Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, so you guys, introducing Ali Demirdis.
He is a professor of political science at the College of Charleston.
And he wrote this article for the National Interest.
Why Syria's Kurdish Militia Can't Do What Washington Wants.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Good, good, Scott.
It's my pleasure to be on the show.
Very happy to have you here.
And so this is about the YPG, the Kurdish militia from the northeast of Syria, who allied with the U.S. against the Islamic State and are now stuck between the Americans and the Syrian Arab army and the Syrian population and the Turkish army and all of these things.
But so I guess let's cut right to the chase here.
What is it that Washington wants from the YPG?
So that's a very good question.
It's a long story.
But the U.S., the bottom line is the U.S. wants to be relevant in the Middle Eastern theater, right?
Therefore, they basically, the United States picked the YPG and propped them up actually in 2012 to be able to stay in the Middle East in Syria and continue to be relevant and conduct the policies there.
That's what the U.S. wants to do in Syria.
Yeah, well, in other words, Iran, it's all about Iran.
Yeah, well, so the idea, the official reason why the U.S. is propping up and nurturing and supporting the YPG is, this is the official line, we need to have a non-Arabic, a secular entity in Syria to prevent the Iranian influence from spreading into Syria, into the Levant.
Therefore, basically, the YPG is going to act like a buffer between Iran and the proxies in Lebanon and Syria, which is wrong in many levels.
Yeah, right.
So, now here's the thing, the Americans have this base at Al-Tanf, which is right at the Syrian border with Jordan and Iraq.
But this is way outside of traditional Kurdish territory.
And you do talk about local Arabs chafing under Kurdish rule, but is there really a cleansing campaign going on?
Are they really trying to take this territory for themselves?
And could it possibly stretch all the way down to this Al-Tanf base?
Are they going to rule this whole area down there?
Is that the plan?
Well, that's the plan, but it is technically impossible for the YPG to rule one third of Syria.
Before the civil war, the YPG claims that it is Kurdish militia.
And the Kurds made up of 7% of the Syrian population before 2011, before the civil war began.
But the YPG now controls one third of the territory, which is predominantly Arab.
There are Turkmens entities there.
So, it is very difficult and not feasible for the YPG to control that portion of the land when it is predominantly Arab.
The YPG is not demographically compatible with the area.
And I don't know how the American decision makers have come up with this idea that the YPG, which essentially is an extension of the Marxist PKK, to rule that part of the Syrian population.
So, it has a lot of problems.
Now, does that include Raqqa?
Yes.
So, Raqqa is right now under the rule of Kurdish militias as their major police force and all that?
Yeah.
Raqqa is the crown jewel of the YPG.
They take pride that they took the city from ISIS and therefore it is their God-given right to govern the city, which is actually more than 90% Arabic.
I mean, they don't have the population to really transfer, to take over the place or anything, really, do they?
Yeah.
No, not at all.
So, are they crazy?
I mean, the Americans put them up to this?
You're telling me that they really say, oh yeah, no, since we kicked ISIS out, we get to own this city where we're not from and obviously not welcome from now on?
Yes.
That's the plan.
But what is missing?
I mean, it sounds like something that could be cooked up in DC, but these guys would have to be crazy to bite off that much more than they can chew, right?
Exactly.
But we need to understand, there is not one U.S. policy, or there is not one U.S. in Syria, okay?
The YPG is a Pentagon program, right?
And within the Pentagon, there are two branches.
There is the CENTCOM, the Central Command, and there is the EUCOM, the European Command Center.
So, these are basically vying for influence in Syria.
Whereas the EUCOM has been supportive of the Turkish claims that these guys are not compatible here, they are going to create way more problems if they continue to stay there.
Whereas the CENTCOM is adamantly propping them up, supporting the YPG, creating more friction on the ground.
Hey, do you have a separate article that's all about that somewhere?
You mean about the...
This division inside the U.S. military, CENTCOM versus EUCOM here?
Honestly, yeah.
I am planning to write about it, but I have read a couple of articles that define the division between, not only within the Pentagon, actually between the President's office, between the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon.
There is not one U.S. in Syria right now.
CIA too, don't forget about them.
Oh, exactly, exactly.
