09/22/15 – Jonathan Landay – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
All right, now to our first guest.
It's our friend Jonathan Landay from McClatchy Newspapers, McClatchyDC.com, been doing some important journalism there.
Hey, how's it going, Jonathan?
It's good to be back.
Very good to have you here.
U.S. and Russia seek common military ground in Syria, you don't say?
Indeed, strange developments in what is already a tragic situation.
Yeah, so I think it's fair to say that most people listening to this show have a pretty good grasp of who's on whose side here, basically.
America, Turkey, and our GCC allies on one side, and Iran, Russia, Hezbollah, and Assad on the other kind of thing.
But then you got the Islamic State, and you know, I remember we talked right after the Declaration of the Caliphate that, well, come on, they gotta switch back to Assad now, kind of, right?
They really haven't done that.
But maybe now they are finally giving up on the idea of training up enough of these moderates to take on all comers in this country, and now that Russia's in the way, they can't possibly overthrow Assad anyway, so now they're just, if you can't beat them, join them again, kind of deal?
Well, it's really hard to say.
I think that this is an administration that can't really figure out what it wants to do, or what it should do.
One thing that we know is that the President came into office with a desire to disengage this country from its history of engaging in conflicts in the Middle East and other parts of the world, that it is usually the case that the United States has exacerbated and made worse.
And after the invasion of Iraq and the invasion of Afghanistan, I think the President decided that he wanted to try and change the way the United States addresses these conflicts.
The problem is that in doing so, you create a vacuum, and you open yourself up to criticism that you're going weak, and apprehensions by your allies that you're going weak, and it looks like Mr. Putin is taking advantage of that in order to buck up Mr. Assad under the guise of going after the Islamic State.
Well, I'm not sure how much of it you saw, I imagine at least some of it, Petraeus' testimony this morning where, you know, he's even trying to teach John McCain, I think, that, you know, I mean, and he is saying we should be breaking off so-called moderate al-Nusra fighters, I guess we could get to that craziness in a minute, but at the same time, in another breath, he's saying, hey, look, regime-changing Assad, without a good idea of what to do, what to replace his regime with, is not a policy that I can endorse, man.
We got a real problem here, and he didn't say exactly what he meant, but we know what he meant when he said the violence there could get much, much worse, meaning if the Ba'athist regime falls, every member of those ethnic minorities, the Christians, the Shia, the Druze, the Alawites, have a death mark on their head.
Well, I think that that's exactly why the President of the United States, Barack Obama, has avoided getting deeply entangled in the Syrian quagmire, and if you remember, the idea of creating, arming, and training, quote-unquote, moderate forces, was really not his idea, and he fought it for a while.
He had a Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, now running for President, who was pushing that idea.
He had a Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, who was pushing that idea, and he had a CIA director, David Petraeus, who was pushing that idea, sorry, no, Panetta, who was pushing that idea.
I think it was Panetta at Defense and Petraeus at CIA at that time, but it is hard to keep it all straight, I admit.
She was very much in favor of this as well, as was John McCain and other hardliners on the Hill, and you saw the President eventually agreeing to this, but it was a program that was very badly troubled by a whole bunch of different reasons.
But you're only talking about the DOD program now, right, because you have reported on the CIA program for years now.
Yes, indeed, but that's being run out of the South, or it originally was being run out of Jordan, and involved mostly people in Southern Syria, although those people are trained and are now, my understanding, dispersed around Syria, but haven't made a great, huge dent in either the Assad regime, in, let me back up, they haven't made a huge dent in their primary purpose, which is to defeat the Islamic State.
Now, we're not sure at this point to what contribution the CIA-trained fighters have made to the loss of territory that Assad has been suffering in recent months, but for the most part, the major actor in that was the Al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra.
And that, then, opens up a whole nother question about the Russian involvement, you know, Putin says, claims that they want to go after the Islamic State, but what would stop him from going after other groups, including groups that are affiliated with the United States?
Right, well, a real good question.
And what the hell is America doing being affiliated with any of these groups in the first place, when we see right here in the Telegraph today the U.S.-trained, that is, DOD-trained Division of Security Rebels, the ones that weren't killed or captured, signed up with al-Nusra and gave up all their guns and all their pickup trucks and everything that the U.S. had given them, and they're now, of course, turned right over to al-Nusra.
And that's the thing, it's not just the trained, and I guess I would ask you, ballpark estimate, best your knowledge, how many the CIA has trained there in Jordan.
But it's not just that, right?
