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Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America and by God we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we're killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right you guys, Scott Horton Show and introducing our friend Gareth Porter, investigative historian and journalist and author of Manufactured Crisis, The Truth Behind the Iran Nuclear Scare.
He's got a couple here in the American Conservative Magazine now, which I bet you think is kind of ironic, don't you Gareth?
Only to the uninitiated I would say.
There you go.
Hey, first things first, man.
How America armed terrorists in Syria.
As a lot of different random people on Twitter observed, hey, this is actually really the best telling of this, at least in article form, that we've seen as far as going step by step through how we know everything that we know about how the CIA armed the Jihad in Syria over the last six years here.
And then the very latest is how CIA and allies trapped Obama in the Syrian arms debacle.
And I know you don't mean to acquit Obama of his own personal responsibility here.
But then again, he is just a figurehead, as they say.
So yeah, let's talk about just who's who here.
And I guess let me set up the question just a little bit.
After Iraq War II, well, first of all, after September 11, but especially after Iraq War II, it seems like anyone in national security who cared about America's national security interests in any way would have one overriding objective.
And that would be to make sure that the al-Qaeda veterans of Iraq War II, wherever they were going home, somebody was arresting them or something.
So we didn't have the same problem that happened after the war in Afghanistan, where all these jihadis ended up becoming al-Qaeda in the first place.
And yet somehow America in the Obama years, really right at the time that they were killing Osama, they were taking the side of his men in Libya and in Syria.
And so that's a pretty big question.
How in the world could it be that a policy of so-called responsibility to protect or so-called responsibility to do anything but keep al-Qaeda down overrode the interest in keeping al-Qaeda down, especially the al-Qaeda too.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq and their veterans after Iraq War II there at the start of the Arab Spring.
Gareth, so tell them.
Tell me.
Yeah, well, absolutely.
This is the way to frame this entire episode, the entire issue.
And it's the issue that is being systematically avoided in sort of commercial news media coverage of all of these issues.
But it is indeed the theme that runs through so much of post 9-11 history of U.S. national security policy.
So there are in fact two issues that are so closely intertwined that I have to talk about them together.
One is the answer to your question.
How can it be that the U.S. national security state did in fact end up doing exactly the opposite of what it was pledged to do by the Bush administration in the wake of 9-11, which was to make winding up, closing down the al-Qaeda organization in the Middle East and worldwide to the maximum extent possible.
And instead basically aid and abet in a number of ways the ability of al-Qaeda to not just to continue to exist but to become stronger.
And at the same time, I think there is the issue here that you alluded to in the introduction and others who've commented on Twitter, at least on my latest article, have raised.
And that is, what about President Obama's role himself?
How can I avoid basically saying that Obama was responsible for this?
And you're right.
I'm not acquitting Obama at all.
I'm clear that, or maybe I should say I meant to be clear.
If I wasn't clear, then it was not intentional that Obama is indeed responsible for the decision that was made by his administration to go ahead with the policy of, first of all, providing covert CIA logistical assistance to the Sunni allies to carry out the arming of the opposition to Assad.
And then later in 2013, actually beginning a program of basically arming the opposition through selected groups to provide arms to selected groups that the CIA would pick and would then help train and provide the arms.
So, yes, these were his decisions.
But the point I'm making in my article is that he was initially resistant in both 2011 and then 2013 to the position that was being taken by the CIA, by Hillary Clinton in 2011, by John Kerry in 2013, to go ahead with such a program.
He was holding out.
He was taking actions, which I chronicle in my piece.
If anything, that just makes him more guilty.
Right.
What you're saying is he was completely aware and self-aware about what was going on in the role he was playing and did it anyway.
In fact, to rewind it a little bit, I mean, George Bush clearly exploited the anti-terrorism mandate to get away with bait and switch and conflate Saddam Hussein and attack Iraq.
However, and this isn't to acquit him either, but turning all of Western Iraq into Zarqawi land was not his plan.
It was just the effect.
It was oops.
It was, as Michael Sawyer put it, an unexpected, but hoped for, but unexpected gift to Osama bin Laden to do this.
And it was a big accident.
It was part of the consequences of doing that war.
But here in the case of Libya and in Syria, Obama has no such George Bush stupidity deniability to hide behind.
He knew exactly what he was doing from the very beginning.
Absolutely.
That is precisely the point that I perhaps should have sort of punctuated and emphasized in my piece more than I did.
But certainly that was my intention, to show that Obama understood the potential, not just the potential, the likely terrible negative consequences of the policy that was being urged on him in 2011 by his national security advisors.
And then again in 2013, the same thing.
And I document the fact that he did push back and said, hey, this would get us involved in another situation such as Afghanistan, where we sponsored the jihadists, we sponsored the Mujahideen there.
And the blowback, of course, came back in many ways ever since.
So he knew and he was resisting, but he gave in.
And I argue that he gave in for political reasons.
He didn't want to be blamed.
And now I'm specifically talking about 2013.
