Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and get the fingered at 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 hacked.
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 us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN, like, say our names, been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Hey, everybody on the line, I got the great Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
He is the news editor at antiwar.com, of course, and keeping track of all the different wars.
And man, there's a lot of them.
Sometimes when I'm listening to them, I forget some.
But not Jason, he's on it.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, man?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining me here.
So Idlib province, this is where the last of the al-Qaeda guys are.
And I guess Arar al-Sham and whoever else up there in the northwest of Syria, the last holdout of the American, Saudi, Israeli, Turkish, CIA, al-Qaeda forces there.
And there was about to be an assault.
And then they called it off because Assad and Putin, or I guess Erdogan, was it all three of them?
Anyway, somebody, they made a damn deal.
So who made the deal?
And what deal did they make, Jason?
Well, it was mostly Turkey and Russia made a deal.
And the deal was there wouldn't be an offensive.
They would form a new demilitarized zone that's carved out of some of the rebel territory in Idlib.
The rebels would all have to leave that territory.
And they would also have to remove all the heavy weapons that they have in that territory so that they don't have.
Basically, so none of their artillery is in range of the Syrian military or any Syrian towns.
And so I guess, so I was talking with Patrick Coburn and he was saying that the more Turkish, I think the more Turkish sponsored, not directly al-Qaeda forces were in positions in the south and the al-Qaeda forces were closer to Turkey.
Or maybe I have that the other way around.
Can you help me visualize where the, which is which, if you know, and where the deconfliction zone or whatever the new disarmament zone is?
Well, my understanding is there are kind of three groups.
There's one Islamist group that's not al-Qaeda, but is basically al-Qaeda.
They're kind of an al-Qaeda light umbrella group that is right where the demilitarized zone is going to be.
And that's al-Rasham or something different?
It's something different now.
I'm not sure.
I don't recall what it's called, but they keep changing their names and forming different umbrella groups.
Right.
They're kind of right where the deconfliction zone is meant to be.
Al-Qaeda slash Nusra Front slash Tahrir al-Rasham is sort of a little bit to the north and also to the east further.
And then the Turkish groups, they kind of are all over the place, but they're mostly in the north, both in Idlib and in Aleppo.
So while Russia and Turkey never officially announced exactly where the demilitarized zone is going to begin and end, it's kind of assumed that that third Islamist group was going to lose pretty much all their territory in it.
So unsurprisingly, they said they don't like the deal and they're not going to go along with it.
Well, now, that's kind of how this has worked out all along, right?
Where the less bin Ladenite groups end up surrendering and then the last of the holdouts get blasted.
Maybe the last few survivors of them get bussed off to Idlib, but that's up until now.
But so, I don't know, maybe that means that all but the worst of them will be spared, but the worst of them won't.
Right.
I mean, that's kind of been the ideal for a lot of these groups that have been engaged in anti-jihadist operations across Syria, which the U.S. was very clear that that was their goal, fighting ISIS in Syria.
All the talk of what are we going to do with all these survivors, and there were U.S. officials that were very public about, well, we don't think there are going to be any survivors, so we're not going to have to deal with it.
But of course, there are always survivors, and then there was no plan in place for how to deal with them.
And I'm sure that's going to happen in Idlib as well.
If and when an offensive does happen, groups like Al-Qaeda aren't going to be totally wiped out.
Right.
Yeah, they're going to live to fight another day, but then the question is where?
I mean, if these are the leftovers from Iraq War II, and the worst of the enemy in Iraq War II were the leftovers from the war in Afghanistan, then what's going to happen next?
And we've already seen quite a preview of this.
It was the first one in 2013 or in 2012, the first attack against that Jewish community center in Brussels was the first direct blowback attack from the Syria war.
And there were quite a few in Europe since then.
So, yeah, it's a whole new generation of enemies to fight there, if you want, at some point.
And no matter what, right?
Like, even if you drop a bunch of daisy cutters on them or MOABs or what have you, there's still going to be thousands of these guys already who've melted away.
And maybe some of them are going to go back home to France and go back to work at their dad's store or something.
But maybe not.
And they don't have to necessarily be sleeper cells to just be battle-hardened jihadists now who can follow their own orders.
Right.
And they're not only battle-hardened, they've also got a whole bunch of new contacts that they didn't have before.
So they know who to call to get the right weapons and they know if they need to conduct an operation that's bigger than something they could do as a lone wolf.
