08/24/16 – Daniel Lazare – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, Al Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
If this nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone, we are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at Amazon.com in Kindle or in paperback.
Click the book in the right margin at scotthorton.org or thewarstate.com.
All right, y'all, Scott Horton Show.scotthorton.org is the website.
4,000-something interviews going back to 2003.
Sign up for the podcast feed there.
Follow me on Twitter, at scotthortonshow.
All right, introducing Daniel Lazare, writing again for consortiumnews.com.
This one is called U.S. Hawks Advance a War Agenda in Syria.
Welcome back to the show, Daniel.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
So there's a lot to cover in this piece.
It's a very important one, but I guess the most important thing here is if you could help us to understand what is going on with the U.S. scrambling F-22s to protect the Syrian Kurdish YPG from the Syrian state, as just happened in eastern Syria the other day.
What's going on there, and what does it mean?
Well, what it means is what happened is the YPG apparently launched an offensive aimed at dislodging pro-government forces, which had controlled a portion of the town of Hasakah in northeastern Syria.
And the town is a mixed population center with Arabs, Kurds, Armenians, and Aramaic-speaking Syrian Christians.
So the YPG launched an offensive aimed at dislodging pro-government forces.
When the Assad government then decided to send a warplane to defend its own territory against an illegal invasion, the U.S. responded by scrambling jets, F-22s, and chasing the Syrian air forces out of the area.
So as a consequence, the U.S. is kind of imposing a de facto no-fly zone around the town of Hasakah.
Yeah, but Daniel, the quote is that, hey, we have the inherent right of self-defense, so what's your problem?
It's totally Orwellian.
You don't claim a right of self-defense after invading a sovereign nation.
Do the Germans complain, no, claim a right of self-defense after invading Poland?
It's just madness.
But meanwhile, as you know, utter hell is broken loose because the Turks have now invaded Syria to the west.
And so now we've got who knows how many armies clashing across northern Syria.
How many Turkish troops have crossed into Syria now?
Several hundred, I believe.
And this is into Syrian Kurdistan in order to engage with the YPG.
Well, also in order to push ISIS back out of Turkish border areas.
So they're aimed at both forces.
And the Kurds are battling ISIS.
It's a three-way battle.
Yeah.
Well, now, why does Assad and the Kurds, why wouldn't they just tolerate each other's BS for now as long as they have so many bigger fish to fry?
You would think they would.
In fact, apparently a ceasefire has been negotiated in Hasakah.
So good sense seems to be prevailing.
But it's a three-way battle.
And the Kurds were intent on carving out a national zone along in northern Syria.
And there are also reports they're engaging in ethnic cleansing as well, prompting the Arabs, the Syrians, et cetera, to seek protection from the Syrian government forces.
So, in other words, the so-called state of Rojava there, independent Syrian Kurdistan, they're busily expanding their borders while the getting is good and creating more problems for themselves and others in the future.
And pushing aggressively against the Assad government forces.
The question is what was the U.S. role there?
The U.S. has special operations forces embedded with the Kurds.
So was the U.S. encouraging this offensive, discouraging it, or what?
The Kurds are supposed to be battling ISIS.
What are they doing battling Assad?
Yeah, good question.
But the whole thing is just an unholy mess.
An unholy mess.
And the U.S. really has done more than anyone else to create this chaotic condition.
Well, that's certainly true.
And that's, you know, without even bringing up, and let's go ahead and bring it up then, the battle for Aleppo that's going on right now where Moon of Alabama has shown that the CIA was shipping a whole new batch of weapons to al-Qaeda's friends anyway.
You know, al-Qaeda's CIA gun accepting front groups.
Just before this last big push to, I guess, break the government siege of Aleppo, which apparently has worked, at least temporarily here.
That seems to have been what happened.
The Moon of Alabama report is based on a Financial Times report of, I think, on August 9th, which said that the U.S. was like no blinking as the Saudis and Qataris channeled weapons to the rebel forces in eastern Aleppo.