He did not want to be blamed for what he was being set up, or at least they made the suggestion that he would stand to be blamed for the loss of the entire war against Assad.
So he was not willing to stand up and take the consequences and explain why he was doing it clearly.
And for that, he deserves the opprobrium that I think you understand is due and many others understand is due.
But unfortunately, the public doesn't understand at all.
All right.
So then back to the original question, how could it be that any one in his cabinet or anyone in their departments would have chosen to attack Assad?
I mean, to rewind it to 2011 and 12, you know, or go back to 2003, what if Saddam Hussein had already been smack dab right in the middle of putting down a bin Laden night insurrection?
And then George Bush went and knocked him off, right?
And we saw the unintended consequence of knocking him off was we created a bin Laden night insurrection.
But what if he'd already been in the middle of one?
Well, that was what was going on in Syria was here.
They're in the middle of putting down a bin Laden night insurrection.
And then American goes and takes the bin Laden night side and tries to dethrone the Baathists, even though the Baathification is universally agreed to be the worst decision made in Iraq were to other than invading itself.
And so how in the world, Gareth, could the CIA, the military, anyone with power and responsibility have been in favor of that policy, especially when Bashar al-Assad?
He was not a loyal sock puppet like Mubarak, but he would torture innocent Canadians for us if we wanted him to or whatever it was.
As Robert Baer said, if you want him tortured, you send him to Assad in Syria.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
So he said, in fact, the quote is, if you want a serious interrogation, you send him to Jordan.
If you want him tortured, you send him to Syria.
And if you want him to disappear forever, you send him to Egypt.
But anyway, he was so George Bush, George Bush and Assad's governments somewhat seem to get along, at least on the torture issue, Gareth.
So why how could the national security state have been so hell bent on attacking Assad that they would sacrifice what we perhaps falsely presumed to be their highest mandate fighting terrorism?
And the answer to that question goes to the very heart of the nature of the national security state in this country, which we've talked about so many times on your show.
And that is that, first of all, there were bureaucratic interests involved, that the programs that they were urging on the president were programs that would enhance the power, the glory, the status, the congressional appropriations, all the rest of it for the CIA.
That meant that that they were inherently that that in this case, David Petraeus, who was then the CIA director, was inherently biased in favor of the program.
And then the second part of the answer that springs from the first is that any high ranking bureaucrat who is in a situation where he has to choose between two potential courses of action or to give a yes or no on a course of action is going to be indulging in subjective analysis of the consequences.
And so we see in this case clearly what happens is that the CIA and Hillary Clinton, who was very deeply involved in helping Petraeus to push this within the Obama administration, were making arguments that were obviously formulated in order to try to persuade the president and anybody else in the White House and White House staff to sponsor, to support.
Their objective and their way of bringing it about.
And in so doing, they indulged in wishful thinking.
They indulged in basically ignoring the negative consequences or playing them down.
And you know better than hardly anybody else in the firmament of people who analyze and comment on this, the way in which the forms in which the human brain basically functions so that it screens out all the evidence that that is not in line with your interests, your psychological or material interests.
And grabs onto those arguments, those pieces of information that support it.
And that's exactly what happened in this case.
Clearly, you know, they they played up the positive possibilities.
Look, I mean, you know, they would argue they did argue.
We know that Assad is on the ropes.
He he can't really escape from from the clutches of the people, that he can't hold on to power, that there's bound to be a change in regime.
What we're doing is merely helping to bring this about as quickly as possible.
So so that was the kind of argument that was being made.
We know from Derek Cholet's book on the Obama administration, The Long Game, he talks about how the you know, all of the advisers to to Obama in 2011 and into 2012 were saying, you know, that that Assad is not going to be able to hold on to power.
He's not tough enough, that the circumstances here are such that it's inevitable he's going to fall.
Now, that wasn't that wasn't based on any objective analysis.
Clearly, that was based on a subjective analysis.
And yet that's what that's what was being played within the White House meetings.
That's that's what was being argued.
Well, so do we need to kind of rewind a little bit to the start of the Arab Spring and the you know, there was like at least half the government's policy was to come up with an alternative to Mubarak.
He's getting old.
The establishment doesn't like his son.
They had floated as a trial balloon that his son would be the one.
And then that wasn't going to work.
And so they're trying to figure out something.
Liz Cheney even was saying, yeah, we need to have elections and all this when she was working in the State Department.
And then when the Arab Spring came, it was all the liberals that the American NGOs had been backing who spearheaded the the riot there.
And of course, the Qataris and Al Jazeera.
I mean, on the other hand, don't get me wrong.
I'm not trying to say it was just a color coded revolution, because it clearly wasn't.
You had virtually the entire political every I mean, the entire population of Egypt, left, right, center and town and country and everyone upper and lower Nile and forget about it.
They all said, let's overthrow Mubarak.
And they did, of course, Ben Ali in Tunisia was first.
But then at that point, it makes sense to me, right?