They know where to find those people as well.
Yeah.
Remember that one, I don't know if we ever found out if this was really true or not, but it sure rang true, when the FBI arrested this kid on a, I don't know if he was a kid, a young man on a terrorist attack plot.
And his father complained, I don't know if the lawyer ever really tried this in court or not or if the judge would allow him to or what the details, but I know the father claimed in the newspaper that, wait, he was recruited by the CIA to go fight on the side of the good guys against Assad.
Isn't that our policy?
But to the FBI, they're like, no, that's conspiring to go and provide material support to terrorists who are on the State Department terrorist list.
So that's a felony, dude.
You're going to prison.
These guys didn't quite have their act together, what their narrative was yet.
Right, because, of course, almost all US arming that has gone on in Syria since the war began has boiled down to that, arming terrorist groups.
Yeah, for sure.
All right.
Now, so the latest developments, too, there was this story, this guy, is it Jeffries in the Washington Post who said, yeah, we're staying forever now.
That whole thing about just fighting ISIS is over.
And then now the DOD has really doubled down on that for sure.
It's not just this National Security Council staffer, but it's James Madison.
They're definitely staying.
They're leaving, what, 5,000 guys to prevent ISIS from ever coming back in any sense.
So that's a mission that could last forever, basically, is completely open ended.
And then did they specifically say, too, it's to limit the influence of Iran and Hezbollah somehow, or did they leave that out this time?
Well, Mattis left it out of his.
His speech said that it was just ISIS and making sure ISIS never comes back, and that's the only goal.
But John Bolton gave his own speech the same day, and he said the US would never leave Syria unless Iran left, all Iranian-backed militias left, and anyone that the US considers an Iranian proxy left.
Which includes Assad, right?
Includes Assad, and I mean, includes basically anybody that's even remotely Shiite, too.
So long as there's Shiites in Syria, the Bolton standard is that there'll be US troops there.
Hey, that's why the US was on al-Qaeda's side here in the first place, was to limit the influence of Iran, and since that backfired and only improved Iran's position in Syria, now they just have to double down.
So I guess they'll have an Ayatollah by the time the US is done there, you know?
I don't know.
Jeez, all right.
Hey, here's something let's talk about for a minute, and we already knew this all along kind of thing, but not exactly.
We certainly learned more details in these stories in Haaretz and other Israeli papers.
I don't know if you have a list in your brain of which all ones who talked about, and in some cases, I don't know if in all cases, but at least in some cases, immediately were censored and had their stories pulled from the web.
But you caught them and, in fact, posted the PDFs even at Antiwar.com of these stories in the Israeli media that, yeah, not only did they give aid and comfort in the form of medical care to wounded jihadis fighting al-Qaeda fighters in Syria, but they were giving them arms too.
Can you tell us about that?
Yeah, and the Jerusalem Post actually broke that story and was censored within a couple of hours of putting it up, which is strange because, I mean, of course, the Israeli military censor has virtually unlimited power within Israel to censor anything that's remotely national security related, and they do it all the time.
And they usually do it preemptively.
It's fairly rare for an article to get out and then have to be retracted after the fact like that.
But that's what happened.
The stories say that a lot of the groups operating in southern Syria, sort of in what's left of Golan, that isn't already Israeli occupied, were receiving money from Israel, they were receiving weapons, ammunition.
I mean, basically, some of these groups were wholly on the payroll of the Israeli government as part of their Syria aid program, which Israel's been bragging about as providing food and medicine, but clearly was also providing arms.
And I think it explains a lot of Israel's military policy along the Syrian border too, because Israel's long, pretty much from the start of the war till now, claimed they're totally neutral in Syria, they don't care who wins, although every once in a while someone lets slip, oh, we kind of are hoping ISIS wins rather than Assad or something like that.
The official position is always neutrality.
But this would explain why when certain rebel groups come under attack, or used to come under attack along the Israeli border, Israel would find a pretext to start firing missiles at Syrian military bases in the area.
Yeah, they always say that they're trying to keep arms from Hezbollah or something like that, right?
Right.
Everything is a storage facility for Hezbollah or the Iranian government or something.
And that's always why they attack, if they acknowledge it at all.
And when you say sometimes they let slip that they prefer ISIS wins, you're not talking about just some guy in Israel, you're talking about their military officers and ministers and diplomats and spies.
