08/06/15 – Conn Hallinan – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here for The Future of Freedom, the monthly journal of the Future of Freedom Foundation at fff.org slash subscribe.
Jacob Hornberger, tireless champion of liberty and president of the FFF, brings you the best libertarian writers every month on the topics that need our treatment the most.
Read Jacob, Jim Bovard, Anthony Gregory, Wendy McElroy, Joe Stromberg, and more every month in The Future of Freedom.
It's just $25 a year for the pocket-sized print edition, $15 to read it online.
The Future of Freedom, fff.org slash subscribe.
All right, you guys, welcome to the show.
Back to it, I mean to say.
I'm Scott Horton, and this is my show.
I'm here live, noon to two, Eastern time, 11 to 1 Texas time here on the Liberty Radio Network.
Our first guest today is Con Hallinan.
You can find him in the viewpoint section at antiwar.com with this great piece at Foreign Policy in Focus.
It's fpif.org, fpif.org, Behind Washington's Crackpot Deal with Turkey to Fight ISIS.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Con?
How are you doing, Scott?
I'm fine.
I'm doing good.
Very happy to have you back on the show here, and what a great piece.
Thanks for being one of the few people who understands this issue well enough to be as confused about it as I am, and to be able to explain to people, I think, as you do very well in this article, who's who and who's on what side.
So I guess if there's a beginning that we could start at, would it be 2011 and Turkey and America's role and Saudi and Israel and whoever else you want to talk about's role in the war that broke out in Syria there?
Well, that's really the beginning of this.
In other words, what you had was an effort to force a regime change in Syria, and this was part of the American strategy of, and not just the American strategy, the Saudi strategy, Israeli strategy, Turkish strategy, et cetera, of breaking the link between Syria and Iran.
They called it the Shiite crescent, which is that Iran, of course, is a mostly Shiite country.
Iraq is one of the few countries in the Middle East that has a Shiite majority.
Lebanon has a Shiite plurality.
It's not a majority.
And at that point, Iran and Syria had a very close kind of relationship.
So there was an effort to break this and to overthrow, get a regime change in Syria.
Now, Turkey originally was pretty friendly with Syria and they had a pretty good relationship, but the now president at that point, the prime minister of Turkey, Erdogan, sort of declared war on Syria and set out to overthrow the Syrian government.
And what's happened is that this recent agreement has essentially put us in the middle of the Syrian civil war.
But more than that, what it has done is, is that the Turks have maneuvered us into helping the Erdogan government get back into power because they essentially were, in the last election, they didn't get a majority.
They couldn't form a government.
There isn't a, there's a government that's still pending right now in Turkey.
And this is an effort, what Turkey is doing by this agreement, is this is an effort to create internal situations within Turkey that allows the Erdogan government to call for a new election and to reverse the results of this, of the 19, of the 2015 election.
So here we are essentially aiding an internal political maneuver within Turkey that is mainly directed not only at putting Erdogan back in power, but the way he's doing it is starting a war on the Kurds.
Well the Kurds are our one reliable ally in the Middle East against the Islamic State.
So essentially what we're doing is not only helping Erdogan get back into power, and that should be none of our business, that really should be up to the Turks, but we're also throwing our one reliable ally, the Kurds, under a bus.
So when I call the deal crackpot, I mean it really seriously is crackpot.
It's not even in our interests to do this.
And it's just going to create a mess worse than the one that we have right now.
All right, now, so when they, when the Turks first started bombing, I guess they hit a couple of ISIS targets for PR purposes, and then they went straight after the PKK in Iraq.
And then I think my best understanding is they've hit PKK targets inside Turkey, and as well as in Kobani, or very near Kobani on the Syrian side of the border.
But now they haven't picked a fight with the government of Iraqi Kurdistan, right?
Because I saw where, I don't know if it was Talabani or Barzani told the PKK, you guys get out.
They're trying to keep their relationship with Turkey intact, at least for now, and are willing to sacrifice the PKK.
Well, the largest trading partner for the Kurdish autonomous areas in northern Iraq is Turkey.
And what Turkey has allowed the Kurds to do is to ship oil from the oil fields of Kirkuk in the north by a pipeline, by a Turkish pipeline, out to the Mediterranean.
