09/11/16 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, September 11th, 2016, I'm Scott Horton, this is Anti-War Radio.
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Alright, introducing our good friend Gareth Porter.
He writes mostly now for Middle East Eye and for Truthout.org.
He's the author of the excellent book, the book, on the Iranian nuclear program.
It's called Manufactured Crisis, the truth behind the Iranian nuclear scare.
And of course, he won the Martha Gellhorn Award for his great work on Petraeus' air war in Afghanistan, on the night raids in Afghanistan, back in 2011 and 12.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Gareth?
Well, hello again, Scott.
I'm fine, thanks.
Very happy to have you here.
And we have some somewhat good news to talk about here, although, yeah, it's complicated.
Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have made a deal about, well, they're calling it a ceasefire.
I'll let you characterize it however you want.
But they've made a deal about the future of Syria.
I don't really want to say much more about it than that, Gareth.
Set us straight here.
Well, it's very, we know too little at this point about how this is going to work to really, to feel very confident about saying much about it.
But, you know, this is, in a way, a replay, of course, of what happened in late February and March, when the same two foreign ministers agreed on a partial ceasefire.
And that didn't work the way they had hoped, although one has to say that it was successful.
Relatively speaking, it was pretty successful in reducing the level of violence in large parts of Syria.
By, nobody knows precisely, but maybe 80 to 90 percent.
At least that's what John Kerry himself quoted as the reduction of violence.
And this appears to have been a largely result of the restraint that the Russians and the Assad government, Air Force, exercised in regard to the areas that were controlled by Nusra Front and its allies.
So now the question, it seems to me, is whether this ceasefire is going to have a different set of dynamics that will produce anything like the same result.
Will it be better or will it be worse?
It's very difficult to say at this point, because there are circumstances that have changed in some ways that could make it more effective and in other ways that are likely to make it less effective.
All right.
Now, so here's this.
And there's so many, you know, moving variables in this thing.
Believe me, I don't know, is a perfectly acceptable answer, too.
But it does seem, Garrett, that at least some writers are saying that basically the last ceasefire was nothing but a ruse or at least amounted to a ruse where the CIA took the opportunity to arm up the so-called mythical moderates, which are the arms acquisition project of the Al-Nusra Front there in Syria, basically.
It seems like the groups that fight under Al-Nusra and with Al-Nusra and share CIA-provided weapons with Al-Nusra.
And they did that in order to make this one last big push for Aleppo.
But then that didn't work, right?
The Syrian government held them in east Aleppo and, in fact, bombed the crap out of them there.
And they've got severe losses.
And then so that was it.
That was basically, at least so far, things could change next year or whatever.
But so far, this was basically the limit of what the mythical moderates and basically CIA-backed al-Qaeda could do there.
And so now they kind of are backing down because they have no other choice, really.
Scott, I think that's correct.
I think that the first ceasefire was one that, A, the United States did not have the buy-in from Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia at all, and certainly did not have the buy-in from very powerful bureaucratic forces in the U.S. government.
Definitely, we know Defense Department was not on board and very likely CIA was not on board as well.
And they actually were, I think, a little bit ambivalent.
I think that John Kerry himself was quite ambivalent about this.
He was very reluctant to allow the Russians to go ahead and have the freedom to attack the al-Qaeda, that is Nusra Front at that point, forces, even if they violated the ceasefire.
And the Russians stood firm on that and he finally agreed, but it's clear that he was reluctant to do so.
So that was the set of circumstances in which the first ceasefire or partial ceasefire went into effect.
And the Russians actually did lay off, as I suggested a few moments ago.
They did lay off Aleppo and Idlib areas for quite a while.
And it was really only after the al-Qaeda folks made a major military move violating the ceasefire in early April of this year that the Russians began to move back and the Assad Air Force moved back and began to respond with a lot of bombing.
So that's one of the questions here, whether, you know, Kerry is much more firm at this point about making sure that the same thing doesn't happen again or not.
I don't know the answer to that as you anticipated, but certainly there's one circumstance, there's one political factor here that gives me at least some slight hope that perhaps this could work out differently.
And that is the role of Turkey.
Now, you know, we all know that Turkey has intervened militarily directly in Syria just in the past month or so.
And that the reason they did so, of course, is their very great fear of the Kurdish, the Syrian Kurds being able to reunite or to unite the two parts of the very large area of control that they have carved out because of the war against Assad.
Now the Turks have become so worried about that, that they are apparently reconsidering or at least taking a different angle of vision on this whole war in Syria.
And I attended a public meeting yesterday in D.C. where Henri Barkey, the Wilson Center's head of Middle East program and an expert on Turkey, said publicly that, as he understands it, Turkish policy in Syria now is 90 percent about the Kurds.
And that suggests to me that there's a possibility that Turkey may be more cooperative at this point in trying to get a ceasefire in Syria.