And certainly their former ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, famously said that they prefer even the Islamic State, not some mythical moderates even, but even ISIS to Assad because Assad is friends with Iran.
Simple as that.
And I forget, I think it's former intelligence officers.
Right, there were former intelligence officers, I believe there were some former defense ministry officials.
I mean, this is not, these are comments that are made publicly, but they're not really for international consumption.
So they tend to be made in speeches domestically, they tend to get reported in Hebrew language newspapers in Israel, where you can find them and get the translation.
But generally, they've been pretty sparsely reported in the English language versions of Israeli news outlets, which almost all of them have both languages.
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Yeah.
All right.
Well, so there's the shoot down story of the Russian jet, but I got Phil Jirali on about that in just a second.
And so I think I'll save that time and skip to oh, and then also there's the Avaz terrorist attack, which is maybe we'll get back to that in a minute.
But I'm going to interview Trita Parsi about that so we can save time on that.
I want to ask you about Afghanistan and I guess Yemen and other things.
But first of all, oh, and Somalia, man, you have this great story.
But let's do that first and then we'll do Afghanistan.
U.S. airstrike kills 18 in southern Somalia.
Tell me everything you know about that.
Well, unfortunately, we don't know a ton about it.
It's one of those very common U.S. airstrike in Somalia stories that comes out of a statement from African command where they say U.S. troops came under fire.
They had a drone strike in the area and they killed 18 people.
All of them are militant al-Shabaab terrorist members.
But they provide so little detail.
This U.S. troops came under fire is just sort of a rubber stamp that they put on anything where they have these airstrikes in countries that aren't directly part of any U.S. wars because then that's like, oh, well, this was a self-defense operation.
Does it have its own acronym yet when they use that?
That's funny because, of course, it just means that they put themselves in harm's way anyway, right?
Like even if you take it at face value, it's not like they're just sitting at their base camp minding their own business in somebody else's country.
They're wandering around the Somali desert.
They think they got shot at, but nobody got shot, which is another thing that for all the times that U.S. troops get ambushed in southern Somalia, it's remarkable how few of them result in any U.S. casualties.
They almost never hit anybody.
But then these airstrikes, they kill a dozen or 18, in this case, people, but they don't provide any information on who they targeted or where they were or how they know that they're al-Shabaab.
It's very unlikely that a fast hit and run group of fighters out in the desert took a couple of pot shots at the U.S. and is just standing there waiting for a drone to fly by.
So usually this means, well, it turns out they bombed the closest building that they think might be al-Shabaab.
But whether it is or not, often we don't find out for weeks.
Sometimes we never find out.
In the past, we've had cases where, oh, the bombs killed half a dozen civilians, but the official statement's already out there that, oh, everyone killed was al-Shabaab, and then the U.S. will stick to that story.
It then becomes a fight between different parts of the Somali government to either clarify what happened or to refuse to.
Yeah.
Well, so I guess it reminds me a lot of the discussions we had about the drone wars in Pakistan over the times, too, and it's just, well, it's the perfect self-licking ice cream cone like any of these, making more enemies.
Although I guess in the case of Pakistan, their attacks on Pakistanis were really kind of a side issue when they were really hunting foreigners in Pakistan for a minute there.
But here, this is just indigenous, rebellious forces.
So this kind of thing, I guess, could just go on forever and ever.
Yeah, and it largely has gone on forever and ever.
I mean, this whole story of the Somalia, I don't know, do they still call themselves the transitional federal government in Somalia, or have they just stripped that off?
Yeah, they might have dropped transitional now, but yeah.
This is the same one, though.
Yeah, they started off as just a bunch of guys that were hanging out in a hotel in Kenya and decided that they should be the government of Somalia.
And they stayed in that hotel pretending to be a government until the hotel kicked them out.
And then they had to go to Mogadishu and try to convince some international force to back them up.
And then Condoleezza Rice bought it.
It's like, okay.
Right, and slowly but surely, then you start seeing, oh, well, they control this neighborhood, Mogadishu, they control that neighborhood.
Eventually, they got the whole city.
And Al-Shabaab took it from them for a little while, I guess, right?
Right.
I mean, Hillary.
Condoleezza Rice, same difference.
They all look alike to me.
Condoleezza Rice made a deal where she said, Sheikh Sharif, you can be the leader of the new government.
