For Pacifica Radio, September 22nd, 2019.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all, it is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I'm the editorial director of antiwar.com.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org.
Alright, introducing the great Max Blumenthal.
He is the author of Goliath and the 51 Day War, co-producer of the great documentary Killing Gaza, which is absolutely essential.
His latest book, of course, is The Management of Savagery.
He runs the Grayzone Project, which features Ben Norton and their great podcast, The Moderate Rebels.
The great Aaron Maté is over there.
The great, great, great.
Welcome back, Max.
How are you?
Good.
Good to be back.
Very happy to have you here.
Now, you wrote this very important article here about Iran sanctions.
It's called, Meet the Militantly Pro-Israel Trump Official Directing the Economic War on Iran.
But that's got to wait, because I want to talk to you about your recent trip to Syria.
I admit I haven't even been able to keep up with your Twitter feed on the subject, or anything, so please just hit us and tell us all about what happened there.
Well, I went to a conference of the General Trade Union Forum, which is an annual conference that brings together Syria's one major labor union, which is 300,000 workers, with other unionists from the African continent, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, the U.S. and Canada, for an event to discuss the impact of sanctions and unilateral coercive measures on Syrian workers, along with how the proxy war on Syria devastated Syrian workers, and how civil service workers who worked for the government were specifically targeted by the armed opposition.
So it was a two-day conference held outside Damascus.
It was held under the auspices of the Syrian government.
So me going there, or pretty much anyone going there from a NATO member state, this is a very controversial thing to do.
We were harshly attacked.
Don LaFleur, who is the Canadian representative, who's actually the vice president of the Canadian Labor Congress, which is the largest union in Canada, is now facing basically a hate campaign to oust him from his position for going and denouncing sanctions.
But it gave me access to the area of Syria where most Syrians live, which is government-controlled territory, the Damascus area.
And basically after this two-day conference, I was left on my own.
There were no government minders.
There wasn't any control.
A friend of mine who's an independent businessman, has no connection to the government, showed me around, and other people showed me around parts of the country.
I stayed in the old city, and I really got to see for myself what life was like for Syrians after the war.
I also learned about an aspect of the war that just wasn't as intimate to me, just reading about it and watching it on various YouTube videos and trying to understand it any way I could remotely.
But being in the old city, and being in a Christian area of the old city at the Eastern Gate, and then walking across the highway and going into areas where I wasn't supposed to be because they're highly sensitive.
There are military checkpoints everywhere.
They don't want someone like me who's an outsider going in there.
And getting in and being able to talk to people in these areas where you see ruins just maybe half a kilometer in the distance, just destroyed buildings.
And people tell me what it was like to live under the control of these Wahhabi militias backed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, like Jaysh al-Islam.
It really hits home.
And when you're talking to them, you're a few hundred meters away from a Christian area where Christians fled Roman persecution, where Saul became Saint Paul.
And you really understand how close Damascus came to being overrun by genocidal elements and figures like Zahran Alush, the Wahhabi fanatic who led Jaysh al-Islam and said it was his mission to cleanse Syria of religious minorities.
So that was a really remarkable experience.
Also being able to go 65 kilometers out of Damascus to this town called Malula, which dates back to the 5th century, to the Byzantine period.
And it's the only place on earth where people speak Aramaic.
I think half the town was cast as extras in The Passion of the Christ.
And you can actually hear Aramaic prayers emanate from the churches there.
Muslims in the town also speak Aramaic.
They were not Arabized.
And they've lived in harmony with these Christians for hundreds of years.
But this town was taken over by Al-Qaeda's local affiliate in 2013.
And I got to meet a nun who was kidnapped by Al-Qaeda.
I got to talk to people in one of the most historic towns or places on earth, where the catacombs where Christians hid from the Romans are still sort of intact in the mountains.
And that was all almost destroyed by the proxy war imposed on Syria.
So, you know, I was able to gain this kind of intimate familiarity with the experience that a lot of Syrians had, and how close they came to having their culture and their history just simply wiped away.
It really has stuck with me since I've left.
All right.
Now, so many points there to go back over.
First of all, just for point of clarity, you're saying at the beginning there, that even though you're an anti-war guy, there are people who are holding it against you that you are from the United States or from a NATO country when this whole war has essentially been...
