09/02/16 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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All right, y'all.
Scott Horton Show.scotthorton.org for the archives, Scott Horton, yep, twitter.com slash scotthortonshow for the tweets, the very rude ones, be warned.
All right.
And Gareth Porter is our guest here.
The Real U.S. Syria Scandal Supporting Sectarian War.
Very important.
Gareth Porter, of course, has won the Gellhorn Award for his work on the Afghan war.
And he wrote the book on Iran's nuclear program, which is called Manufactured Crisis, The Truth Behind the Iran Nuclear Scare.
Very important.
And, yeah, well, he's an expert on all the wars, Vietnam and the 21st century ones, too.
Welcome back.
How are you, sir?
I'm doing very well.
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back on.
Good.
Good.
Happy to have you here.
And, you know, thanks.
I'm glad that you wrote this thing.
You've got lots of good history in here.
And that's what we need, is context, always context.
So this is sort of your retelling of not just Obama's Syria policy since the outbreak of the Arab Spring and the outbreak of America and Saudi's counterrevolution against it and co-opting of it in some cases, I guess.
But you go back to Assad's father's reign and back to old days to get us all caught up on the real situation there.
So go ahead.
Where do you think we should start?
Well, you know, I would start by explaining how I happened to write this piece, because it's a bit unusual.
I mean, what happened in this case was that I started with I mean, what really got me started was the a tweet by Joshua Landis is very fine Middle East specialist at the University of Arkansas, Oklahoma, excuse me, Oklahoma, my apologies, Oklahoma.
And he tweeted a video made by a masked militant of Al-Qaeda in Syria, the renamed Al-Nusra Front with its with its new, more acceptable somehow name, invoking Al-Sham, the traditional name of Syria.
And it was in the context of the what they called the Great Battle for Aleppo.
And they were either on the verge or in the process of breaking through the government lines around Aleppo.
And this masked man was saying, we are dedicating this battle to Ibrahim al-Yusuf.
Now, you know, I didn't know who Ibrahim al-Yusuf was.
But I found out after this, that he was the Muslim Brotherhood underground agent who had penetrated the Syrian artillery school in Aleppo in 1979.
And was was part of a militant extremist faction, I would say, the most extremist faction of the Muslim Brotherhood, which believed in armed struggle at that moment.
And he had he had gotten into the artillery school.
And one day, pulled together all of the Alawite members or cadets at the artillery school and separating them from the Sunnis, whereupon he shot 32 of them and apparently ran out of bullets.
I don't know why.
But then he threw grenades at the other some 50, 54, if I remember correctly, wounding seriously those those other cadets before he escaped.
Now, this was really the first sort of sectarian, major sectarian violence, mass sectarian violence carried out by the Muslim Brotherhood against the Assad regime, the Baathist government there.
And it was the beginning of a longer struggle, basically a violent struggle between the regime and the Muslim Brotherhood, which then resulted ultimately in there was also an attempt on Bashar al-Assad's life.
I'm sorry, not Bashar al-Assad, his father, Hafez al-Assad in 1980.
And in 1982, the the regime, after more violent terrorist attacks, went out and went into Hama, where the the most militant group of Muslim Brotherhood people were focused, where they were organized and went in to round up as many of these folks as they could on their list.
As a result, they were mowed down by snipers who were in waiting for them, whereupon they sent in huge reinforcements with tanks.
And there was a huge battle in Hama for three weeks, which resulted in either a minimum of 5,000 and as many as 20,000 of the Muslim Brotherhood and their families and associates and so forth being killed in Hama.
So this is a very important and relatively unknown, I certainly didn't know about it, background of the what we've now seen as a sectarian war in Syria.
And the reason that it is so important to understand this is that it has been picked up now, this theme of, you know, of going after the Alawites, who are considered by the Muslim extremists, Al-Qaeda and other jihadist and Salafist elements fighting against the regime.
The Alawites are considered to be not really Arabs and not really Islamists at all.
They are considered to be sort of phony or false Iranians.
And so they're slightly, you know, above the level of animals, one might say.
And therefore, they treat them as disposable.