And so, I mean, I'm not guaranteeing that by any means, but there is some reason for hope there.
Well, I don't know if it was the last time we spoke or the time before that where you had talked about how the Turks had made this deal with the Iranians, that they were going to finally now back off, insisting on regime change against Assad because they finally figured out four years into this thing that, oh, yeah, it's the Kurds that they hate the most.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think I called it a deal, but it was a preliminary agreement on principles that was very promising, it seemed like at that point.
And that process has now sort of gone into deep sort of hiding, if you will.
Nobody's on either side saying anything about it.
I'm not sure whether that means that it is making progress or that it's been suspended or what's going on.
But in the broader perspective, it does appear that the Turks may be more amenable, particularly because of their desire to work with the Russians, I think, but also with Iran on possibly curbing the Kurdish ambitions in Syria.
In order to to make sure that the way in the way this is presented by Barkey yesterday was that what Erdogan wants to do is to set up a situation, oddly enough, where he can negotiate a peace agreement with the Kurds in in Turkey.
And he wants to make a very big flourish of action against the Kurds in Syria, make it look like he's taking a very tough line there in order to be able to to accomplish what would be a major move politically and militarily in in Turkey.
So so there's there's more to this story that goes back to Turkey's fundamental interests at home as well.
Yeah, well, I mean, that does make sense that if Erdogan felt like he had to cover his right flank, that he would pick on the Kurds in Syria more while making peace with the ones in Turkey.
But he's the one who picked the fight with the Kurds in Turkey anyway.
He already had a peace deal with them.
And then he's the one who blew it.
And by the way, I don't understand.
And listen, again, I don't know is an acceptable answer here, Gareth.
But do you have any real good pulse on what Erdogan was thinking in trying to get rid of Assad anyway, in terms of what that would mean for the future of the Syrian Kurds?
Did he think that Al Nusra was going to sack Damascus and then they were going to turn right around and destroy the Kurds for him to or at least, you know, dominate the Kurds for him to or didn't he know he was risking an independent state of Rojava?
Yeah, that's a very good question, Scott.
And I certainly don't know anything on the inside about the answer to that, because it seems really stupid, doesn't it?
Like, hey, my my neighbor Assad is keeping his Kurds down.
I think I'll pick a fight with him and set his Kurds I hate free.
The point I would make about Erdogan, though, and this is pretty well established, is that he's a very mercurial decision maker, very mercurial policymaker.
And he does tend to respond, perhaps over respond to situations or at least his his feelings about situations.
And I think it appears that he was very angry with Assad, who he regarded as somebody that he could talk to personally and deal with and and thought that that Assad would listen to him.
And when Assad refused his advice in April of 2011, his advice to, you know, to make nice with protesters and make major gestures, gestures to try to calm things down, he was very upset.
And that seems to be the basis for his his very what now seems to be ill-advised move to to basically stoke a war against him.
All right now, so and I'm sorry, audience, for the Syrian war being such a mess here.
But, you know, we're trying to cover it for you.
It is very complicated, as we talked about.
Back to the real story here about the ceasefire.
In the last ceasefire, we got the Russians to agree.
Everybody still is bombing ISIS, America and Russia and Assad's government, too.
But we got the Russians to agree to stop bombing al-Qaeda for a while so we could try to separate moderate al-Qaeda from extremist al-Qaeda.
That never or that was the story anyway.
That never really did work.
Al-Qaeda forces made another major push against.
And by the way, they changed their name, Jabhat al-Nusra.
They changed their name, but they did not renounce Ayman al-Zawahiri and al-Qaeda.
And they did not say we are no longer sworn to al-Qaeda.
That is widely misreported by a lot of people that Jabhat al-Nusra is no longer the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria.
Yeah, they are.
They are just now called Jabhat something al-Sham.
But it is still Jolani and his very same people serving Zawahiri's interest there.
Now, so they have launched this major attack on Aleppo which has failed.
And now we have a new deal, the same deal again more or less it looks like with the Russians to ceasefire.
And then so are we going to try to separate them out again?
Or do you think that this means because like we're talking about the Kurds, maybe you're changing their mind too.
I wonder what you think, Gareth, that this means that Obama is going to start bombing al-Qaeda, al-Nusra seriously.
And maybe even the so-called mythical moderates abandon them, stab them in the back and go ahead and tilt back toward Assad at this point.
I mean this is the central question really about how this is going to work.
And I really don't know the answer to this.
It's very much as far as I'm concerned up in the air.
And there are a couple of parts to this.
One is that we know from John Kerry himself that he – well, from the State Department at least, the State Department spokesman for John Kerry, that Kerry wanted to hold back this business of forcing the hand of the mythical moderates, if you will, after the first ceasefire in order to have leverage on Lavrov and the Russians to do what the United States had not been able to accomplish in the first agreement, which is to get the Russians to agree formally that the Assad Air Force would not be able to go into action except under very specified circumstances.