Go ahead.
No, no, there was no anti-Americanism to be detected from Syrians.
What I'm talking about is, you know, those of us who come from the Imperial Corps, we got attacked by back home.
We face online hate campaigns.
Whereas, you know, there was a union rep from South Africa who had been in Robben Island with Nelson Mandela, and he had no issue being there, and he wasn't going to be attacked because the rest of the world and the global South sees Syria as an anti-imperialist ally.
So that's what I mean.
Right.
Okay.
I'm glad you clarified that.
And then, but so it goes to what you were just saying there then about this war being a proxy war, not a civil war, not an uprising.
But, you know, it's 2019, more than halfway through now, and this is all ancient history, 2011 through 15.
So why don't you remind us a little bit, Jaysh al-Islam, are these our moderate rebels we're looking for here?
This was a group run by Saudi Arabia that was just directed by Saudi Arabia to the point where a Saudi Arabian prince actually ordered Jaysh al-Islam to carry out a missile strike on the airport in Damascus.
And they did so.
You know, there was a group called the al-Rahman Brigade, which I think was vetted by the Institute for the Study of War and the different kind of CIA cutouts in Washington that vetted the moderate rebels.
But they controlled an area called Ain Turma, which was right next to Ghouta, which was controlled by Jaysh al-Islam.
And al-Rahman was mostly funded by Qatar.
So because they were funded by competitive, you know, Gulf competitors, these two groups would actually fight.
And some 1,000 fighters and bystanders were killed while they were fighting in the Damascus suburbs.
And then, you know, they were lobbying mortars into Damascus, constantly killing civilians.
I was in a carpet shop in the old city talking to a guy about, you know, he said, you know, I haven't seen any Americans here in a long time.
And I said, I asked him about the war and he said, yeah, mortar fell right outside the shop two years ago.
A guy was outside playing dominoes with his friends and the mortar fell right between his legs and his body parts exploded all over the store.
So that was the kind of the experience that people in Damascus had with these groups that were just hundreds of meters away, a few kilometers away.
And these groups did not want to negotiate with the Syrian government because their pay masters in the Gulf told them not to.
They wanted them to fragment the state, to weaken Syria as much as possible.
And so ultimately the Syrian army and its allies carpet bombed the Damascus suburbs.
And I was able to drive through there on a highway, on the highway that cuts through these areas and there's nothing left.
I mean, it looks like the apocalypse.
Every building is destroyed.
I was told some people have still been forced to live in there because they have nowhere else to go, but most everyone else has left.
They've gone to Damascus and they're internally displaced or they've become refugees and gone abroad.
And this was sort of the only solution for a government that had Vietnam era weapons.
And so now it's hard to get in those areas.
I wasn't able to go in like I was into the destroyed areas of Gaza because there are military checkpoints everywhere.
They don't want me in there.
The Syrian government doesn't want reporters to show this because it's sort of seen as a tragedy or they could be accused of a war crime.
But the country for the most part is at peace.
And what I saw were people enjoying their lives for the first time in years and going to sort of resort areas outside Damascus, hanging out in restaurants and bars.
And at the same time, they're coping with what they describe as the next phase of the war, which is the economic war.
The U.S. has ratcheted up sanctions on Syria.
I think they might be the most ruthless sanctions in the world where they've not only prevented Iran and other countries from sending oil to Syria, they have occupied Syria's own oil fields with the Kurdish militias that the U.S. is backing.
And then the U.S. is maintaining troops on the Syrian-Iraqi border, which is preventing trade between Syria and one of its historic economic partners.
So one businessman said to me, it's like the U.S. pushed a button and destroyed our economy.
And it worked.
They did it.
Before the war, the Syrian pound to dollar exchange rate was 45 pounds to a dollar.
Now the exchange rate is like 650 pounds to the dollar.
The buying power of the Syrian consumer has been completely shattered.
Last winter, heating fuel wasn't available to many Syrians, and they just spent the winter in the cold.
There was scenes of Syrian cities paralyzed, ground to a halt, because gasoline wasn't available for several weeks.
And so the sanctions are affecting the average Syrians, regardless of what they think about their government.