And to come back to this very interesting video, this horrifying video, he actually, the guy who masked, the masked man actually threatened when the war was over, when the battle was over for Aleppo, and they had won, of course, they would do to the Alawites what Ibrahim al-Yusuf had done in 1979.
So that's why I decided to write this piece.
That's the background of it.
And the question that I was posing was, why did the Obama administration go ahead with a fateful decision to support this essentially sectarian war that the Saudis, Qataris and Turks fueled with their money and their arms, you know, supporting a lot of Salafist elements and clearly understanding that they're in the process, they were going to be supporting the al-Qaeda and its close allies as well.
So that was the question that I was posing in this piece.
All right.
So now let's get back to the Obama years in a second.
But, you know, it's interesting, this phrase, I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but I've seen it reported from time to time coming from the so-called moderate rebels, as well as the al-Nusra Front, who I guess are supposedly moderates now too, that Alawites to the sword or to the sea and Christians to Beirut.
So I guess the plan is to let the Christians live, but they better run.
But the Alawites, you know, this is like a slogan they chant, you know, like left, right, left, or whatever.
That's what they mean is for genocide against the Alawites.
As you said, they see them as such heretics that they deserve no better.
So that's the kind of thing.
And, you know, this is what's funny is and I didn't I certainly didn't know the whole history of this, but I did know about the big massacre of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1983 or 4, whichever it was, because Eric Margulies was right down the street when it happened and saw the and has told the story before how, you know, he saw the tanks on their way there.
And oh, you know, and that was the way it all took place.
And this is why for years on this show, even going back to 2000, at least five, maybe even four, I always raised the question, the obvious question based on the clean break documents about expediting the chaotic collapse in Syria, as David Windsor put it, that who do these neocons think is going to replace Assad and the Baathist government in Damascus?
It would be the Muslim Brotherhood if they're lucky, right?
And then, in fact, if there was a whole war over it, then it would be probably more somebody like Al-Qaeda in Iraq would take over.
And this is just the hypothetical question.
If the neocons got what they want in Syria, that we're asking on this show, I was asking the experts on this show for, I think, at least six years, something like that, before Obama ever inherited this policy.
And of course, and even before George Bush had done his Sunni turn, which is described in Time magazine and a few other places, including Seymour Hersh's article, The Redirection, where they decided that, oops, they fought a whole war for the Iranian-backed Baata Brigade and Dawah Party in Iraq, so now they better tilt back toward the Saudis and start backing their jihadist friends, the proto-Obama policy, in Lebanon, Syria, and Jandala in eastern Iran as well, which I'm sure you remember.
But yeah, no, it does get back to what you're saying makes the question, well, what in the hell do they think they're doing?
Because this would be like overthrowing Saddam's government and de-Baathifying the government and abolishing the army if Zarqawi and al-Qaeda in Iraq were already at war against Saddam.
There was already a giant Sunni jihadist bin Laden-ite war against Saddam, and America went and knocked them off in the middle of that.
Well, what the hell kind of sense does that make?
And that's the policy that Bush started in 06, that Obama inherited, and seems like more than doubled.
Gareth, am I right?
Right.
So the first point that I want to make, going back to your first quotation that you cited, this I am told by someone who had listened to the Arabic chants on a video that I recently looked at in regard to preparing for this piece, I'm told that that chant was being used by Muslim Brotherhood people in 2011 during the protests against the regime.
This was, as I've been told, was not the kind of chant or the kind of slogan that was being used by most of the demonstrators.
Most of the demonstrators were indeed calling for democratic human rights and democracy, but the Muslim Brotherhood was there and they were hearkening back to their extremist, violent sectarian outlook all the way back to the 1970s and 1980s.
So that was clearly still very much in the minds of Muslim Brotherhood and, of course, the other extremists who came into Syria very soon after those demonstrations.
Now you ask the question or make the point that this backing of sectarian war is in line with the whole notion that the Israelis had espoused and their neoconservative friends had espoused for many years now of creating chaos, you know, having the extremists fight against their state enemies, of course, as part of that.
And I mean, what that underlines is that these people have always believed that they're far more clever than they really are.
They're too clever by half.