And Turks are using the oil.
They're also selling the oil, etc.
So the Kurds in northern Iraq don't want to have a major fight with Turkey.
At the same time, the Kurds in northern Iraq have to be very careful here because the Kurds are really angry at what's going on, what the Turks are doing.
Because by bombing the PKK, not just bombing the PKK in northern Iraq, as you said, they've also bombed their own Kurds in eastern Turkey, and they're attacking the PKK-affiliated resistance movement, Kurdish resistance movement in Syria.
These are the people that successfully defended Kobani from the Islamic front, Islamic State, and has been driving Islamic State militants out of town after town.
The Turks are worried about the fact that the Syrian Kurds are going to eventually develop a kind of a local autonomy there.
And the thing that the Turks fear the most is that eventually the Kurds in Iraq, in Syria, in Turkey, eastern Turkey, and also western Iran will form a whole autonomous region and even possibility of a state.
So here the Turks are.
They say that they're bombing the Islamic State.
They put up, at least the last thing I saw, they put up something like two strikes with a handful of airplanes.
In the meantime, they have been flattening the PKK in northern Iraq.
Now, as you say, this is really a complex situation.
So you have the Kurdish government in northern Iraq saying to the PKK, look, we don't want to fight with the Turks.
At the same time, the government in northern Iraq recognizes that the most effective fighters against the Islamic State are the PKK, not the Peshmerga, which is the army of the Iraqi autonomous area in northern Iraq.
So the Islamic State is trying to go after the Kurds.
The most effective guards against that are the PKK.
They're not going to lean on the PKK.
That is, the autonomous government in northern Iraq is not going to lean on the PKK very hard over the censure because they need the PKK.
Well, of course, the Turks would have nothing to worry about as far as Syrian Kurdish independence if they hadn't been back in the Al-Nusra Front in their war against Assad all this time.
So they dug their own grave as far as that goes.
Now, we've got to go out to this stupid break.
But when we come back, we're going to talk about that DIA report and a new interview of Michael Flynn, the head of the DIA at the time, and his comments to Al Jazeera about it.
It's Con Hallinan from Foreign Policy and Focus, fpif.org.
We'll be right back.
Hey, I'm Scott here for Samurai Tech Academy at MasterSamuraiTech.com.
Modern appliance repair requires true technicians who can troubleshoot their high-tech electronics.
If you're young and looking to make some real money, or you've been at it a while and just need to keep your skills up to date, Samurai Tech Academy teaches it all.
And they'll also show you the business, how to own and run your own.
Take a free sample course to see how easily you can learn appliance repair from MasterSamuraiTech.com.
Use coupon code SCOTTHORTON for 10% off any course or set of courses at MasterSamuraiTech.com.
All right, guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Con Hallinan from Foreign Policy and Focus.
He's got this great article behind Washington's crackpot deal with Turkey to fight ISIS.
It's all so crazy.
It's barely comprehensible.
But no, really, it's true.
And Con, before we go on, I want to hear this.
And I think you'll want to hear this, too.
There's the DIA memo that was unearthed by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act request a few weeks back.
And a guy named Brad Hoff from LevantReport.com has been doing a lot of work on it.
And now Al Jazeera has an interview with Michael Flynn, who was the head of the DIA at the time that the memo was written.
And this was the one where they, quite frankly, warned in August of 2012 of the rise of the Islamic State before they were even calling themselves that again in eastern Syria and possibly dangerously even Iraq.
And so this isn't the whole thing or anything, but I just wanted to play about a minute or so of General Michael Flynn, now retired, the former head of the DIA on Al Jazeera.
We were going to let me let me just one before we move on.
Just to clarify once more, you are basically saying that even in government at the time you knew those groups were around.
You saw this analysis and you were arguing against it.
But who wasn't listening?
I think I think the administration.
The administration turned a blind eye to your analysis.
I don't know if they turned a blind eye.
I think it was a decision.
I think it was a willful decision, a willful decision to go support an insurgency that had Salafists, Al-Qaeda, a decision to do what they're doing, which which you have to really you'd have to really ask the president, what is it that he actually is doing with with the policy that is in place?