But it's not affecting the Assad family and their inner circle, or businessmen like Rami Makhlouf, who are part of the government's inner circle.
It's affecting average people, and it is not in any way impacting the government's ability to rule.
Now, as you well know, Max, the narrative here is that Assad is at least as bad or worse than Saddam Hussein, that essentially there's just no contest.
Whoever his opponents are, even if it's Jolani and Baghdadi, that they're nothing compared to the monstrous fascist state of secular Syria, a la white, held Syria.
And it is a fascist state after all, although a secular one that protects all these different religious minorities, the Christians and the Shiites and the Druze and other groups that you've been mentioning here.
So what do you say to that?
I mean, for one example, I don't want to get too far into Tulsi Gabbard, but as this is the number one smear topic against her, is that she met with Assad.
Now, this is while Trump is in the middle of meeting with Kim, and while everybody wishes he would meet with the Ayatollah, and that we could have peace in the world, but this is the absolutely disqualifying aspect of Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, supposedly, is that she went and met with this monster Assad, and that in the American version of this war, he is still by far the worst guy.
And here, even after he won the war, essentially, we just ratchet up the economic war and refuse to accept the fact that we backed, first of all, the wrong side, and second of all, the losing side in this thing.
Yeah, it's just a childish view of a conflict that was imposed on Syria, and it demonstrates a complete lack of accountability by the most powerful forces that really forced the Syrian government's hand and triggered this.
I mean, if you want to talk about repression, if you want to talk about the carpet bombing of Ghouta, that would have never happened if billions of dollars of weapons weren't pouring into the country to take over these areas with Wahhabi militias who were executing people in the streets, who were slaughtering religious minorities who no one really wanted, who have no popularity now, and no constituency.
And just from having personally spoke to people who lived under their rule, it's just they speak like they escaped from hell, like they were in prison, but they were in a prison of our own making, of the U.S.'s making and the making of its Gulf allies.
And so when the Syrian government is blamed for, I mean, I wouldn't say they won the war, but for defeating at least the proxies of these superpowers, it just shows a complete lack of reflectiveness on our part and a lack of accountability.
And so do the attacks on Tulsi Gabbard.
Tulsi Gabbard's trip to Syria, I think, was her finest moment.
And it's sad that she's been afraid to really double down and to frame it that way, because what she was trying to do was what any diplomat from the West should have done, which is to recognize that the government wasn't going to fall, that even if it had, it would not have been replaced by some Jeffersonian Democrats.
It would have been replaced by a collection of warlords who would have destroyed the country as Afghanistan was in the 1990s.
And the migration crisis would have been 10 times worse.
What Tulsi Gabbard did was she tried to end the proxy war.
She introduced the Stop Arming Terrorists Act in Congress, which sadly only picked up like 13 co-sponsors, where she was basically going to go into the black budget of the CIA and the House Appropriations Committee and say, this can't be directed to Ahrar al-Sham or Jaysh al-Islam or any of these fanatical groups anymore.
Let's start de-escalating the conflict.
And instead she's painted as some kind of, that she loves dictators.
There's really no attempt to understand what she did.
And that was the only way to end the conflict, is to accept that the government was going to stay in place and to stop flooding the country with weapons.
The other part of it is that we nearly fueled a genocide.
And that's what I was talking about at the opening of our discussion.
You can say what you want about Bashar al-Assad.
There's a ton of criticism that I heard of him from loyalist elements, particularly about corruption.
And it's not really about him or his inner circle.
It's more about the security state, the security apparatus and corruption, and the kind of business cronies that are around it.
But what he did was he kept the country together and he prevented the erasure, the complete erasure of Christian communities, Shia communities, Alawite communities, and Sunnis who are suffering under the rebels, the complete erasure of their heritage.
And we've seen that take place in so many other places in the Middle East, whether it was the kind of disappearance of Jews during the 1960s and 70s from countries from Lebanon to Egypt, Syria as well, to the collapse of the Chaldean Christian community in Iraq.
And that hasn't happened in Syria.
And I think that was an achievement.
When you talk to loyalists in Damascus, people who support the government, one of the things they emphasize the most is how important it is to have this cultural and religious mosaic that's really at the base of their Syrian identity.