It's the money and the coordination with the Saudis, the Turks, the Qataris, for years now, to just help and make sure this all keeps going.
I think the figure that I've seen in the open in the New York Times was 5,000.
And then, but so, and, but now the entire CIA op, again, though, includes more than just training these guys, it's coordinating with our allies this whole time, too, right?
In theory, I think one of the original reasons for that, or purposes of the CIA program, and I've done some reporting on this in Jordan, was to help prevent a spillover of the conflict in Syria into Jordan, across the border into Jordan, across the border into Israel.
I think originally, the purpose was to sort of secure the southern border of Syria to prevent, as I said, a spillover of the war, and prevent Nusra or Islamic State from being able to infiltrate and carry the war into, across the borders.
But it's obviously gotten bigger than that.
Again, we don't know what the impact has been, because it is a classified program.
We know that the impact of the Pentagon program is nil.
And we know, I mean, one of the things that's really interesting to me is that the Russian deployment, the intervention by Putin, suggests that the Assad regime, and Assad himself, are far more shaky, are in a far more shaky situation than had been appreciated.
And I think if you look at the composition of the Syrians who are pouring out into Europe, I think a lot of those people may have, in fact, been, you know, this middle class, educated middle class, who were the core of Assad's supporters for so long, and have basically given up, and are without hope of being able to remain in their native land, and are therefore heading to Europe.
And so, take all that together, and plus, one other, one other aspect of this.
Wait, wait, hold the aspect.
We'll be right back, y'all, with Jonathan Landay, McClatchy Newspapers, McClatchyDC.com.
We're talking about America, Russia, the jihadists, the Syrian Civil War.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking about the Syrian Civil War, so-called civil war, foreign war, and Russia, et cetera, with Jonathan Landay from McClatchy, D.C.
And now here's a couple of things you need to know.
Time flies really fast, and I know that a lot of listeners to this show are pretty young and don't remember a lot of the same things I remember.
So let me tell you a thing.
Jonathan Landay and his buddy Warren Strobel, far above and beyond any other mainstream newspaper reporters in this nation, for Knight Ridder Newspapers back in 2001, in italics there, two and three, told the real story of how Cheney and his Gestapo office is what Powell called it, the separate government of the AEI neocons inside the Bush Jr. administration, how they lied us into war, and how pissed off the rank-and-file CIA analysts were at how twisted all the data was and everything else.
And so that's not just to give you credit, Jonathan, because I've given you credit a lot of times.
It's to tell the people that they can go to McClatchy, D.C. dot com, and then you just search and make sure and add 2002, 2003 to Landay's name.
And when they bought Knight Ridder, they did a good job of importing all those articles.
They're all there at McClatchy, D.C. dot com.
It's a very important history lesson for you there.
First to break the existence of the Office of Special Plans, and on and on and on.
So speaking of which, the Office of Special Plans, your buddy Julian Borger, who wrote an article called The Spies Who Pushed for War, that's very important, and talked about Ariel Sharon's war and lying us into war in Iraq in 2002 and 2003.
He has a piece here about how Russia tried to negotiate a deal at the beginning of 2002 to get Assad to step aside.
So I'm sorry, I'm remembering now that you were in the middle of a statement when we got stopped for the break, but we've got to come back to 2012 in a second here.
We can try, yes, but my other point was this, that the other reason I think that the Russians, that Putin decided to intervene, is because who was the other supporter, main supporter of Assad?
It's Iran and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard and their proxy force, Hezbollah.
So they've been tied down in an offensive near the Lebanese border since June, and have been making very little progress, and Hezbollah may in fact be taking unacceptable casualties.
And so I think not only has Assad been losing territory, and he has admitted he has serious manpower problems, but I think Iran and Hezbollah have run into a serious problem over by the Lebanese border, and I think that may have had something to do with the Russian decision as well.
Yeah.
Well, and here, you know, same story again, better segue to the story, instead of OSP, Russia says Syria's Assad is ready to share power.
And when Russia says that, Syria listens, and so do the rest of us, right?
So not only did they offer...
No, but I don't know if the Iranians are listening, because they've made clear that they still see Assad as the guy, as the man.
Yeah.
Interesting.
You know, I know a Syrian Druze who says that everybody hates Assad himself, basically, but what they support is the Syrian state and the Syrian military that is protecting them from the crucifiers and the headchoppers.
Simple as that.
Yeah, I think that's right.