I don't know if this is the same hotel guy that you're talking about, or his buddies, or what.
But you can be the leader, but it has to be in the form of the transitional government.
It can't be the Islamic Courts Union.
It has to be the government we've created for you.
And then the State Department person is rationalizing that, well, you know, at least we took him down a peg, or something like that.
They did the whole war, and they ended up keeping the same guy.
And he lasted until 2012.
All right.
Afghanistan.
Bombings.
More bombings than at any time since the height of the surge in 2011, right?
Right.
We saw, of course, Obama sort of dialed back the airstrikes for a while near the end of his term in office.
And then with the focus on fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria, that's where a lot of the U.S. planes were committed.
But with Mosul falling, with the last few ISIS cities in Syria falling, suddenly we had a whole bunch of planes that didn't have any cities to bomb.
So we quick relocated them to Afghanistan so they could be part of that escalation.
And with the Taliban controlling, you know, I've seen estimates of 30-40% of the country just outright Taliban-controlled, that there's plenty of targets to bomb.
And they're not any better at bombing those than they are at anything else.
So, of course, you see a huge increase in bombings, and you see a huge increase in the number of civilians getting hit in U.S. bombings.
Yeah.
By the way, everybody, I mean, I think you dig it that every one of these topics, they're all at news.antiwar.com.
This one is called UN Alarmed by Spike in Afghan Civilian Casualties in U.S. Airstrikes.
And, you know, not to go back and quote myself or anything, but to quote Mike Flint, who was, you know, the guy everyone knows.
Donald Trump's very controversial first National Security Advisor there, noted Iran hawk and everything.
He was Stanley McChrystal's right-hand man when they were implementing the counterinsurgency doctrine.
And the kind of entire basis of the argument was that, look, if we're just hovering around in the air with drones and planes, you know, B1s doing circles and dropping bombs on people, then we don't really know who we're killing.
And so we're just driving regular Joes into this armed militia movement against us, you know.
And so he ridiculed that policy of minimal troops and maximum air power as anti-insurgency, which is counterproductive and horrible and wrong.
And then, of course, the second part of the argument does not follow.
But the rest of his argument was, that's why we need a surge, so that when we have 100,000 troops on the ground, they'll have a much better idea of who to kill and who not to kill.
And then that'll work better, which, of course, that part is crazy and wrong and even more counterproductive.
But his criticism of what he called anti-insurgency sure does seem right, never mind the morality of, you know, tearing human beings to little pieces with high explosives.
But like you're saying, you just escalate an air war like this, where you're going to necessarily escalate civilian casualties in response.
And what good has it done this whole time, except to make the Taliban stronger, to make the enemy stronger in reaction?
It never does really take them out, does it?
They just, you know, recruit 10 more kids for everyone that gets killed.
Right.
And in recent months, the focus has been so heavily on body count in Afghanistan that the fact that a lot of them turn out to be civilians really never gets into Pentagon reports anyway.
So it sort of doesn't matter to them that they're just making it worse.
When you say increasing importance of body counts, you had a story about that recently.
And you made something specific by that.
Right.
Early in the Afghan war, and by early, I mean roughly the first 15, 16 years of the Afghan war, all the top Pentagon brass, all the commanders and everything, were very clear about not wanting to emphasize body count.
How many Taliban are we killing?
How many people are we killing in Afghanistan?
And the specific reason was because that's what we did in Vietnam.
We emphasized, oh, we killed this many people in this attack and this many people in this attack.
And it's not very good PR.
It comes off as very ghoulish to make your main metric how many bodies you're piling up in an air war.
And so they decided, well, we're just not going to do that.
Well, it kind of turned out to be meaningless, too.
It turned out that it was the wrong metric to measure, right?
That like, if you're trying to pacify the population of the South, you're trying to win over their hearts and minds, while just putting down this supposedly narrow VC, you know, Viet Cong insurgency, then blasting the hell out of everybody is actually not a very good way to accomplish that.
Right.
They pretend like these are completely consistent means and ends, but it doesn't seem like it really.
And that was a very consistent part of the war was that, you know, it's not that the U.S. would specifically not come up with body counts for certain incidents, but they wouldn't have the Pentagon saying, oh, in the last six months we've carried out, you know, they might say, oh, we've carried out 1200 kinetic operations where we dropped bombs, but they wouldn't say, oh, that killed 2000 people.