So I oversimplified it and said, oh, the CIA just handed it over, but it was just America's best allies did it.
It's hard to know.
It's hard to know who's doing what.
It's really hard to know.
I mean, I would assume the CIA has got a hand in it, but one just doesn't know.
Yeah.
Well, there's certainly, even when they're denying that they're arming these guys, they brag to the New York Times that they're helping to coordinate our allies' efforts.
So, same difference.
And deniability is always key, you know.
Right.
But it is.
It's just an atrocity what's going on.
Syria is being torn apart.
There's a huge power vacuum.
Everyone is rushing in, and a clash, a widening clash, is inevitable.
Inevitable.
So, you know, this is just, there is no way of bringing this under control.
In fact, everyone, the U.S. most particularly, is pushing for a wider and wider conflict.
Yeah.
And, you know, even when the photo of the, the viral photo of the wounded boy started going around, I mean, it seems like any person, no matter what your politics are, just, you know, assuming you're not part of the foreign policy community with, you know, your determined, prepackaged answer ready to go.
Any regular person sees that, and the first thing they think is, what can we do to help end this war?
Somebody call a damn peace conference right now.
And instead, this is supposed to be a reason, or we're supposed to believe that somehow if we escalate the war, that's what's going to bring peace sooner.
How can we not escalate the war at this point?
We must go save this little boy by invading his country.
But that photo of that poor four-year-old, Amran Jaqneesh, was done, was arranged by pro-rebel forces.
The photographer, Mahmoud Rouslan, if I have that correctly, was photographed, took a selfie, in fact, of him with other members of a rebel group called Al-Zinki, which a few weeks earlier had decapitated, i.e., cut the head off, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy because they believed he was fighting with the pro-Assad forces.
I mean, so that picture of Amran Jaqneesh was a two-minute hate, an Orwellian two-minute hate aimed at blaming the Russians and Syrians for what's going on there.
And, of course, that's just completely misleading.
Well, you know, I've got to say, man, I think we have to stop and give them some credit, in a way, the war party in America, for even two years, two full years, after the declaration of the caliphate, they still are determined, a great part of the establishment, anyway, are still determined to overthrow Assad for the benefit of the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda in Syria.
Yeah, well, once you wind up on America's wrong side, you never get off the enemy's list.
Yeah, and it's just amazing.
There's this guy, Michael Duran, at the Hudson Institute.
Take that as a personal warning, Scott.
I've got to go on.
Sorry.
No, yeah, I know.
Believe me.
Luckily, nobody cares about me.
But, yeah, no, like this guy, Michael Hudson, who I was supposed to debate, but they wouldn't pay me enough to travel to debate the guy.
But I was just reading his article a couple of years ago.
It was a two-year-old article I was just reading, that he wrote in Foreign Affairs, about how, yes, Arar al-Sham is also Al-Qaeda, just like Nusra, but they're even nicer than Nusra, and Nusra's pretty nice, and especially compared to Islamic State.
So as long as Islamic State is extreme, then that means Al-Qaeda is moderate, and that means Arar al-Sham is even more moderate than them.
And so let's back them, because, and it just goes without saying here, for, I don't know, two-thirds or three-quarters of America's foreign policy establishment, that the Shiites are the real enemy, because Hezbollah and the Syrian government are backed by Iran, and Israel hates Iran more.
So it doesn't matter who knocked our towers down.
It doesn't matter who killed 4,000 out of 4,500 dead Americans in Iraq War II.
What matters is Michael Duran hates Hezbollah.
And so let's back al-Nusra, let's back al-Sham.
Hell, let's ignore the Islamic State as they create their caliphate, as long as we're helping to weaken the axis of the Ayatollah Khamenei.
That's absolutely correct.
The other half of the story is Saudi Arabia.