That so Hillary and whoever the National Security Council held a meeting, they invited some Saudis.
You know, they said, listen, so we'll try to clamp down on the Arab Spring revolts wherever we can, like in Bahrain and Yemen and anywhere it's getting out of hand and threatening our current status quo interests that we prefer.
But then also we could exploit the Arab Spring and do kind of a counter revolution in the disguise of a revolution in Libya and in Syria and guarantee our interests there.
So it makes sense the way they're kind of teaming up and doing that.
And I can see how Gaddafi, he was no Mubarak either.
Right.
He was he had come in from the cold under George W. Bush.
But he is still the wacky colonel and unreliable and whatever.
And I guess they just saw him as expendable.
Hillary, I think, clearly saw this was going to be the platform upon which she was going to stand when she ran for president, was that she was the hero of Libya and all of this.
And yet I got to say, though, I got a little bit of cognitive dissonance here about Syria, because, well, here I have evidence right here from the beginning of 2012, from February 2012.
She's being interviewed on CBS News and the CBS Newsman is, of course, taking the angle that why aren't we doing more?
How come we're not doing enough?
And so she is defending Obama's policy of only somewhat backing the terrorists, not too much at this point.
And here's how she and here's how she explains it.
We know Al Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria?
Hamas is now supporting the opposition.
Are we supporting Hamas in Syria?
So I think, Wyatt, you know, despite the great pleas that we hear from those people who are being ruthlessly assaulted by Assad, if you're a military planner or if you're a secretary of state and you're trying to figure out, do you have the elements of an opposition that is actually viable?
We don't see that.
All right.
So there you go.
So she knew better.
And that's that's a good quote, Scott.
But you know what's going on there?
That's seven months before the DIA warned about the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and all of that.
That's what she's saying is, I'm sure what she's been told to say by Obama.
Obama was very closely riding herd on her at that point.
And that was his line.
We know that that was his line.
OK, but no, this is her line, because this is what we know.
It's in the WikiLeaks or I don't know which which batch of emails it came from, if it was the lead to the release by the State Department or what.
But you can find it on WikiLeaks.org anyway.
The State Department email where her aide, I believe one week before this or four days before this or something, sent her an email that said, hey, look, boss, AQ is on our side in this one and it has appended to it.
Ayman al-Zawahiri endorses revolution against Assad in Syria.
Yeah, I know that she had in her own head that at that point.
OK, maybe it's not my cognitive dissonance.
It's hers.
But this is at the start of 2012.
And as we know, she spent the rest of the year arguing for this policy.
But I'm just saying the whole thing about playing up the positives and playing down the negatives.
I understand that.
And confirmation bias and groupthink and and let's all get along.
And I asked Peter Van Buren, the State Department, former State Department guy about this.
And he said, listen, if you work in the State Department, you only have one job.
Tell Hillary Clinton that she's right.
That's it.
No one's job is saying, ma'am, I think there could be a problem.
So I understand that.
But then on the other hand, I also know that she can read and also know that we all knew on this show we were covering it all along.
And it was her State Department that said that al-Nusra, Jabhat al-Nusra, the Association of Helpers or whatever the hell it is, that's just another name for al-Qaeda in Iraq.
They were the ones telling me that.
That was who I was quoting was her State Department in 2012, warning people of that very fact.
So I guess, I don't know, explain it more and better then, because I still don't get it.
Because to me, it just seems like blatant treason on behalf of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the butcher of New York City.
I'm not saying it's not treason.
You know that.
I don't I'm not arguing against that for for one moment.
But but nevertheless, what I'm trying to indicate here, what I'm trying to point out is the distinction between what Hillary Clinton says when she is being told by Obama to make the argument that we can't do this because it's too dangerous.
And we know there are other sources that that show that that's what that's exactly what Obama was saying within the White House meetings.
He was arguing that this is this is not in our interest because we're likely to repeat the mistake that we made in Afghanistan.
And of course, here it involved not just Mujahideen, but it involved al-Qaeda.
And he and he knew that already by late 2011, by, you know, I would say October, September, October 2011.
There was already indications that al-Qaeda was active and was becoming very aggressive in its military role in Syria.
So so he was able to make that argument.
And so she is, in fact, saying exactly what she was told to say by the president.
But in her own mind, that's not her view.
She's she knows that al-Qaeda is active there, but she's in her own mind saying, yeah, but the CIA is going to go in and we're going to support the the opponents of Assad who are against al-Qaeda, who are free Syrian army.
So that's going to be the the response to what Obama is arguing here.
He doesn't understand that we've got to do this in order to defend our interests, that that's the only way to do it.
So so basically it's it's another element of the justification that goes on constantly, that in her own head was was was there at the very moment that she was spouting the line that Obama was telling her to spout.
Well, then she spent that whole year trying to set up the Friends of Syria committees and all of this kind of thing.
And, you know, I don't know if we got time to get off into a tangent about David Petraeus here.
I really do like attacking.
Go ahead.