That's one of the characteristics that strikes me as consistent over decades about the Israelis and the neoconservatives.
And I think that we're seeing over and over again how that is borne out by the consequences of the sort of policies that they have espoused and urged on the United States.
Yeah, well, the real question then is, why do the Americans go along with it?
I mean, I know.
Yeah.
The Saudis, the Turks, the Israelis.
I don't know how much influence the Qataris got.
I guess they own the Brookings Institution.
That's something.
But you know, why in the hell is Obama going along with this at all?
Why?
It seems like, you know, even we've seen we've talked about on the show where some people, maybe not the secretary of defense, but some of the generals would love to have war all day long, but would rather not be fighting directly on the side of the jihadists that hit the Pentagon that day.
And you know, we've seen them complain about that in Yemen.
We've seen them complain about that in Syria.
And yet that's not enough for Obama to cover his right flank.
And I mean, I'm naively assuming that he's I mean, I guess I know he's somewhat reluctant to do this, right?
He lets the CIA back these guys, but never enough to win.
So I guess that's his halfhearted efforts at regime change here.
Couldn't he have shut them down a long time ago, all our allies and just told them, no, man, anything that came out of al-Qaeda in Iraq, we seek to limit and we don't care what you think or how much you want to, that we prefer Baathism in Syria to what you guys have coming next.
And David Wumser, seriously, he was Dick Cheney's advisor.
He's gone.
I would take the position and have taken the position all along that the Obama administration and Obama himself had the leverage over all three of those Sunni allies in the Middle East to force them to reconsider this extremely ill-considered policy of starting an armed struggle, sort of ginning up out of thin air, essentially an armed struggle against the regime in Syria.
I mean, it was so obvious that it would have to become a sectarian war and that it would involve an increasingly extremist, terrorist-based armed force to threaten the regime.
And of course, that's what we've seen exactly has happened.
The United States had the leverage because Turkey needs the United States political support even more than its security guarantees as a member of NATO.
It needs U.S. political support in order to have access to Europe.
That's the main thing with the Turks.
The Qataris and the Saudis need the United States sort of security umbrella.
That's why they've signed on with the United States.
That's why they've curried the favor of the United States.
Without that security umbrella, they would be very much less secure, rightly or wrongly, for whatever reason.
So the United States has the leverage.
They chose not to use it.
Why?
Because, and I've talked about this on your show many times, I think, by now, but it has to be reiterated because it's so important and it's so unknown.
They did so because the Pentagon would not agree, ultimately, nor would the CIA agree, nor the NSA, to threaten their access to, A, military bases in all three countries, which are the lifeblood as seen by those bureaucratic institutions of their operations, of their health as bureaucracies, and secondly, the dollars that they bring in from their relationships with particularly Qatar and even more so Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia is the source of billions upon billions of dollars going into the coffers of the Pentagon.
Seven percent of the Pentagon budget comes from the sales of something on the order of $200 billion of arms sales to the Saudis.
Then there's the Saudi funding of covert operations for the CIA, as well as paying off the CIA for other services rendered.
And the same thing goes for the NSA.
So there is this set of cozy relationships between the major U.S. national security bureaucracies and their Middle East allies, which, in my view, has been a barrier, an absolute barrier to their going along with any policy that would jeopardize their access to the bases and to the funding.
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Well, it really just goes to show the deformities that our system creates in not just the policies, but even the language that's used to talk about them, the entire frame of the debate.
I mean, imagine, honestly, Gareth, this sounds like the kind of thing that some Sarah Palin fan would have dreamed up in 2008, that you watch, Obama's going to come to power and he's going to support a bunch of jihadists against the Ba'athist secularist government in Syria.
It sounds crazy, and yet it ain't just him, it's everybody.
And Hillary right now is running on, as she said in her speech the other day, and there's no question, really, what she was talking about here, when she said that so many lives are lost due to the things sometimes that we don't do, which was a direct reference to Obama's dithering on Syria.
He's not doing enough to put Ayman al-Zawahiri on Assad's throne in Damascus.
Gareth?