Thank you.
So, they are vying for influence in Syria.
And whoever wins this war of influence will determine the Syrian policy of the United States.
Man, all right.
Well, I am going to have to ask you for those footnotes later.
I am not putting you on the spot that you have to remember them right now, but if you could email me those links later, I would really appreciate to read about that.
Famously, as the LA Times and others reported, you had outright battles between CIA-backed jihadists and DOD-backed YPG forces.
But then, all this stuff about UCOM versus CENTCOM, I was unaware of that.
Yeah, yeah.
It is very interesting to see how the factions within the Pentagon basically fighting each other to vie for influence in Syria.
I am going to send you the footnotes, definitely.
Great.
You know, Mattis was saying the other day, the former Secretary of Defense claimed, short-lived as it was, that he was going to withdraw military forces from Syria.
I mean, Trump said at the time, well, ISIS is defeated.
I mean, of course, there are still a few guys running around, but as far as the state, they are gone, so we can leave.
And then, everyone said at the time, there was no question about what they were talking about, that the enemy wasn't ISIS, the enemy was Iran.
They wanted to stay because of Iran is now gaining power of influence because of America's attempt to limit their power and influence in Syria.
And so, now we have to stay further.
Just the other day, Mattis said, well, I resigned because I said, you'll have to find another general to lose to ISIS, which is a great line, but that's not what he meant.
We know that he knew that he personally and his men, his Marines, had just stomped the hell out of ISIS in Mosul and in Raqqa and all around that desert around there whenever they were trying to kill him anyway.
Yeah.
And with the help of the YPG, he didn't think that Trump was surrendering to ISIS.
The policy is about staying because of Iran's increased influence, ISIS's enemies, the Iranian Shia.
Yeah.
In my other article titled How America Fought Iran's War in the Middle East, I sent you the link.
Oh, great.
Yeah, I can't wait.
That's basically the theme of my book I'm working on.
But anyway, go ahead.
So, in that article, I explained, how, I mean, the official line is, the U.S. official line is, okay, Iran is supposed to be contained by any means necessary.
They need to be contained.
But when you look back in 30 years, American foreign policy in the Middle East, the U.S. did everything to help the Iranian influence to grow in the Middle East.
In my article, it's in the national interest, too, removing Saddam Hussein was the biggest, in courts, mistake.
If you remove a Sunni dictator whose only goal is to prevent Iranians from spreading into his country, you are basically placating Iraq to the mullahs in a silver platter.
And I don't understand why you want to remove Saddam Hussein, but then you want to contain Iran.
It is just like, it's incompatible.
Yeah.
Well, and not only this, but I'll go ahead and say it, because I like to.
Barack Obama said to Jeffrey Goldberg, that's right, Jeffrey Goldberg, getting rid of Assad would be a great way to weaken Iran, since Assad is the last Middle Eastern state that's allied with Iran.
So, that's what we're doing right now.
And then they had a little joke about, I don't want to tell you, but I'll have to kill you kind of thing.
And there it is in the Atlantic from the spring of, I think, March 2012, certainly the spring of 2012.
And there was no question that that was why they were backing the jihadists in the war and sending mercenaries from all around the Middle East, like it was 1980s Afghanistan, to go fight against Assad.
They thought they were going to weaken Iran.
And instead, all they did was, one, empower Iran and Hezbollah to be more dependent on them than ever before.
And then they blew up their whole plan, blew up in their face into the size of the entire Islamic State in eastern Syria and western Iraq, which was way too big.
And so then they had to go back to war for the Shia again in Iraq, if not in Syria, for the YPG in Syria, but in Iraq, certainly, for the same groups they wish they hadn't fought the last war for.
Everything they do, and hell, I'll throw in Yemen too, they give the Houthis, every Houthi victory, they give Iran credit for it.
They call it blame, but in the scheme of things, they're giving Iran credit for influence that they barely even have, and portraying Iran as the most powerful force in southwest Arabia.
And so all of this is all, at the very minimum, it's free PR for the Iranians.
And it does help increase their influence that this whole war has in Yemen.
So, yeah, I mean, it just goes on and on.
I don't know what we're going to do for them next.