Because it is.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry, we don't want to go too far into that.
And of course, Michael Flynn himself is a hawk who wants war with Iran and the Islamic State and all kinds of crazy stuff.
But there he is, the head of the DIA.
I think if we know one thing for certain from that exchange, it is that that is not just some flunkies memo from the bowels of the DIA that no one ever knew about or cared about or paid any attention to.
Michael Flynn apparently was paying close attention to it.
And he's saying that, you know, this was no ignorant mistake.
They knew damn well that the field was dominated by jihadists and they went on anyway for years now.
And in fact, Con, the president of the United States just said three weeks ago that Assad must step down for the beginning of any kind of settlement, that that we must have regime change to start.
It's madness.
And it continues.
How do you explain this?
Well, I think that this demand that Assad step down and I'm no fan of Assad.
I think the demand that Assad step down is it is a deliberate demand that its purpose is to torpedo any possibility of a diplomatic settlement because no government is going to voluntarily resign.
This is the situation you had in Libya as well.
And so the idea that you have to start by the head of the government resigning is is a nonstarter.
And sort of everyone knows that.
I mean, this is this is very, very clear by all of the kind of independent observers of the situation.
And as far as knowing about that, the Islamic State, look, the United States supported the budget in Afghanistan.
And and the Mujahideen eventually became the Taliban.
Here we are fighting the Taliban, in theory, anyhow, in in Afghanistan.
And a lot of the kind of washover from the Mujahideen who fought in Afghanistan was the core of the people who originally set up first Al-Qaeda, then Al-Qaeda in Iraq and Al-Qaeda in the in the Arabian Peninsula.
All of these groups are are are have metastasized from our original support for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to attack the Soviet occupation.
And and we've known that all the way along.
So this whole thing that we're that we're supporting the moderates in in Syria, there are no moderates in Syria.
I mean, the the pardon me, Syrian army is is, you know, it's it's a couple of hundred people.
Sure.
Let's get back to the moderates here in just a moment.
But as far as supporting the Mujahideen and that kind of thing.
Yeah.
But and it shouldn't go without saying, and I know it sort of does, and everybody knows this, but I just feel like maybe it's important to bring up that then they bombed the World Trade Center.
Then they bombed the Khobar Towers in Saudi.
Then they bombed the African embassies.
Then they bombed the coal.
Then they tried to bomb LAX.
Then they bombed the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.
And then they finally became our enemies after all of that.
And we've been fighting over there in the name of denying them a safe haven for 15 years.
So don't skip all that when you go from.
Yeah, you know, they worked for us in the 80s and now they work for us again.
These are actually the only enemies that the American people have on this planet are al-Qaeda.
And yet we're on their side in Syria.
Absolutely.
There are guys and and we deny that.
But that is objectively the case.
We are essentially supporting an al-Qaeda takeover of Syria.
And if that happens, if the Syrian government collapses, which is a possibility, you're going to have a vacuum.
And somehow we've got this idea that these, quote, moderate forces who are completely marginal to the war that's going on in Syria, that these marginal forces are going to take over.
I mean, this is like believing in unicorns.
I mean, it's a nice thing, but you don't want to try and make a living at doing it.
And and the thing is that what you will have is is that you will have a very powerful state.
You know, Syria is at the Libby is off there on the edges.
Syria is right in the middle of the heart of the Middle East.
Twenty five million people.
Borders on Jordan, borders on Lebanon, borders on Turkey, borders on on Israel.
You know, this is this is really the heart in many ways that has been historically of the Middle East.
This is going to be in the hands of al-Qaeda people.
And we are the people who are going to make it possible to bring it around, because even if we're not directly aiding them, what we're doing is that we're supporting the Gulf Cooperation Council, specifically United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar and Kuwait that are providing arms and money to the al-Qaeda people.
And and we're allowing that to happen.
We're pouring arms into the Gulf monarchies, and those monarchies are turning around and giving those arms to al-Qaeda in Syria.
So we're really funding, basically, the creation of an al-Qaeda state in this heart of the Middle East.
I mean, that's really crackpot.
Yeah, it's crazy.