One person I spoke to whose father, I'm sorry, his grandfather helped found the Syrian army.
He talked about Syrian society like a rosary, and every bead represents a different sect or religious group.
And he said that what the opposition wanted to do was to break the string of the rosary and have all of those beads separate.
And the rosary managed to hold together.
So that's something to think about.
It is a police state.
It is a dictatorship.
It's a one party state, but it's also a pluralistic society, which stands in contrast to a lot of other places in the Middle East that have been fully destroyed.
Yeah.
Remember America's moderate rebels, the Al-Farouk Brigade, they wanted to hold regular elections, but also here's footage of their commander eating a dead soldier's heart.
But otherwise though, they're good Democrats and we could count on them to usher in a new age of freedom for the thing.
And here's the thing too, I want to go back to what you said about how it's too bad, nevermind for her campaign, but for truth and reality in our society that Tulsi Gabbard does not relish the opportunity to answer the question about Assad every time and just say, let me explain to you about that war there and why you're damn right he was the lesser of evils when you compare him against Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, who wants to suicide bomb every last Christian and Druze off the face of the earth, which would leave any CNN hairdo lady standing there completely speechless.
They don't know anything about the war or what they're talking about.
It's actually not a hard, it's not a tough one.
When she was getting badgered by Meghan McCain, why couldn't she have just whipped out a photo of John McCain with Salami Dries and two fanatical militia members who had kidnapped Shia pilgrims just a few days before during McCain's first illegal trip into Syria?
Why couldn't she have done that?
And who later kidnapped and sold Steven Sotloff to ISIS who cut his head off.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's that too.
The Northern Storm Brigade.
And by the way, Max, and anyone can Google this up, the Northern Storm Brigade before John McCain met with them, they had already been interviewed by Time Magazine months before, or I think six weeks before, and it was on the internet where they were bragging that, yes, they were veterans of Iraq War II, where they fought with Zarqawi against the Americans.
Yeah.
I don't know how Meghan McCain would have come back from that one.
But, you know, one person who knows Tulsi Gabbard and has interviewed her several times, kind of commented to me that he didn't think she was ready for these attacks.
And they've kind of taken her by surprise.
Yeah.
And I think that's really unfortunate because what did she expect?
Of course, that was the first card they were going to whip out.
And the whole point of her campaign should have been to hammer anyone who attacked her on that as, you know, pro-war, you know, basically the permanent war lobby.
Right.
But she sort of backed away from it.
And after all, why is she good on it?
She's good on it because she was stationed at the Balad Air Base during Iraq War II, which means that in these different contests, she knows enough to be able to tell the shirts from the skins who's on whose side and what does it mean.
So when someone says to her, yes, of course, we have to prefer al-Qaeda to Assad because Assad is allied with Hezbollah and Iran.
She says, I don't care about that.
No, sorry.
Bin Laden knights are my enemy, not Hezbollah, who did not knock our towers down.
Right.
Right.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I haven't heard her really ram that message home.
No, I know.
I really wish she would, too, because there's such a gap between the truth that you're explaining here and the narrative the way TV has it.
She should see that as an advantage for her to just smash that gap closed with the truth.
Yeah, there's that.
And then there's the issue of sanctions where she's been the only candidate to really talk about how sanctions are not only ineffective, but they're lethal.
And at the same time, she hasn't emphasized the point enough.
And I don't think Americans understand what sanctions are, what they do.
But, you know, Syria's medical sector is suffering badly because of sanctions.
It's and it's one of the better medical sectors in the Middle East.
But, you know, they're starting to have trouble treating cancer patients.
And, you know, in Venezuela, the situation is far, far worse because of sanctions.
I think the public health care system is just in a state of complete freefall.
Right.
So I thought there's a big opportunity for Tulsi Gabbard now that she's out of the debates.
It's unclear what else she can do.
But she didn't go hard and she didn't seem ready for it.
So it's a little bit of a disappointment.
And something I've learned in taking on these issues is that if you give the other side an inch, they're just going to take a mile.
I mean, you just don't.
And I'm sorry, Max, speaking of which, and I don't really have time to give this full justice on the show, but I do want to give you a chance to talk about this important article at the Grayzone Project.