Tell us all about David Petraeus and his role in all of this, Libya and Syria, because it's one big story.
Yeah, because Petraeus Petraeus is famous within the U.S. national security state for his commitment to doing whatever he can to oppose Iran.
And I mean, this has to do with his role in Iraq, of course, when he was commander in 2007, 2008 in Iraq, the Iranians were, you know, very active and they were giving his forces a lot of trouble.
And so he was personally very vindictive about about Iran to the point where there's this famous story, I'm sure you're familiar with it, about how Soleimani indirectly contacted him, sent a message to Petraeus offering to meet with him.
And, you know, Petraeus was very outraged by this, or at least he he made out as though he were outraged about it.
He told the story, retold the story, and and he found it outrageous that the Iranians would propose to actually speak personally with him, given their role in in Iraq.
So I just I just want to point out that that he had this animus very strongly and and he repeats it at every opportunity.
I mean, ever since then, he has taken every opportunity to take shots at Iran and and to come out with whatever kind of proposal he can think of to get back at Iran.
Well, and, you know, I think this is part of Obama's whole influence here or, you know, motivation here, too, is that in the background was his decision, his determination to reach a nuclear deal with Iran.
But that meant if he was going to do that, he had to pose he had to oppose them in every other way in order to not look like he was pro Ayatollah or whatever.
This is the same thing that this was no scoop.
I mean, this was the official press release to The New York Times about the current genocide taking place in Yemen was, well, we need to placate the Saudis shrug, quote unquote there, because while we're doing the Iran deal, which in fact secures their interests, assuming they really are concerned about Iranian nuclear weapons.
But they're worried that we're you know, that their role in our Middle Eastern order is jeopardized.
So we have to placate them by aiding and abetting this horrible war against the men, women and children of Yemen.
And it's the same thing with Syria.
We're right around the time just a few weeks after that Hillary Clinton clip I just played you.
They published in The Atlantic Obama's interview with Jeffrey Goldberg.
The title is as president.
I don't bluff.
That's his promise that he's not going to let Iran get nukes as though they were trying to get them.
And it's right there in the article where Jeffrey Goldberg says, hey, Mr.
President, don't you think if we got rid of Assad that that would help bring Iran down a peg?
And Obama says, that's right, Jeffrey Goldberg.
This would be great for Israel because we heard Iran a little bit.
And, you know, Jeffrey Goldberg, of course, is the ombudsman between America and Likud.
Scott, I think it's a very good point.
But but I think it applies.
Oh, I got to say one more thing about that.
See, George Bush, as you reported, and that's how I know partly George Bush gave all of eastern and southern Iraq to Iran's friends in Iraq war two.
And ever since the redirection, they've been that's in 2006, the New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh.
They've been trying to figure out a way to make up for that fact without obviously they can't reinvade Iraq and and sectarian Lee cleanse Baghdad the other direction now and repopulate it with Sunnis.
It's too late for that.
And so, well, we could take out Assad and that's a consolation prize.
We gave them Baghdad.
Let's take away Damascus.
And that'll help make up for George Bush's stupidity in 2003.
Yeah, I think that's a good point.
But again, you have to take into account the distinctions between what Obama was willing to do in 2011, what he was willing to do in early 2013 after he started negotiating, you know, was actually actively pushing for negotiations with Iran on the nuclear deal in 2013.
And then in 2014, when in fact they were getting closer to to the deal, when they were making the deal.
And I think that it was in that latter period in 2014 when he really began, as you point out, to to embrace the notion that he was being very tough on the question of regime change in in Syria.
That was very, very political decision that I think you're right, had to do with the fact that that he he needed to buttress his credentials as being anti-Iran because of the fact that he was on his way to making that nuclear deal.
So so I think that timeline is very important in understanding the the relevance of that factor and how it played into his his policy.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
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All right.
So now we're going to talk about the Israelis.
As you know, well, I don't know if you know this.
I don't really know it for a fact, but Eric Margulies says so.
So it must be true is that Jabotinsky and one of the original designers of Zionism in the first place back 100 years ago said, well, what we got to do is break up all of the Arab states into war and competing tribes so that they're easier to dominate.
And we can have greater Israel over there.
And then a guy named Oded Yanan wrote a thing in 1980, which is actually hilarious if anybody reads it.
It's about the impending triumph of Soviet world communism and how Israel is going to be the last fort of civilization left in the world after North America falls.
And so therefore this has to be our policy.
It's the most ridiculous freaking thing.
And then, of course, there's David Wormser, who is a prominent neoconservative, was the leash on Colin Powell and Dick Armitage in the State Department in the early years of the George W. Bush administration.
And then later was Dick Cheney's Middle East advisor in the vice president's office.
But back just 20 years ago, right around in 1996, when Netanyahu was becoming the prime minister the first time, he wrote these two position papers for Netanyahu and for Likud called A Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.
And the second one is called Coping with Crumbling States.
And I forget the subtitle.
And they're both on my website, scottwharton.org, by the way.