They just wouldn't say that.
And whether they knew it or not is, I guess, another question.
But in the past...
And saying it up the chain of command as a success to the generals and the civilians is one thing compared to giving it directly to Walter Cronkite and the media for public consumption, too.
Right.
Yeah.
But that's changed in the last few months.
And it seems like it's changed specifically because President Trump is starting to sour on the war.
He kind of wasn't thrilled when he announced the escalation in 2017 in August.
He kind of made it clear his first impulse was just to pull out.
But they kind of convinced him, no, no, the war is going to go well.
We just need to escalate again.
We need another surge.
So they got another surge and things are going worse than ever.
But they think that with Trump, body count might sell it for him, that it's like, oh, well, yeah, but we killed like thousands of people in that time.
So it's not like we didn't do anything.
You know, maybe we're losing more territory and maybe the Afghan government's got higher than ever military casualties, but at least we're killing a lot of people.
Right.
Well, you know, take it for what it's worth.
And I don't know what it's worth.
I don't know what it's worth.
But in the Woodward book, The New One Fear, Donald Trump.
And hey, it sounds like something he would say.
Donald Trump says, all you guys are doing is killing people.
So why do you need a strategy for that?
You don't need a strategy to kill people.
So in other words, just, yeah, increase the bombing, increase the raids, find the guys and shoot them and kill them.
And then at some point they'll run out of bad guys and we'll have won the thing.
Right.
Like, what's the flaw in the logic there?
Let's do this.
So.
Right.
And that's been the assumption for American wars for the past several years.
I mean, the wars against ISIS, the wars against al Qaeda and the Taliban.
It often comes back to these official Pentagon estimate of, oh, they've got 10,000 fighters left or 20,000 fighters left in the ISIS wars.
Pretty famously, they would estimate, oh, ISIS has 3,000 fighters.
Then we'd kill 10,000 ISIS guys and come up with, well, ISIS has about 6,000 fighters left.
Like, they're bigger than they were when we started, but we killed all these people.
Which in Afghanistan, the reality is the Taliban's, the Afghan government's admitted recently the Taliban's far bigger than they've ever given them credit for being.
They've got well more fighters than Pentagon and Afghan estimates had.
You know, I'm kind of worried.
I mean, I guess so far, right.
The rule has been you can't just completely decimate them like LeMay did in Japan and just firebomb their cities and this and that kind of thing.
But I'm not really sure what's stopping Trump from doing that.
I mean, if he thought that that was the only way out was to just go full scale Richard Nixon Christmas bombing on him or something like that.
I don't know.
Right.
He is Donald Trump.
In the campaign, that was sort of the way he was talking about the ISIS war was that, oh, we're just going to do the whole reason we hadn't won the ISIS war yet was because we weren't just, you know, brutalizing the entire region, killing everyone and their families and all this stuff.
So, yeah, I mean, that's that's certainly a notion that's floating around in his head, whether he ever puts it into practice.
Hopefully not.
But I guess we'll have to see.
Well, you know, one other thing that I learned in there, and this part must be true the way it's portrayed by Woodward, is that General Kellogg, who at one point was in line to possibly be the national security adviser, that he was against the Afghan war, that he agreed with Bannon and Trump and that he was allowed to give a presentation.
When they all went to Camp David and rolled them into doing it, that he was the one who gave the presentation saying, let's just quit.
And that was always presented as the, you know, porridge is too cold kind of answer.
And then, you know, the actually, of course, the too hot answer one, because the just right was supposed to be an increase in CIA death squads, and the CIA didn't want to do that and take responsibility for it.
They wanted the DoD to be responsible.
So they didn't they like didn't show up for their own briefing.
But anyway, funny thing that you got to read Woodward books, man, even though they're kind of full of a bunch of crap, they're still entertaining.
And there are tidbits of things that seem, you know, reliable and things.
But anyway, useful.
So listen, I'm sorry, we didn't get to talk about peace in Korea, because I'm late and I got to go.
But thank you very much for coming back on the show, Jason.
Sure.
Thanks for having me.
All right, you guys, that's Jason Ditz at news.antiwar.com.
And I hope you guys have that bookmarked and check it every single day.
And also, of course, in the front page of antiwar.com.
But news.antiwar.com.
All the wars all the time.
The great Jason Ditz.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scothorton.org, antiwar.com and reddit.com slash scothorton show.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