And that supposedly has been spelled out in this agreement.
I mean I have not seen and as far as I know the specifics have not been spelled out publicly yet.
But that was part of the political diplomatic byplay in the implementation of the first agreement.
I mean Kerry clearly did not use all of the leverage available to him to force the issue.
Now, I'm not at all clear, I have to tell you, that even if Kerry used all the leverage that the United States has, that it would guarantee or would be successful in getting all of these U.S.-vetted armed groups opposing Assad to actually separate themselves from the al-Qaeda folks.
That's such an important point, right, that if Russia and Tehran and Damascus have an agreement that they want Hezbollah to withdraw from this neighborhood or that one, it's going to happen, right?
But if the CIA says, hey, al-Qaeda terrorists, we gave a bunch of guns and money and explosives to do what we say now, they might just say, yeah, right.
Yeah, I mean, I think they've already said, yeah, right, because in fact, you know, they issued a statement that is a large number of the non-jihadist groups.
I believe it was 36 in number, if I remember correctly, in, was it late March?
If I remember late March of this year, after the ceasefire went into effect, they made it clear that they would not abandon the al-Nusra Front forces because of the ceasefire and that they would treat the ceasefire as null and void if it did not apply everywhere across the entire Syrian territory.
Meaning that it had to apply to al-Nusra Front as well.
And that is a remarkable document, which was not covered in the corporate news media at all, which suggests that with perhaps a few exceptions, the bulk of the U.S. supported armed groups are simply not going to budge.
They don't believe that they have the ability to do that.
They don't have enough power to stand on their own, to fight on their own without being closely allied with the al-Qaeda forces in Syria.
So I really I mean, it's hard to believe that the State Department and the CIA don't understand this already.
And that casts, I have to say, a very serious shadow over this agreement.
Well, so now, Gareth, we've got to talk about the knife in the back of the Kurds.
So you mentioned that the Turks, I guess a couple of weeks ago now, have gone ahead and invaded with some tanks and some infantry, I guess, come across the border from Turkey.
They did it supposedly in the name of ISIS, but there weren't really much.
There wasn't really much ISIS around.
They went after the Kurds to push them back east of the Euphrates River.
And these are the same Syrian Kurds that are backed by the American military and I guess the Russian military, too.
I don't know who among the Russians are dealing with the Syrian Kurds, but I know that they have a friendly relationship, if not an alliance, with Russia as well as with the United States.
I know we've got Joint Special Operations Command, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of American top and probably second tier special forces as well embedded with these Kurds.
And yet, this is our NATO ally, Turkey, is fighting them.
They also apparently refuse to follow American instructions.
Well, I don't know exactly what JSOC was telling them on the ground, but the American politicians were telling them, get back east of the Euphrates, and they wouldn't do it.
So, now the question is, to what degree is the American government preparing to just completely stab the Syrian Kurds in the back and leave them high and dry and to the tender mercies of our ally Erdogan in Turkey?
Yeah, and I don't know the answer to that one either.
We still need them to sack Raqqa for us, don't we?
I mean, we meaning the evil American empire, not you and me.
Right.
But of course, I mean, Raqqa is something that fight's going to go on for a long time.
And whether that has to happen now while this ceasefire is getting underway is a very separate question.
I mean, I'm not convinced.
It seems like that would be the easy way to go, right?
Based on what we're describing here this whole time, we're talking about a ceasefire in the west of Syria, more or less, but the war in the east is still blank check.
It's the Islamic State.
There's no restrictions.
Go after them.
Back the Kurds.
Back the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga as well.
Back the Iraqi Shiite militias, whoever you can, to fight against the Islamic State in Mosul and Raqqa is the policy now, right?
Still?
That's correct.
Yeah.
I mean, the two wars are still going on at the same time.
And there are very, very interesting and intricate links between the two things.
And by the way, you mentioned that when the Kurds took over the area that they were attacking, there wasn't much of a fight because there was not much in the way of ISIS troops to fight against.
Well, what happened to the ISIS troops?
Nobody seems to know.
The fact is the Kurds are saying that they fled to Aleppo and into the arms of, guess who, the al-Qaeda folks.
So, I mean, and I asked Henri Barkey yesterday after the meeting because he drew attention to the same question.
He said he couldn't figure out what happened to the ISIS troops.
They disappeared.
They melted away.
Nobody knew where they went.
And I told him what the Kurds said.
He said, yeah, well, that's certainly plausible that that's what happened.
So, I mean, this is a relationship between the two sets of two fights that have a lot of different angles, which are not really well understood at all and which are important to understand, particularly because of the possibility that there is a continuing link between ISIS and al-Qaeda.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I think anybody, left, right, libertarian or any just independent or non-political person, a regular person, you know, living their life can just look at the calendar and say, OK, it's 15 years later.