And, you know, clearly he's got Chalabi's featured in the whole thing.
And it's all about this is how, as everyone knows, it says in there, the way to weaken Iran is we got to focus on getting rid of Saddam, which these guys are so stupid.
I just can't.
But anyway.
And then they say by doing that, that'll put Iran on notice.
And then that'll put Syria on notice.
And that'll help weaken Hezbollah.
And because our obsession here is Iran backs Hezbollah by way of Syria.
And then in Coping with Crumbling States, he even says we should expedite the chaotic collapse to Syria so that we can better control what's going to come next.
This is the only reason that I've been so good on Syria going back to when I first started this show in 0405.
Because I read that and I thought, well, who would be organized to replace the Baathist government in Syria?
Last I heard, they had to do a horrible massacre of a couple of 10,000 people in the early 80s to keep down a Muslim Brotherhood revolt.
Then sounds like they would be the natural, you know, next step to replace the minority Alawi dictatorship.
I mean, that was so obvious even back then.
OK, now.
So anyway, I'm sorry I'm going on so long, but then I'm going to play this clip, too.
I'm going to give you plenty of time to respond to all this.
This clip is from 2014, from right around this time, 2014, so three years ago.
This is just after the fall of Mosul.
And this is when Obama's policy of backing al-Qaeda in Iraq, a.k.a. the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, blew up in his face.
And it became an actual state, not just the name of a group.
And they took over, you know, all of eastern Syria and western Iraq and, you know, Tikrit and Fallujah and Mosul.
And I forget if they got Samarra or whatever.
Anyway, and so just on the heels of this, they hold the Fancy Pants Aspen Security Conference, which they just finished having a couple of weeks ago here.
Well, so this is the version from three years ago.
Again, it's Commissar Goldberg up there on the stage with Michael Oren, who only about six months before had retired from being Benjamin Netanyahu's ambassador to the United States.
And so he does say, I'll go ahead and mention, he says, I'm only speaking for myself, not for the Israeli government.
And then he continues to say, so from Israel's point of view, over and over and over again, he's clearly speaking for Netanyahu's government here.
And here's what he says.
All right.
Keep in mind, I don't speak for the government anymore.
I'm speaking for me.
And what I'm going to say is harsh, perhaps a little edgy.
But if we have to choose the lesser of evils here, the lesser evil is the Sunnis over the Shiites.
You're not speaking for me.
Okay.
It's a lesser evil.
It's an evil.
Believe me, it's a terrible evil.
Again, they've just taken out 7,800 former Iraqi soldiers and shot them in a field.
But who are they fighting against?
They're fighting against a proxy with Iran that's complicit in the murder of 160,000 people in Syria.
You can just do the math.
And again, one side is armed with suicide bombers and rockets.
The other side has access to military nuclear capabilities.
So from Israel's perspective, if there's got to be an evil that's going to prevail, let the Sunni evil prevail.
And again, I'm speaking entirely for myself.
And there you go.
And he's clearly not referring to any mythical moderates.
He's referring directly to Baghdadi and the Islamic State.
Again, they just massacred 1,700 troops in the field.
He's talking about the Air Force cadets at Camp Spicer, right?
Absolutely.
And of course, this is something that has been reflected in Israeli policy more recently as well.
We know that there's plenty of indications that Israel has been interacting with and supporting al-Nusra Front and ISIS in various ways.
But again, as an investigative journalist, it's all about timeline.
Timeline, timeline, timeline.
And you have to go back a few years before this and recall that there was a period when the Israelis were involved in secret and somewhat not-so-secret negotiations with the Assad government over a settlement on the Golan Heights.
Now, how far back are you going?
You're talking about when Condoleezza Rice ruined the talks back when?
No, I'm talking about, well, it started under Condoleezza Rice 2008-2009.
It was continuing under the beginning of the Obama administration, for sure.
So there was this period when I remember as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry was going to Damascus and having secret meetings with Assad.
This was 2007-2008, 2008 specifically.
So again, the Israelis, despite the fact that they have always had this notion that, you know, it's better for us if the Islamists and the Assad regime are at war with one another, you know, and confusion and disorder reigns.
And there's complete lack of any clear-cut regime, strong regime in that part of the world.
Nevertheless, they were involved in talks that were quite serious at one point.
And that was still the case, I think, in 2011 when the Arab Spring began.
So it took them a little while to adjust their policy to come out finally with roughly the position that you heard Oren voicing.
And I think I believe that that happened precisely in April of 2012, because that is when Hillary Clinton's advisor, Jamie Rubin.
Oh, right, right.
Yeah, no, the foreign policy piece.
Jamie Rubin was telling her, hey, the Israelis now are saying, and he quotes the defense minister, saying that, you know, it's now clear that we have to get rid of the Assad regime in so many words.
And it was at that point that Clinton began to, you know, really become much more explicit about, you know, moving towards that position.
So and that's reflected in the Clinton emails.