Well, you've hit the nail on the head, and while you were talking about this imagined incidence of Sarah Palin saying something along these lines, it occurs to me that what we've seen in the last five to ten years, this enormous development of conspiracy theorists online, and just proliferation all over the place of conspiracy theories, it's no wonder because of the nature of the policies that we've seen, they beg for explanations and it's very difficult to dig those explanations out of normal sources.
You have to, I think, study the historical record very carefully with a kind of theoretical background, if you will, that is looking for, or a theoretical framework, let me put it that way, that is looking for what are the interests of the people who are actually pushing these programs, pushing these policies.
And if you do that, then you come up with an explanation that eludes all the conspiracy theorists.
And I think that's the problem that we face in trying to understand and to communicate the reality to most people.
Right, yeah, I mean, talk about kernels of truth, wow, I mean, really the difference is some right-wing kook would say Obama's doing this because he loves terrorists, because he's an Islamic terrorist usurper, or whatever.
He's an Islamist himself, right?
When the truth is, yeah, no, he's doing this because he's Ronald Reagan, and that's what Ronald Reagan would do.
He's a right-wing nationalist, centrist, middle-of-the-road, compassionate conservative, just like George W. Bush.
Again, Bush is the one who started this in 2006.
Zalmay Khalilzad said, let's tilt back toward the Sunnis, and they did it.
Hirsch wrote, Hirsch's piece, The Redirection, is from 07, and he says we're back in Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon, we're back in the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, we're back in PJAC, which are a Kurdish leftist group, but anyway, and also Jandala against Iran.
And that was back then.
So that's why Obama does it, is because he's a Republican.
God, this is where I have to part ways with you in terms of the focus on the personality, if you will, of Reagan and Obama.
I mean, you know, yeah, I'm as critical as the next person of Obama, or maybe not as critical as some people, but I certainly have had my serious problems with Obama's policies across the board, but let's face it, I mean, Obama is making a lot of these decisions looking over his shoulder, or looking, you know, more accurately, straight into the eyes of bureaucracies that are pushing very hard for their position, and the rule of thumb, the real rule of thumb, it's never been published by any of these people who've been in the White House, but, you know, it's very clear that they fear that if they cross the entire national security bureaucracy, the permanent war state as it's become now, that they will pay a huge political price.
And this is the received political wisdom that we know people like Leon Panetta advised Obama on Afghanistan, don't refuse to do what your Secretary of Defense tells you to do.
So I just want to insist that, you know, we refocus away from the personality of the President as problematic as it may be, and focus on the primary issue, which is the power that these bureaucracies have gained over the decades, which has continued to grow, particularly after 9-11, of course, a power that presidents have been afraid of, and which have forced them to do things over and over again that they didn't really want to do, that they knew better.
I mean, you know, I can cite one case after another, beginning with Vietnam.
Both JFK and LBJ knew better.
Well, even Reagan himself wanted to negotiate nuclear weapons with the Russians and Pod Horowitz and Richard Perle and all the neocons completely freaked out and said he was a traitor.
Right.
And of course, in that case, he went ahead and did it because I think it was one of those situations where he he had a lot of confidence in what he was doing.
And by the way, just to clarify, I was just pointing out that Obama is not an enemy alien.
He is of Washington, D.C., and his policies come from there, not any allegiance to foreign power like in a birther, you know, version of this.
But the point being, the scandal is that look whose side we're on, our CIA.
And ultimately, he is the man in the chair.
Our CIA is back in the suicide bombers.
Yeah.
And a lot of people would say, I mean, people who disagree with me on the other side of the ledger from the establishment would say that I'm a conspiracy theorist for making the analysis that I do about the the way in which and the reasons which the Pentagon, the CIA and the NSA push for programs that have been so disastrous and have gotten away with it.
But but anybody who has even a minimum of objectivity in analyzing these issues would agree that that that in every case where the U.S. has adopted disastrous policies, it has been urged on it by one or more, usually more than one powerful national security bureaucracy.
I mean, you know, I cite the case of the invasion of Iraq.
I mean, it wasn't just a handful of neoconservatives in the administration, although they played a key role in this, no doubt about it.
But Rumsfeld got the idea for how we would go in and use shock and awe to change regimes in Syria.