When we started this thing, there were probably maybe three or four hundred al-Qaeda guys in the whole wide world.
A thousand if you count every single Arab fighter in Afghanistan, which is really not fair.
But let's round up.
OK, now there are tens of thousands of these guys.
So and that's after Bush and Obama.
Eight years of each.
So even if Bush was the problem, Obama's had eight years to do nothing but make it worse and worse and worse, apparently.
And so you got to wonder whether maybe it's time to just call the whole thing off.
Right.
Everybody should be wondering that right now.
Fifteen years of digging this pit.
Enough is enough.
And, you know, as we talk about the the issue of U.S.U.S.-Russian cooperation and trying to bring about a ceasefire, you know, the one factor that we haven't talked about is the the opposition.
I mean, I mentioned it in passing, but the opposition to this agreement from the Defense Department reached the point where yesterday after Lavrov and Kerry had agreed after many, many hours of negotiation to a text and Kerry sends it back to Washington, there are five hours of meeting with an interagency group grilling Kerry about the agreement.
While, you know, in an embarrassed one of the most embarrassing scenes ever filmed by by news crews, there was Lavrov sitting waiting for Kerry to come back from being grilled on the agreement that they had negotiated.
So, I mean, this this highlights for me the incredible destructive role that the Defense Department is playing here based on its bureaucratic self-interest.
In avoiding anything that would allow Russia to be in the position of cooperating with the United States, not because of the the actual benefits or or or the loss of of interest in that cooperation, but because it's not good for their bottom line because they depend on the idea that Russia is the enemy and is a threat for their congressional appropriations, for getting the appropriations that they want.
Well, and who is this Barack Obama guy that the secretary of defense is higher in the chain of command than the secretary of state?
Why is John Kerry having to stop by Ash Carter's office for any of this?
Give me a break.
Yeah, I mean, Ashley Carter should be fired.
I mean, his he should be gone.
I mean, there's no doubt about it.
That's the secretary of defense, y'all.
And, you know, this is just a few this couple of months since CIA-backed jihadist terrorists were in pitch battles fighting against DOD-backed Kurds.
And the CIA was accusing the DOD of buying into Russian propaganda that these guys are terrorists.
But Ash Carter's taking the CIA side against his own JSOC guys on the ground there, I guess.
As long as it, you know, if it means any kind of rapprochement with Russia, that's got to be headed off at all costs.
Absolutely.
That's the bottom line for them.
And it's so painfully obvious what's going on.
And nobody in the news media, of course, is really covering this, except insofar as they take the DOD position, which is what The New York Times has done in their first story about the agreement.
Well, you know, I don't know.
I guess from what we know now, at least there's a possibility here that things could get better.
It seemed more than the ceasefire deal itself.
It's the positions of the politicians.
Seems like maybe Erdogan is backing down.
Seems like clock's running out on Barack Obama.
This is like right around the time Bush Jr. was having to decide to go ahead and sign Maliki's sofa that promised to get out of Iraq by 2011, back when it was his turn.
Lame duck president.
And so maybe everybody's just going to kind of at least the outside powers are going to back off some.
Well, I think that, you know, what seems most likely to me now is that, as I suggested, the U.S.-backed groups will not agree to move out or to force the Nusra Front.
I mean, sorry, the Fatah al-Sham now they call themselves forces to to move away from the areas where these U.S.-backed groups are located.
And as a result, you know, there will be strikes in those areas and they'll have to take the consequences.
And by the way, I mean, by way of disclaimer, it sounds kind of silly to even have to say.
But, you know, it should be obvious that neither of us support any kind of alliance with Russia against anyone, the Islamic State or anyone.
We don't want intervention there.
We're only trying to highlight the contradictions and the hypocrisies in a policy that has us fighting on the side of our enemies.
Fifteen years after September 11.
Let me just say personally that my my key point, my key takeaway about Syria, the Syrian war is there are no good guys to support here.
There is no good side to support.
And that the lesson of the whole thing is that the United States must stay out of what are essentially sectarian and ideological wars that that really the United States has no interest one way or another.
And ultimately, I mean, the only interest is not to be sucked into taking responsibility for such wars.
All right, so that's the great Gareth Porter.
The book is Manufactured Crisis, the truth behind the Iran nuclear scare.
Check out his great archives at truthout.org and Middle East Eye, as well as we reprint basically all of it at antiwar dot com original antiwar dot com slash Porter.
Thanks very much, sir, for coming back on the show.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, John, that's antiwar radio on September 11th, 2016.
I'm Scott Wharton.
Check out my archives at Scott Wharton dot org.
Sent for the podcast feed there as well.
And follow me on Twitter at Scott Wharton Show.
See you next week.