So I think that that's really a key turning point in Israeli policy when they began to support the Sunni allies, the Saudis, Qataris and Turks, in calling for a military overthrow of the Assad regime.
Well, I think it's notable, too, that Michael Oren is a ridiculous liar.
I mean, in his two excuses for this policy, which, as you say, even included directly providing aid and comfort to al-Nusra, that is al-Qaeda fighters in Syria.
He says, because the Iranians have military nuclear technology, meaning what?
They have H-bombs or even A-bombs, and they're going to hand them off to Hezbollah.
We've got to prevent that by overthrowing Assad.
What is he even talking about?
And then he goes on to blame Assad for every single death on all sides of the war.
And those are his two excuses for this policy, which, you know, I don't know.
Anyway, and then now it's also true that it makes no sense to me that the Israelis would want to overthrow Assad when, you know, it's easy to come up with the old cliche.
The devil we know is better than a bunch of al-Qaeda suicide bombers.
That's right.
They did use that cliche.
You know that, that the Israelis used that to justify.
Well, and they told Judy Ruder in the New York Times that, well, we prefer to see them hemorrhage to death.
Both sides continue to hemorrhage to death, but without a final regime change, really, in Damascus.
Right, right.
So.
That is indeed, that is indeed the.
So is that the death of the clean break then?
Does that mean that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That was 20 years ago.
And, you know, Netanyahu is not so much bound to that policy of breaking up these states in that way.
I mean, to me, it seems crazy if you read if you go back and read a clean break and coping with crumbling states.
He even says in there in the mid 90s, it's true that getting rid of these states might lead to the rise of jihadist terrorism and that kind of thing.
But we can deal with that.
I mean, that's not going to be that big of an issue.
Right.
You know, that that was certainly.
We've learned something since then.
Right.
That actually, you know, a bunch of crazy suicide bombers and stuff might be worse than a bunch of Baathists.
Yeah.
And I think that in 2007, 2008, 2008, 2009, when they were negotiating with Assad, they clearly did take more seriously the idea of the dangers of jihadists taking taking power.
That was clearly in the background of of their negotiations.
Plus, of course, they the hope that the United States could use its use, its leverage with Assad to help them get a deal which would be favorable to them on the Golan Heights, which they could never get, unfortunately, for for the Israelis.
And, you know, unfortunately, for the from the point of view of the Obama administration, that's what they really want to do.
They want to flip Assad.
That was always the idea that that they could flip Assad away from Iran and that would solve their problems in the Middle East somehow.
That was that was the the big picture strategy that was was motivating not just the Obama administration, but was, you know, the realist, quote unquote, in the Bush administration as well.
That was what Colin Powell and then, you know, the his his successor, Condoleezza Rice, were talking about within the administration.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, but it was clear from at least 2012, maybe 2011 that, hey, here comes Hezbollah to help Assad.
I mean, what do they think that they're just going to move all their pieces on their side of the board and everybody else on the other side is just going to sit there?
Well, you know, that's one of the points that I didn't get into in this last piece that I did, but which I have written about.
Actually, I take that back.
I guess I did mention it in this piece that the advisers to Obama failed utterly to warn him that going ahead with arming the opposition to Assad.
And to the extent that was successful, it would certainly bring much greater involvement by Iran and Hezbollah, particularly Hezbollah, because of the security equation, because of the role that that Syria plays in in Iranian and Hezbollah security.
So, you know, that was a fundamental problem that, again, the people who were arguing for the regime change or simply arming the opposition to try to put pressure on Assad to step down, however you want to put it.
They completely failed to talk about that, whether they were totally ignorant about it or because it wasn't convenient.
I'm not sure.
But, you know, it was argued to me by my source, the former official in the Obama administration who was a witness to all this, that people in the National Security Council staff were too ignorant to understand the importance of this factor.
I don't know, man.
It's amazing.
I just, I got to say, I thought that the slowest motion train wreck in the world was the Bush administration announcing a year and a half in advance that we're about to start telling you an entire giant pile of lies so that you'll let us start a war with Iraq, you know, back in the fall of 2001.
And that was just amazing.
And yet this whole thing, with America taking the side of al-Qaeda, and they keep trying to call it everything but that, and yet, you know, you were linking on Twitter to that piece by a hawk where he was admitting that, in essence, as we've accused on this show all these years, the mythical moderates are really just the gun and money procurement branch of the terrorists.
That they, you know, the CIA needs it to be slightly deniable, and so they go, hey, you sort of moderate guy, give this gun to that terrorist over there for me.
And that's been the policy this whole time.
I mean, I remember I had Flint Leverett, who used to be on Bush's National Security Council on the show back in 2012, and I said, hey, when Ronald Reagan sells tow missiles to Iran by giving some tow missiles to Israel and having Israel give some tow missiles to Iran, people don't even notice that Israel's in the equation.
They just say, well, Ronald Reagan gave tow missiles to Iran, right?
Because it's just plausible deniability, but it's not plausible and it's not deniable, you're caught.