Excuse me, in Iraq from the Air Force.
I mean, this was an Air Force idea.
This was an Air Force strategy.
And behind it was a huge bureaucratic budgetary interest on the part of the Air Force in getting more of the military budget by pushing their idea for regime change by using Air Force.
Right.
So, yeah, Richard Cummings in his article Lockheed stock and two smoking barrels talks about how really the Iraq, the shock and awe invasion was like a Lockheed promo video basically was here's all our capabilities and all the different brand names and all the everything.
That was basically what it was, a big Air Force Lockheed conspiracy to get rid of some product.
Right.
And Rumsfeld bought it because it solved his budget, his his military budget problems of how to get more high tech stuff without having without being having to break the budget.
And he did it by taking it out of the army, by by having a plan for a small army footprint going into into Iraq.
So, you know, it all comes back to these bureaucratic interests, bureaucratic political interests.
All right.
Now, so switch back to to Syria again.
Tell me about the bureaucratic interests at play when Stanley McChrystal's old right hand man, General Mike Flynn, was the head of the DIA and his DIA produced this memo in 2012 that could have been basically a transcript of this show from August of 2012 saying, what in the hell are you doing?
You're backing the jihadists and this isn't going to work out well.
But, you know, that that actual file that Judicial Watch sued for and got Mike Morrell, the former acting director of the CIA, even wrote a thing about how there's nothing to see here.
And so I wonder what is your take on that?
Well, look, you know, the question that that we've both posed but not but not answered clearly of why the Obama administration went ahead, why Obama himself approved a policy of of going along with and coordinating with these Saudis, Qataris and Turks in funding and arming of a again out of thin air armed force to or set of I should say a set of of armed groups to oppose the the Assad regime.
I think the reason for that is is relatively simple, that the secretary of state was pushing hard for it.
The CIA, of course, at that point was was our old friend, General Petraeus.
And between the two of them and and this Defense Department at that point was run by Panetta.
And so I think that's right.
And I may be I may be slightly confused, but I think that that's correct.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Panetta was still at the Defense Department.
But anyway, I'll check it was it was the major it was the major national security senior officials astride the national security organizations pushing for a policy that Obama, I think, was was rightly very concerned about, very skeptical about.
And it was the it was the alternative to what they really wanted was, of course, for the United States to take over the job of doing what the the Saudis, Qataris and Turks were doing.
And he refused to do that.
I see.
So so Mike Flynn, in other words, this wasn't, you know, some beef between Mike Flynn's DIA.
And yes, you're correct.
Panetta was in at DoD until 2013.
But this wasn't Mike Flynn, McChrystal's old buddy at DIA in a turf war with David Petraeus over at the CIA, the former General Petraeus.
This was him or his agency writing up a report that actually was meant to give more ammo to the Hillary Panetta Petraeus plot as they bragged to The New York Times later that to force Obama to escalate because, hey, if we don't triple down on our support for the so-called moderates there, then the Islamic State in Al Qaeda is is going to do better.
So they weren't warning in that DIA report against intervention.
They were advocating for more before the consequences that they'd already set up came to do.
That's a very interesting reading of it.
I did not see it that way.
I don't see it that way.
And the reason is that had Flynn had in mind, you know, pushing forward the Petraeus program for Syria, I don't think he would have put in the key statement that the opposition in Syria, the armed opposition, is very quickly now turning in a sectarian direction.
That is a signal.
That's a warning signal.
That's a red flag.
That's a red light.
I don't think he would have used that language had he had in mind the purpose that you've suggested.
So I think maybe there was a turf war between McChrystal's guys and Petraeus.
No, I don't think that this report could be seen as part of a turf war or a power struggle.
I mean, I think that this is what the DIA analysts were reporting.
And it would have been a very awkward for Flynn, I think, at that point to say, no, I'm not going to I'm not going to release it.
I'm not going to allow you to circulate this.
That would have been a that would have been a pretty serious move for him.
So I think that wasn't him writing it.
It was his lower down.
It wasn't him writing it was it was DIA analysts.
And this is kind of a routine kind of thing that they they circulate all the time.