I mean, I was in Syria twice last year on visas, you know, I went in on the government side, and that's exactly what I found, that, you know, you don't necessarily like Assad, but what you don't want is our foreign jihadis, and let's not forget, the Islamic State is dominated by Iraqis and foreigners, coming into your country, which was, you know, as bad as the Assad dictatorship was, it preserved Syria as a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional country, and imposing these, you know, these strict interpretation, perverted interpretation of Islam.
And you know, I had a friend there who's a Sunni, with a young son, and she said, you know, I don't want these, I like to drink, I like to smoke, I like to dance, I have a young son, I don't want these people coming into my country and telling us how to live.
So I think that your Druze friend is absolutely right.
I think a lot of Syrians don't necessarily, and I wrote a piece about this when I was there the first time, a lot of Syrians I don't think necessarily support Assad, but they do support preserving the nature of the Syrian state that they know, which is this sort of multi-confessional, multi-ethnic state.
Well, and there's not, correct me if I'm wrong, Landay, but is there another mustache waiting next in line, as Greg Palast would say, to replace him, or not?
I don't know, that's the thing.
It seems like he's holding the state together, that's why he's still there.
You know, you know the expression, I am the state.
I think that's very much the case of when we're talking about Bashar al-Assad.
But as you say in your article, America insists he has to go, even before they'll negotiate.
But we're starting to maybe hear a little bit of flexibility on the part of the administration.
You heard the Secretary of State, John Kerry, over the weekend talking about there can be no long-term role for Mr. Assad.
Well, that's maybe heralding a bit of a change in administration policy, I don't know yet.
But certainly, you know, and you had the Brits come out a couple weeks ago with a proposal that perhaps Assad should be allowed to stay on for the first six months of a transition.
So already the European allies, you know, who are facing this huge influx of refugees, half of whom are Syrians, may be shifting as well to try and find a more pragmatic political solution.
Because the one thing that is certainly right is that, at least as far as anybody I know is concerned, there is no apparent alternative at this moment to Bashar al-Assad.
And that raises the problem of a potential power vacuum, should he go, and there's no...
You know, this was an interesting thing in former Yugoslavia, which I also covered.
There was no designated successor to Marshal Tito, and there was no one on whom all the different ethnicities could agree upon as his successor.
And I think that could also be a problem that they have in Syria.
Yeah, well, there's no alternative successor, obvious successor to take over Syrian Sunnistan from ISIS and Nusra, other than Damascus either.
Right, right.
And that's why I think the Russians went in, because they understood that Assad may be in far more serious straits than we all appreciated.
That his grip on power was increasingly tenuous, and let's not forget there's been a lot of reporting about members of his own Alawite minority becoming disenchanted and disillusioned with Bashar, because he'd made a lot of promises about how he was going to win the war and expel these foreign jihadis, and has failed to do so.
And when I was there, I was meeting Alawites who had already done two terms in the military and were being summoned back to do another term.
And, you know, people had lost multiple sons, and there was a feeling, I mean, I was getting the feeling that, you know, yes, people still sort of supported him, particularly among the Alawites, because there was no alternative, and because they really do face potential existential threat, even genocide, from the likes of the really crazy Sunni extremists, like Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State.
Yeah, you just think about this story.
If you take the fact that America is in on it, and we're Americans and all that, and leave that aside for a minute, and just look at it, you know, like we're Kang and Kodos in space here, and we're just looking down at what's going on here.
Well, Syria has been invaded by al-Qaeda, backed by Syria and Turkey, and they got every right to kill as many of them as they possibly can.
And these are the guys who knocked down our towers, who we hate more than anything, who used to just be a few hundred guys, and were the excuse for America to turn the whole Middle East upside down in the name of them.
And now we're on their side, against the guy with the clean shaven chin and the three-piece suit.
Well, I don't know that we're on their side.
I mean, I haven't heard anyone beyond David Petraeus talk about...
Well, but again, like we talked about, all the guns and all the money ends up going to them anyway.
And there's a hundred different YouTubes of al-Nusra shooting TOW missiles, right?
Oh, sure.
I mean, come on.
It's all America's been supporting.
We know they stole those.
But yeah, I get your point.
But yeah, I mean, you know, it's not very plausible deniability, is basically what it is, right?
No, I hear you.
Yeah, I hear you.
Anyway, listen, you do great journalism.
I appreciate you coming on the show, Jonathan.
Absolutely.
Anytime, Scott.
All right, y'all.
That is Jonathan Landay.
He is at McClatchyDC.com.
This one is called U.S.-Russia Seek Common Military Ground in Syria.
Hey, y'all.
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