Well, isn't this the same as that?
If Obama hires the Saudis to give a bunch of guns to a bunch of bin Ladenites in Syria, isn't that just the same stupid cut-out thing trying to fool me, and yet, really, this is just an American policy to do this?
And Flint Leverett said, yeah, absolutely, that's the correct way to look at it, and that was from the very beginning of this thing.
I agree.
And it was actually tow missiles, in fact, right?
Tow missiles sold to the Saudis, specifically with the understanding that they would dole them out to the people, to the organizations that the CIA handpicked as the people they wanted to get them.
But, of course, in a situation where it was inevitable, it had already been shown in the previous couple of years that, inevitably, the people that you send, the so-called FSA groups that you send arms, are going to share them with Ahrar al-Sham, and Ahrar al-Sham is going to share them with al-Qaeda.
So, they knew that they were going to fall into the hands of al-Qaeda, and if they didn't, then they've lost their ability to reason, and they should be shoveled off to some old folks' home or to the insane asylum, I don't know which.
Well, I mean, we got John Kerry on tape going, yeah, well, see, you know, this is how it works, and in fact, we have Joe Biden trying to turn it around and make it an accusation against all our allies did this, when we know that he was the boss of them the whole time.
Who's the empire and who's the satellite here?
Give me a break.
Cutter was arming a bunch of terrorists, and we couldn't stop him.
Why not?
You can stop Cutter with one Treasury agent.
The CIA people are able to rationalize it in their own unique way.
You know, one can, you know, you can figure out how they would rationalize it.
I don't have it formulated in the front of my brain at this moment, but I could do it, you know, in 15 or 20 minutes.
I could come up with an approximation of how they rationalized it.
Their ability to rationalize whatever they need to rationalize in order to advance their interests is unlimited, basically.
And, you know, the flip side of that is being always unalterably opposed to believing anything they say or agreeing with anything that they want to do means that we get to be right about everything all the time.
And, you know, I get to say not like bragging or whatever, but just I've been here doing the same job interviewing you brilliant geniuses about all of this.
You know, the truth of what's going on here for so long that, well, you just can't fool me about any of it.
When the redirection came out in 2007, I interviewed Seymour Hersh all about it just because this was my same job way back then, too.
And so it's just been keeping up all the way through.
And so it's just amazing to think that like in 2011, if you go back and listen to my shows in 2011 and 12 and 13 on all of this with Pepe Escobar and anyway, the endless list.
You know, obviously, Patrick Coburn and first among equals and all of this.
David Enders, everybody knew better than this all along.
You're absolutely right, Scott.
But on the other hand, the reality, of course, the reality of power is that the CIA and the rest of the war state always win, regardless of whether they're right or wrong.
I mean, of course, they're they're wrong, you know, virtually all the time, but they always win, despite the fact or in part because they're wrong.
Because they are lying.
But but also because the lie has to do with something that is going to advance their interests.
Well, because there's absolutely no accountability whatsoever.
So, you know, a friend of mine was asking about, you know, geez, I don't know.
I heard that Russia and China were doing some joint exercises.
And so, well, actually, that's been going on for a long time.
That really this the Sino-Soviet split really started being healed by George W. Bush when he invaded Iraq, was threatening everybody in the world.
Russians and the Chinese said, man, we're going to have to start working together to make sure that we're a powerful enough bloc to maintain our independence from these kooks and their full spectrum dominance here.
And that this has been going on and how if you if you look at D.C., anybody.
Well, not anybody, but some intelligent Republican think tank people, somebody somewhere should have been able to see this coming, probably could see this coming, did predict this.
And yet, even though that would be considered, I would think the primary threat of all of American national security would be for Russia and China to become friends again like back when that.
If that's even likely eventual possible outcome of an Iraq policy, for example, well, that's pretty terrible.
But that warning would never be enough to stop the thing, whatever it is that they want to do from stop them from doing it in the first place.
Really, no matter what eventual terrible outcome, that'll just be an excuse for more intervention later.
And they'll just keep on going like that.
I mean, can you imagine if Brent Scowcroft, for example, and I don't think he did, but Brent Scowcroft's famous Wall Street Journal article where he said, don't attack Saddam.
What if paragraph one had said this is going to push Russia and China together at the ultimate?
They still would have ignored it.
Right.
It's still the worst.
Absolutely.
What doesn't make the slightest difference.
I agree.
And this is the entire history of the U.S. national security state since the beginning of the Cold War.
I mean, you know, it has never been about strategy in any rational sense.
It's always been about policies that made, quote, the United States stronger, more powerful, more dominant, but in fact made those bureaucratic entities more powerful, more dominant.
That was the practical effect.
That was the real effect.
Well, in fact, I remember when I was a kid, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the senator from New York, was saying maybe we should abolish the Central Intelligence Agency, everybody, now that the Soviet Union is gone.
Who needs them?
And boy, they didn't like that, did they, the CIA?
About five minutes.
Yeah.