I mean, Saudi Arabia is locked in a growing sectarian war with Iran first and foremost, but also Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, democratic demonstrators in neighboring Bahrain, etc., and of course its own rest of Shiite population in Saudi Arabia's eastern province.
So Saudi Arabia has done it very effectively to enlist the U.S. in this neo-medieval sectarian crusade aimed at rolling back the so-called Shiite trust.
And so that essentially was what the U.S. was doing there.
The U.S. at Saudi's behest is taking part in a great anti-Shiite crusade in Syria, and therefore finding itself casually on the side of the most noxious Sunni fundamentalist forces, two including al-Qaeda and even ISIS.
All right, so now this is sort of BS because it's just a counterfactual, Daniel, but if Obama had said, you know, forget all this R2P, this, that, whatever.
The Bin Ladenites are the American people's enemies, and that's the priority in all this Middle Eastern stuff.
So sorry, Hillary, we're not overthrowing Gaddafi.
We're not overthrowing Assad.
And by the way, you can instruct the Turks, the Qataris, and the Saudis that they're not going to overthrow Assad either because America said so, because al-Qaeda are our enemies, and we don't care how much you love them, king of Saudi.
How do you like that?
Then what would have happened then?
And assuming they had obeyed him, would Assad have already won the war, or the war would have gone on anyway?
It just wouldn't have been America's war.
Well, Hillary would have replied with two words, oil and weapons.
The U.S. needs the Saudis and the other petro-states, Persian Gulf petro-states, to supply oil and other fossil fuels, and increasingly importantly, it needs them as a market for U.S.-made military goods.
Remember, Obama and Hillary negotiated the biggest U.S. weapons sale in history, and I believe 2013, a $60 billion sale to Saudi Arabia.
That was manna from heaven for the American defense establishment.
And that's two years into this so-called covert op in Syria, too.
The U.S.-Saudi relationship is really the key to unlocking this whole thing.
It is a dysfunctional marriage that's bringing the rest of the region down with it.
And I'll tell you why the U.S. is so supportive of the Saudis, because the regime is weak and getting weaker, and America's greatest nightmare is it'll fall, the House of Saud will fall to an ISIS offensive.
That is the nightmare that keeps Obama awake at night.
And so he just keeps doing everything he can to make that more and more likely, it looks like to me.
Yes, he does, but he's just desperate to prop up the Saudi regime because he feels if they collapse, ISIS will be in control of 25% of the world's fossil fuel reserves.
But you're right, everything he does to prop up the Saudis only serves to weaken them.
Just the same as he extended the war in Afghanistan, where even if the Taliban had seized total power there, at least they're not the Islamic State.
Now we've got the Islamic State running around there with their own agenda and fighting the Taliban, too.
Yes, I mean, 10 or 15 years ago, al-Qaeda was a tiny band of conspirators.
Now they control vast portions of North Africa and the Middle East, and other parts of the world as well.
No, I mean, you're quite right.
Everything the U.S. has done to, quote, combat al-Qaeda has only made the problem worse.
All right, now let me be a kook for just a second.
What if back in, I don't know, the 90s or something, they just made a deal with the Saudis that, listen, you guys back terrorists, and we'll fight them forever.
So let's just do this thing, and we'll make a mess, and yeah, we'll fight the Iraq war.
That might benefit Iran a little bit, but let's take the risk.
And who cares if it's a disaster?
Who wants stability?
Maybe we want stability on the peninsula, but let's go ahead and do like Michael Ledeen said and turn the rest of the entire Middle East into a boiling cauldron and see what happens.
That's more or less what happens, more or less.
I mean, obviously no one put it as explicitly as that.
No one quite knew what they were getting into.
But, yes, there is this kind of phenomenon of perpetual warfare where the wars, the battles just widen, just grow and grow and grow, and no one gives a thought to how to reverse the process.
It just piles in with more and more weapons, leading to more and more battles.
