a contradiction.
Right.
And then he wouldn't have asked the question, right?
He would have known better than to bring it up.
That's right.
And you know what?
I don't know every single thing about that revolution as it broke out and exactly how it was, but it sure seemed at first that the people protesting in the Pearl Roundabout there, their version of the Tahrir Square, that they were asking for the ability to participate in power somewhat, to have some sort of law for how their trials are to be carried out.
They were not, I don't believe anyway, and I don't want to play down any of the hardcore revolutionaries, what they're really about or whatever, but I don't think they were even trying to overthrow the king, really.
They were trying to...
No, in fact, they're still not.
Many of the protest movement's leaders are still not saying, let's overthrow this regime.
They're saying the monarchy needs to have less control in politics and we need to have free and fair elections and a parliament that actually represents the demographic makeup of the country.
And that's why the regime changed and that's why they're being tortured.
Right.
Right.
And because America needs to have their ships based there.
Right.
But in the beginning, they were asking for very minor things as compared to that.
All right, well, listen, man, I really appreciate your time on the show today, John.
I'm really glad that you're writing all over the place at the Washington Times, at the Huffington Post, and at Antiwar.com there in the viewpoints and on the blog at Antiwar.com/blog.
Always good to read you and always good to have you.
Thanks again.
OK, Scott, thanks.
All right, that's John Glaser, Antiwar.com/blog and then also at the Washington Times and in the Huffington Post and then the latest one at the Washington Times.
You've got to read this.
You'll be like, no, come on.
But yeah, of course.
In Syria, U.S. arms go to pro-Assad militias and jihadists.
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