Well, and now the thing is, is they haven't been able to take any of the major cities.
I mean, Idlib is basically a small town.
And the if not Assad himself, but his government and his army have the support of all the Christians, all the Shia, all the Druze, all the Alawites, of course, and most of the Sunnis still are under the, you know, at least, you know, tacitly are supporting the government because their opposition are a bunch of head shopping suicide bombers.
So here we are after four years of this.
We're still at stalemate, even after the declaration of the Islamic State and after all the foreign aid to the Al-Nusra Front and the other, you know, Arar al-Sham and whatever crap.
But so it would take, I think, really what almost happened two years ago of an American bombing campaign to drive Assad out of power.
And it's looking now, Khan, like that is no longer out of the question.
They've they found their loophole.
Forget the bogus sarin attack from two years ago.
Now they've got their two dozen moderates and anyone who attacks them is subject to American protection.
And there's your new loophole straight to Damascus.
Well, that that's absolutely that's exactly what why that was such a worrisome statement that they were going to protect the free Syrian army from attacks by the Assad government.
I mean, this is a civil war.
You know, there are sides that are horrible guys, sides that are not so horrible and sides that are still bad, but maybe not quite so horrible, whatever.
But it's a civil war.
And what we're doing is we're taking sides now in the civil war directly, not just support, not just giving money, not just giving, you know, equipment and stuff like that.
But we're directly militarily involved in supporting one side in this civil war.
And the fact is, you're right about it being a stalemate.
I don't see any kind of collapse happening quickly.
I could be wrong.
I don't think it's going to happen.
I think it's going to go on for a long time.
There already been to something like 240,000 people killed in this war.
There are, you know, hundreds of thousands of others wounded.
There are more than a million refugees.
There are something like between three and four million people that have been displaced.
I mean, it's just an absolute tragedy.
It's just this horrible tragedy.
And essentially what we're doing is we're prolonging it.
And instead of taking the position Assad has got to go, therefore the war is going to continue.
All you have to do is stand back and say, look, if there's going to be a compromise here, all the parties are going to have to sit down.
And we can't make a demand that a government voluntarily resign.
They haven't lost a civil war yet.
And that's the political solution.
And what's most interesting of all, Scott, is really the only force which is really capable of taking on the Islamic State is the Syrian army.
The Turks are not going to go in militarily to fight the IS.
They basically support them.
In any case, there's no support in that for Turkey at all.
The Iraqi army is demoralized and corrupt.
They're not going to do anything.
The single most kind of together force that's capable of taking on the Islamic State is the Syrian army.
And now we're going to be bombing it?
I mean, they say crackpot.
What can I say?
It's just crackpot.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, now, so I'm sorry I'm keeping you over just a minute here.
But why?
And in fact, before you answer that, let me say one thing about it so you don't have to waste your time on that part of it.
Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg back in 2012, you're right, Jeffrey, bringing down Assad would be a great way to bring Iran down a peg in the region and all that.
And that's good for Israel, who you're here to represent.
Blah, blah, blah.
Right.
We all know that part of it.
But Saudi, Turkey, Israel, they all hate Assad and hate Iran, hate Hezbollah.
So they want to weaken Assad.
That's all fine.
And that's all understandable, really.
I guess people say that the Saudis and the I should learn more about this.
The Saudis and the Qataris may be working together or the Saudis going around the Qataris are trying to make a pipeline through Syria to Turkey.
And Assad was standing in the way of that.
But none of these things sound important enough to me that the emperor of the United States of America can't say to our satellite states, sorry, not good enough.
Uncle Sam overrules because we hate Al-Qaeda more.
And so I'm not saying, you know, I would support a George W.
Bush policy of paying Assad to torture and murder these guys.
But at least we don't have to back the Bin Ladenites against him.
And so, you know, why is it?
Is it just because of the Israel lobby in D.C.?
Is the only reason Obama's doing this?
Or because somebody in the State Department has another reason to hate Assad this much?
Or what the hell?
Well, I'll tell you, I do believe that there are big divisions in in the Obama administration.
And you do have a big wing of the Obama administration that wants that agrees with Turkey and wants to see Assad overthrow.