Yeah, because even the little side wars like in Afghanistan that nobody even pays attention to, I mean, that's a sinkhole of a trillion dollars has been blown on that occupation in 15 years.
How about Yemen?
Yeah.
I mean, this is incredible what's going on.
I mean, for that poor kid, Amran Dagnish in Aleppo, I mean, I can show you pictures of kids with their limbs blown off, faces disfigured by bombs.
I mean, it's heart-wrenching, heart-wrenching.
And the U.S. is backing the Saudis all the way.
And while the U.S. goes on about these siege cities in Syria that are due to government forces, the population of Yemen, the entire population, more than 20 million people, is on the verge of starvation because of a Saudi-U.S. naval blockade.
Hey, now back to the beginning here before I cut you off here.
Daniel, let me ask you about this de facto no-fly zone.
It sort of looks like Obama is going ahead and getting Hillary Clinton's more hawkish policy up and going.
For the baton handoff coming up here, he's been a bit more reluctant.
I don't want to give the man credit just to say she's even worse than him.
But it seems like he's really going for it here.
He's going for it here, and I don't want to sound like, oh, I'm such an alarmist or whatever here, but aren't they kind of risking air confrontations with Russian MiGs here?
And could that possibly be worth it?
I mean, what are they doing?
I don't think that's alarmist at all.
I don't think it's the Swedes that alarm us.
They are definitely risking confrontation with Russian air forces.
In fact, I don't know how Russia can stay out of the fray.
I mean, can Syria stand by while U.S.-backed forces take over more and more of our Syrian territory?
I mean, at some point, they'll have to send in more planes, and if the U.S. shoots down those planes, Russia will be under great pressure to intervene.
The more chaotic the situation grows, the greater the likelihood of some kind of unexpected clash occurring.
And again, this is while the Syrian government and the Russians are bombing the Islamic State, who supposedly is the big boogeyman of the world.
If you listen to the presidential campaign, you don't hear Donald Trump scaremongering about Hezbollah.
Who gives a crap about Hezbollah?
It's ISIS.
ISIS this, ISIS that, ISIS everything, and our enemies are anyone who attacks ISIS.
Well, you know, Donald Trump, as people point out, I mean, Trump is insane, but on this one issue, he is definitely less insane than Hillary.
I mean, Trump has said, like, let's forget about Assad for the moment.
Let's join forces with anybody who is battling ISIS, and that includes Russia or Syria.
And he's, I mean, this is certainly less crazy than anything, than the current policy.
Well, yeah, I mean, on this show, we, of course, support only non-intervention, but it's kind of, isn't it interesting when you hear someone proposing a total war, and at least that's reasonable compared to his opponent's position?
Which is just mass confusion and chaos.
I mean, no one knows what's going on there, but all we know is that the battle is widening with every passing week, and now the process is accelerated.
All right, well, listen, man, I'm sorry I've got to go and get Ray on the phone here, but I really appreciate you coming on and talking with us again, Daniel.
Great, Scott.
All right, so that is Daniel Lazar.
You've got to read everything he writes at ConsortiumNews.com.
And he was locked away writing books for the last 10 years or 20 or something, but now, man, he is writing just great stuff on the Middle East all the time for ConsortiumNews.com.
He's got a book called The Frozen Republic, How the Constitution is Paralyzing Democracy.
Boy, I wish that was true.
Let's paralyze this thing.
All right, anyway, Scott Horton Show, ScottHorton.org, podcast feed, archives, et cetera.
Follow me on Twitter, at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, y'all.
Superior blends of premium coffee.
Roasted fresh in Zionsville, Indiana.
Darren's Coffee satisfies the casual and the connoisseur.
Scott Horton Show listeners, visit Darren'sCoffee.com and use the coupon code SCOTT at checkout for free shipping.
Darren'sCoffee.com.
Because everyone deserves to drink great coffee.and earn a good return in an economy like this.
Mike Swanson can help.
Follow along on paper and see for yourself.
WallStreetWindow.com.