Meet the militantly pro-Israel Trump official directing the economic war on Iran.
So, you know, describe the economic war heavy and her role light.
But I do want to hear about Seagal Mandelker.
Is that it?
Yeah.
Seagal Mandelker.
And, you know, she is basically the head of a department within Treasury that was founded by her mentor during the second Bush administration, Stuart Levy, who is a pro-Israel ideologue like her that presides over the economic war on Iran.
Now, this division of the Treasury Department, OFAC, was really initially started after 9-11, and it was justified on the basis of taking on al-Qaeda's financial network.
But, you know, these pro-Israel ideologues did very little on the Sunni extremist side and were really focused on Iran and Hezbollah, because those are the two forces that are most capable of militarily resisting Israel.
So Mandelker comes in in the Trump administration in 2017 and begins sanctioning pretty much everything associated with Iran.
And what I focused on was one of the most absurd sanction designations, which is the New Horizon Conference or the New Horizon Organization, basically founded by an Iranian intellectual, Nader Talebzadeh, who is a popular TV host in Iran.
He's a filmmaker.
And his wife, Zeyneb Mahana, who is a Lebanese writer and researcher, they host people from the West, mostly Americans.
Some people who've come on your show, like Phil Giraldi, have been to the conference.
And, you know, they host some people that I consider sort of a little bit toxic and suspect.
I think Alexander Dugin has been there, the sort of Russian syncretic proto-fascist.
But they bring people together just to have open discussions at a public media conference, usually in Iran.
I think Peter Van Buren went last year.
He's a frequent guest on your show and he wrote about it in Reuters.
And, you know, so you can, you know, argue with the politics of the conference.
You can criticize it.
But how it became a target for sanctions is such a bizarre story.
And it really exposes the fanaticism inside the Treasury Department that's embodied in Sigal Mandelker, someone who has been rumored in the Jewish press, you know, Jewish-oriented publications and in Israeli publications to herself be Israeli, which would be highly unusual.
I don't know how you get a security clearance when you have dual nationality.
And the Treasury Department has refused to answer whether she's Israeli or not.
But the way that these sanctions came about, I don't even know if there's time to explain.
Basically, a former Air Force counterintelligence officer named Monica Witt, who left the Air Force in 2008, but had served in really highly sensitive places, including Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, who had become fluent in Farsi, wanted to defect either to Iran or Russia and to become kind of the next Edward Snowden and to reveal the identities of undercover U.S. intelligence operatives and whatever else she'd learned.
Because what she had witnessed while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan horrified her and turned her against her country.
She wanted to basically take on the U.S. war machine by going to the other side.
She came into contact with Marzia Hashemi, who you might remember earlier this year was the press TV anchor who was detained in St. Louis and became this kind of civil liberties cause celeb because no one knew why the U.S. was holding her.
It turned out that she had met Hashemi at a conference that was not a New Horizon conference, but was sort of similar to it.
It was a conference in 2012 called Hollywoodism, where a bunch of Western dissident types and Iranian intellectuals got together to complain about the film Argo and about Iranian portrayals in Hollywood.
Monica Witt appeared at the conference and then she started corresponding with Hashemi, the press TV anchor, asking her, can you get me a visa?
Can you get me into Iran so I can defect and do this?
Hashemi began assisting her and apparently was working various channels in the IRGC to do it.
So this is why she was detained.
She was a material witness in the case against Monica Witt.
Basically, Nader Talebzadeh and his wife Zayna Mohana, because they ran the New Horizon conference, because they were at the conference that Monica Witt, the defector, was at, they were targeted by Mandelker and labeled as global terrorists, which is just absurd.
And as a result, Americans, including former national security professionals who had attended this conference, like Michael Maloof, who you might remember from the Bush administration, he served in the Pentagon, began getting visited by the FBI.
All right, everybody, that is Max Blumenthal.
He wrote Goliath and the 51 Day War, and he co-produced the great documentary Killing Gaza.
His latest book is The Management of Savagery, and you can find him at TheGreyZone.com.
Thanks again, Max.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
And that has been Antiwar Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in LA.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org.
See you next week.