And that's only partly related to to Israel.
That's also part that's also related to the fact that they would love them.
We would like to have the monarchs in charge.
Monarchs are easier to deal with.
I mean, there's just one to one kind of thing.
And and we see it as a stabilizing force in the Middle East.
And so there's a wing that would that that really is focusing on Assad.
There's another wing.
And Obama is part of that, too.
That sees an opening with Iran as a very important kind of political breakthrough for the region.
You know, Iran traditionally has been our guys.
They were always our guys in the past until the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
They were Iran were our guys.
And we were very close to them in in the Iraq-Iran war.
And we supported clandestinely.
We supported the Iraqis in that war against Iran, which they haven't forgotten about it.
That's why I say this is crackpot.
There are several policies which are at absolute loggerheads here and and and they're slamming up against themselves.
For instance, Israel's pushing to overthrow the agreement with Iran.
The administration, part of the administration, is deeply committed to getting that agreement in place.
Now, that's a kind of a contradiction to the idea that, you know, the Israeli lobby runs American foreign policy.
It doesn't.
The U.S. will support Israel when it's in the interests of the U.S. to support Israel.
And Israel has been our spear carrier on many occasions in the Middle East.
Really?
What about the Iraq war?
That wasn't born in Ariel Sharon's office?
Oh, listen, there's no question that that that that that we have that we have done a lot of the Middle East to support Israel.
That's not what I'm saying.
It was in our interest to overthrow Iraq.
It wasn't our government thought.
So anyway, I understand what you mean.
And so what I'm simply saying is when our government, when our two policies come together, then we will support Israel.
Absolutely.
What's interesting about this fight around Iran is let's see where this goes.
Yeah, I like seeing this split.
In fact, real division here.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's really good to see, especially the way Obama put it yesterday that like, hey, I think Americans should should listen when the Israelis complain about some.
But I'm just here to tell you, I'm the president of America.
And so sorry, our interests are different than theirs.
And that's about the frankest discussion of that on that level we've probably ever had in America since Reagan's diary or something.
And what's interesting is and I see the Israeli lobby went crazy on this one is he said the people who are opposed to this agreement are the people who supported the war in Iraq.
Right.
Which is absolutely true.
Absolutely.
I'm sorry.
Listen, we got it.
We got to cut it here, Con.
But you're great, man.
I sure appreciate you coming on the show today.
Sure.
Anytime.
Great to talk to you again, everybody.
That is the great Con Hallinan.
And he's at FPIF and antiwar dot com today.
It's behind Washington's crackpot deal with Turkey to fight ISIS.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
It's always safe to say that one should keep at least some of your savings and precious metals as a hedge against inflation.
And if this economy ever does heat back up and the banks start expanding credit, rising prices could make metals a very profitable bet.
Since 1977, Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc.has been helping people buy and sell gold, silver, platinum and palladium.
And they do it well.
They're fast, reliable and trusted for more than 35 years.
And they take Bitcoin.
Call Roberts and Roberts at 1-800-874-9760 or stop by our RBI dot CEO.
Hey, I'll check out the audio book of Lou Rockwell's fascism versus capitalism narrated by me, Scott Horton at Audible dot com.
It's a great collection of his essays and speeches on the important tradition of liberty from medieval history to the Ron Paul Revolution.
Rockwell blasts our status enemies, profiles our greatest libertarian heroes and prescribes the path forward in the battle against Leviathan fascism versus capitalism by Lou Rockwell for audio book.
Find it at Audible, Amazon, iTunes or just click in the right margin of my website at Scott Horton dot org.
Hey, all Scott here.
If you're like me, you need coffee.
Lots of it.
You probably prefer taste good, too.
Well, let me tell you about Darren's Coffee Company at Darren's Coffee dot com.
Darren Marion is a natural entrepreneur who decided to leave his corporate job and strike out on his own, making great coffee.
And Darren's Coffee is now delivering right to your door.
Darren gets his beans direct from farmers around the world, all specialty, premium grade with no filler.
Hey, the man just wants everyone to have a chance to taste this great coffee.
Darren's Coffee dot com.
Use promo code Scott and get free shipping.
Darren's Coffee dot com.