Yeah, I mean, there's something wrong with this picture.
You know, you're trying to contain Iran, but on the other hand, you're doing everything to help Iran.
Eventually those things help Iran.
And I don't know how it is containing policy.
You know what it is?
It's they never really define it right.
They never admit who's on whose side.
And so that way, they never really have to grapple with what they've done and what's next.
You know, they say, well, we're fighting Islamic extremism.
Well, that's more than a little vague.
It's way too vague.
Like the war, the global war on terror.
I mean, there's not just enemies invisible.
So you're basically chasing a ghost.
Meanwhile, you're depleting your energy and resources.
Yeah.
Which was the plan of the terrorists in the first place, was to give our government an excuse to deplete all our energy and resources.
Exactly.
I watched your video on Afghanistan.
Oh yeah?
Oh, I love that video.
I love how you put it down, like what Osama bin Laden wanted was to withdraw, to draw the United States into a quagmire and let America bleed to death.
This is exactly what Osama bin Laden wanted.
And I liked your video about it.
Cool.
Hey, thanks for saying so.
I'll send you a book.
Oh, I appreciate it.
Yeah.
And another thing is ISIS is fundamentally anti-Shiite, right?
We need to understand who ISIS is.
Where are they from?
How did they end up in Iraq and in Syria?
The ISIS is, the ISIS was formed by the former generals of Saddam Hussein who were purged by the debuttification policies after 2003.
And the current Shia government basically alienated them, excluded them from the government offices, etc.
And they ended up forming ISIS to purge the Shia to basically fight the Shia elements in the region.
The biggest enemy of ISIS was not the United States, was not Turkey, was not you know, Arab.
The biggest enemy was the Shiites.
So ISIS was essentially formed as an anti-Shia organization.
So by removing ISIS, basically the United States helped Iran, Syria, and Lebanon to stay in power still.
Hey guys, check out Listen and Think audiobooks.
They're at listenandthink.com and of course on audible.com.
And they feature my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, as well as brand new Out Inside Syria by our friend Reese Ehrlich and a lot of other great books, mostly by libertarians there.
Reese might be one exception, but essentially they're all libertarian audiobooks.
And here's how you can get a lifetime subscription to Listen and Think audiobooks.
Just donate $100 to the Scott Horton show at scotthorton.org slash donate.
All right now, so let's talk about the Turks because the Turks, man, they hate the YPG.
I think unreasonably.
I mean, what do they think?
The YPG is going to invade Turkey or something, but they're basically the American, the Americans are acting like, and maybe they really are standing between the Kurds and an assault by the Turks against them.
Yeah, so in order to understand the view of Turks of YPG, you need to understand who YPG are, right?
The YPG is the Syrian branch of the PKK.
It's the Kurdistan Workers Party, which was established in 1970s on Marxist revolutionist base.
And PKK is Turkey's main security threat in the region, okay?
So, I always liken the relationship between PKK and the YPG as the relationship between Walmart and Sam's Club, okay?
They look separate, but essentially corporate-wise, they are one.
They are part of the PKK.
They are not really communists anymore, though, right?
They are bookchinists.
Well, I read a couple of articles about the Maoist practices of the YPG in northeast Syria, whereas they form communes and they establish co-chairs of sovereign administrative style, and it is exactly what Mao did in China back in 1960s.
So, they still carry the elements of Marxism in the form of neo-Maoism.
Their flag is made up of red star, right?
So, they manifested this...
I mean, at least they are not Maoists or Stalinists, right?
I mean, I'm not...
And it does make a difference.
I mean, I don't know.
Well, you tell me about their tortured death camps.
Yeah.
They're actually...
They tend to oppress and torture people, the local population, because the Iranian children tortured them and forcefully conscripted them to the military there.
So, they still have the elements of oppression and torture, intimidation in Syria.
So, what about the Turks and the YPG?
You said the YPG is not going to invade Syria.
Well, I mean, I guess just they've been really busy lately.
I could see the Turkish argument that they don't want PKK guys, you know, taking safe haven inside Syria and this kind of thing.
But it seems...
Well, and this is kind of the deal that I could see happening with the YPG.
I mean, I could see that the YPG is not going to invade Syria.
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