They said, hey, we can find something to do.
Don't call us lazy.
We'll contract it out.
Well, that's partly what my book on Iran is about, as well, as you know.
Right.
That's one of the chapters is focused very much on that, how the CIA primarily, Robert M. Gates particularly, who was then the new director, newly named director, came up with Iran as the new threat.
The Iran and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction as the new threat that had to be addressed by turning over all the manpower and the budget that had been really focused on the Soviet Union for decades towards that problem.
And he was relatively successful in that, of course.
That reminds me.
Have I ever told you guys how much I like that book and how important that book is?
It's called Manufactured Crisis.
It's by Gareth Porter.
And it is the book.
Forget about all the rest of them on Iran's nuclear program.
It's Manufactured Crisis.
The myth.
What is it?
You always change it to the truth behind the Iran nuclear scare.
That was the first subtitle.
It's the untold story of the Iran nuclear scare.
The untold story.
Yeah.
And it's really time to have a revised version of it.
I'm just now thinking of that as a possibility.
I don't know if I can get my publisher to agree.
Well, and you know what?
As long as we're at it, you guys can hear.
I interviewed Garrett 10 interviews about all 10 chapters of the book.
Or maybe there's 11 in the last two chapters got combined into one.
There's 10 interviews there, I guess, half an hour long each, I think.
And then somewhere on my site, if you search, you can find all of them combined into one big interview where we go through the entire book and talk about every bit.
And I know some people just they can't find the time or their eyeballs just don't work for reading entire books.
And I totally understand that.
But that's why the radio show is here, so that you guys can listen to this stuff.
And it's me and Garrett talking about every bit of that book, beginning with how the CIA manufactured this crisis in the first place.
All right, Garrett.
So before we go, then, let's talk about the allies here, other than Israel, Saudi, Qatar, Turkey, and I don't know who all else.
UAE, too.
They've had an interest all along in backing different groups.
And it's hard for me to keep track of which groups are backed by who.
Oh, Kuwait's been accused, although maybe just by the Qataris.
I don't know.
But anyway, so who's whom and who they're, you know, who's the satellite and who's the empire when it comes to all of that?
Well, that's a very good question, because, you know, there is a obviously reciprocal set of of interest here between the Sunni allies of the United States.
That is the Saudi Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey on one hand and the CIA and the Pentagon on the other hand.
Now, in this case, in both 2012, 2011, 2012 and 2013, the two episodes that I talk about in a little bit of detail in my in my piece of the CIA is the one that really played the most active and most important role here in the US political process.
But, you know, the point that I would make about this is that it was sort of the united front between the allies of the US in the Middle East on one hand and the CIA, particularly on the other.
Plus, of course, Hillary Clinton in the initial period and then John Kerry in 2013, that really created the pressure that I think brought about the two steps that I described.
First of all, the you know, the creation of this covert CIA logistical help for shipping the arms to Syria and then the beginning of actual U.S. military assistance to the armed opposition to Assad in 2013.
And and so, you know, what what I talk about in the piece is really how the the CIA and the Pentagon were clearly closely allied with those allies on Syria because they were getting big payoffs from their ally.
Part of the reason that not the whole reason part of the reason was they were getting payoffs from the Saudis in particular in the form of big arms sales to the United States by the Saudis for the Pentagon and this for the CIA.
It's the CIA.
Excuse me.
It's the Saudi funding of covert operations.
Whenever the CIA wants to do something in the Middle East or elsewhere that they don't really want to have on the ledger, the CIA, you know, for for the CIA from from Congress, they don't have to inform Congress.
They can simply do it with the Saudi help.
And that's a big plus for them.
That that's that enhances their power.
And so the closeness of that relationship is really part of the storyline here of the CIA being so eager to push this in the first place in 2011 2012 for for David Petraeus to push it.
And then in 2013, again, you know, there's there's this alliance that shows itself in in mid 2013 when the and it's all about the the so-called or the alleged sarin attacks in the spring of 2013 that the that the allies are 100 percent behind.
They're pushing it very hard.
And the State Department, with John Kerry now at the helm, is taking advantage of that to push very hard for the not just the enactment of the program of arms to the opposition, but he was also pushing to use direct military force against the Assad regime.
We know that we knew that at the time and it has been it has been underlined since then in more reporting, including my own.
So so there is this reciprocal relationship between the interests of the Sunni allies in taking down Assad and getting the United States on board and the interests of particularly the CIA, but also the Pentagon in 2012 and again in 2013.
All right, well, we better wrap it up there because I got to go and get to my next guest.
But thank you very much, Gareth.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
Glad to be on.
All right, you guys, that's the great Gareth Porter at the American Conservative magazine.
How America armed terrorists in Syria and how CIA and allies trapped Obama in the Syrian arms debacle.
I'm Scott Horton.
Find all my stuff.
Four thousand five hundred and some interviews at Scott Horton dot org.
Check out my institute at Libertarian Institute dot org.
And follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, you guys.