So I think you have to see it as as a genuine, you know, intelligence product rather than as as an effort to move policy in the direction that that Petraeus wanted.
Yeah.
Or any other one.
But just yeah, I mean, it is basically I believe from Brad Hoff's writing about it that it was penned by a DIA analyst in Iraq who was writing from the Iraqi point of view, which, of course, we were hearing from Patrick Coburn at the time, is that they're terrified that American and NATO and GCC support for the revolution in Syria is, quote, re energizing the insurgency in Iraq.
And so it makes sense that this guy and that's what he calls it.
There's a danger, he says, that the Islamic State could blow back all the way and take over exactly.
And are in all of Western Sunni Stan, former Iraqi Sunni Stan.
Yeah.
In other words, I do think that this was a genuine this was a good case of a well timed, genuine intelligence warning, which was deliberately ignored.
Yeah.
Well, you know, and people should take note, too, that it was only, I believe, one year ago, right, that Petraeus was openly saying we ought to do a awakening program, a Sons of Iraq Concerned Local Citizens program with Syria and al Qaeda.
And if they'll follow us instead of Jelani, then it'll be fine.
Because after all, if ISIS are extreme, then, hey, al Qaeda ain't so bad, right?
It's all the dialectic here, you know, I don't know how conscious consciously Petraeus was saying, yeah, let's let's wave al Qaeda on in this into this effort.
I think it's more likely, although I could be wrong, but I mean, that was the headline in the Daily Beast was Petraeus making the rounds in DC saying, hey, everybody, let's go ahead and quit futzing around.
And let's go ahead and ally with at least part of al Nusra.
I mean, there's no doubt I was going to I'm just going to add there's no doubt in my mind that they knew that al Qaeda operatives were getting into these militias.
There's no doubt about that.
But I think they felt, well, they'll be a minority.
They won't be most of the most of the people.
I mean, I guess that's the way I look at it.
I mean, I think the beast version of it was that, well, we want to split them off.
The true believers is just like they said about Afghanistan, right?
Well, we're going to split off the tribal guys from the Taliban.
But yeah, so they're only in a contest for who wants to kill you more.
So how are you going to split one off from the other?
That's not going to happen as always.
I mean, this goes back to this arrogance about feeling that they're so they're so powerful and so all wise that they can sort of manipulate things so precisely as to, you know, thread a needle just just the way they you know, they they thought that they could support, in effect, the rise of al Qaeda in Syria without in danger of putting the jihadists into power in Damascus.
Right.
Yeah, just like they thought that they could fight a whole war for the most Iranian backed of the Shiite factions in Iraq War Two.
But at the end of the day, they'll side with us rather than siding with their, you know, at that point, 30 year Iranian sponsors and co-religionists and best friends.
Or in the case of Syria, we'll we'll still be able to control them.
We'll just pull the plug.
You know, we'll get our allies to pull the plug on them and and they won't be able to do what they want to do.
I mean, they have these ideas about how they can pull the strings and, you know, thread the needle.
And even though at least hundreds of these guys have Western European citizenship and have nowhere to go but home after this, right?
Yeah, I mean, I think that this this stands out as as perhaps the I mean, I've said this before.
I mean, I just regard this as the most outrageously high risk, dangerous policies ever, ever pursued by the United States.
You know, going beyond even Afghanistan.
I mean, that's the way I would I mean, at least at towards the beginning of it.
I'm talking about the beginning of it now.
I mean, obviously, Afghanistan by the end was much more much more problematic.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, thanks for coming back on the show, Gareth.
I sure appreciate it, man.
My pleasure as always.
Thanks, Scott.
All right.
So that's the great Gareth Porter.
He writes for Middle East Eye and well, that's most of the time.
And you find pretty much all he writes.
Oh, also truthout.org.
And you find most of what he writes also at antiwar.com.
The real U.S.
Syria scandal supporting sectarian war is the latest.
There at original.antiwar.com slash Porter and read the book.
It is the book on the Iranian nuclear program.
I promise you it's called Manufactured Crisis and put all those myths to bed for you.
OK, thanks, y'all.
That's the Scott Horton Show.
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